Wesley's Tool-Box

Shooting photos of the celestrial objects in a big city come with lots of limitations. Two most notable hindrances are the skyline and light pollution. Tall buildings outright block the view of the lower parts of the sky, while the light pollution makes the sky fuzzy and make it hard to see dim stars, especially near the horizon.

Of course, I'm willing to put up with that. Lots of trial and errors taught me how far I can get away with it. But that's all about static conditions. Weather is dynamic. Not all days are clear. Clouds come and go. So I check the weather forecast and decide when to prepare for a shoot.

But now there's another thing that's throwing a wrench into my observation, and that is this yellow smog that's been coming in for a couple of weeks so far. Even on a clear day, the smog dissipates urban lighting in the sky and compound the light pollution. It's bad for breathing and bad for observation. I hope it clears up soon.

Venus keeps coming closer to the Earth, and it's getting visually larger from here. But since it's in the inner orbit, the crescent is getting thinner as well. Take a look at how it looked like two weeks ago and four weeks ago to see what I mean. I'll be keeping track of the planet regularly as it keeps coming closer. It'll be closest to the Earth almost exactly six weeks from now (January 11, 2014).

Settings: Canon SX50 HS - 1200mm (2x enlarged) - ISO 80 - 1/250s - f/6.5
Filters: Baader M&S applied
Time: 2013-11-30 17:47 KST
Location: Suwon, Korea
17 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

I've risked the streaking and went with lower ISO and longer exposure for today's comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy photo. I've experimented with the micro-adjustment head (Longperng TP98AR) that finally arrived late last night after much delay to see if that would help reduce the streaking, but manual compensation proved to be quite difficult. So, after about an hour of fiddling I ended up taking simple long exposure photos just before the Sun came up.

As a note, I waited for another pass of Tiangong-1 half about twenty minutes later, but either the calculations were off or it was too dim (it was supposed to be around magnitude 1) against the brightening morning sky to be seen.

Settings: SX50 HS - 243mm - ISO 800 - 15s - f/5.6
Time: 2013-11-26 06:26 - 06:29 KST
Location: Suwon, Korea
7 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

While I made an unsuccessful attempt to photograph Tiangong-1 space station transit the Sun, I noticed some big sunspots. Sunspots like these cause solar flares, which have been prevalent in the recent months. This particular group of sunspots shown here is called AR 11899, of which the biggest one is casually referred to as "Sunspot 1899". It's about 4 times the size of the Earth. If you click the picture for the full look of the Sun, you can also spot AR 11903 near the middle.

Settings: 1200mm - ISO 250 - 1/1000s - f/6.5
Time: 2013-11-23 13:22 KST
Location: Seoul, Korea
10 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

I tried the Baader Moon & Skyglow filter early this morning to photograph comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy with my Canon SX50 HS as I mentioned yesterday. It has some interesting effects to the photos.

It does tone down the white noise as intended, but the background turns from black to dark blue. The tail doesn't really become more bright because it's a filter that blocks certain wavelengths, not some sort of a booster. But due to slightly lower noise it's easier to make it more visible with post-processing.

For reference, the bottommost star in the cropped photo above is HR 4572 (HD 103799; HIP 58287), a 6.6 magnitude star in Ursa Major.

Settings: 243mm - ISO 1600 - 6s - f/5.6
Time: 2013-11-21 05:32 - 05:36 KST
Location: Suwon, Korea
15 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8