Lunar and Astro Photography (6)

this was one of my most reasonable pictures



Sony ILCE-7M3
150-600mm F5-6.3 SSM
f/7.1
600.0 mm
0.5sec
iso800

Edited by digiton - 22 January 2019 at 07:50

pegelli wrote: It's crystal clear here and -5 degC with no wind.

That sounds balmy, here in Helsinki it was -15°C and little wind (2-3 m/s with up to 5 m/s gusts) this morning.

But I did brave the elements, although sadly I underestimated the darkening in the complete lunal eclipse phase and despite using a tripod I didn't dare to lower the shutter enough and got only way too dark photos with a telephoto lens.

Before the moon went into complete shadow, I had slightly more luck...


α77 II + Tamron 150-600 @ 600 mm, f/6.3, 1/320 s, ISO 6400

Some beautiful images here, and it's interesting to compare with the view of the blood red moon eclipse we had in the Southern hemisphere about a year ago on 31 January 2018. Main difference of course is that the surface features we see are 'upside down' with the 'melon stem' crater at the top for us Antipodeans.
Total eclipse, blood red super moon by Joe Lewit, on Flickr

Edited by Jozioau - 22 January 2019 at 09:13

Got on the computer. A7rII, Tamron 150-600

Great work here, it's nice to see all the different moon positions from different places on earth

Here's another one from me that didn't turn out too bad (never imagined the blood moon was so dark) so it needed a much higher iso/longer time than I expected. So this picture isn't the sharpest. It's taken at 5:42, just before the whole shadow of the earth covered the moon completely


A6000 + LA-EA4 + Tamron 2x + Kenko 1.4x + Min 200/2.8 APO HS G

How wonderful to see all these red moon pics!   I rather like it with mostly red and a hint of grey - it really helps the 3d effect which it often missing from full moon pics.

I woke up nice and early for work to find a blanket of cloud covering our region. Ho hum.   I still hoped to catch a glimpse at work as totality was due to continue about half an hour passed my planned take off time. No luck there either - we'd turned to face east just before breaking cloud, leaving the red moon nicely hidden from view behind us.. Oh well. Ho hum.

Back to non-sony deep space objects... This is the Pacman Nebula.

As with many Nebulae, it's made from clouds of light-emitting ionized gas. Conventional SLR type sensors filter out that band of light rather nicely but an Astro camera can capture it quite nicely, given enough time.


Here's the first one - conventional R/G/B capture with the ionized stuff added in from Ha and Oiii frequencies. Ha is deep red (near infrared) and Oiii emits in the blue range
Pacman Nebula RGB Ha Oiii


(Just over two hours of exposures)

Keeping just the 'narrowband' exposures from the ionized gas allows for some experimental fun with mixing the colours (eg, the Hubble images are usually false colour, but look great

Pacman Nebula - Ha and Oiii


I think I could do better but work and cloudy skies have frustrated me this year!

As a comparison, here's a version from the A6000. It's rotated and at a wider focal length but you can see how much red is missing...