Show Your Astrophotos

[Missourian]

FYI. Lunar eclipse ongoing now. Totality soon

[Wrangellian]

Completely clouded out here. Miserable weather this Spring....

[Top Trilo]

Colorado had clear skies and I got a few pictures. They weren't too good though so hoping some other members also got some images.

(Most were at totality, the other ones were even worse)

 

I also watched as the moon occulted star, HD 138268. These images were from my phone through a telescope eyepiece, so not good. I think I needed to clean my camera or my telescope lens or both.

These two images were taken only 1 second apart.

 

 

It was very nice just sitting outside under the eclipse, even if the images don't truly show what the experience was like.

Look at the images and then use your imagination to clear the blurriness. 

[snolly50]

Selene rose, her full countenance glowing a pale yellow...

 

 

soon a looming shadow appeared...

 

 

it crept, concealing her beauty...

 

 

Her grace could not be consumed by the shadow, she glowed red and soon slipped past the dark intruder...

 

Edited May 17, 2022 by snolly50

[Roanoker]

Excellent pictures. ALL of them. Thank you. 

[Wrangellian]

Very good... I don't think I've ever seen the moon occult a star, never mind get a pic sequence.

If I hadn't been clouded out I think I would have gotten some good shots as the moon rose in the SW here. Oh well, can't see every one. In lieu of the eclipse, I was going to try taking a closeup shot of a fossil for the ID section but dropped the lens onto the tile floor and broke the macro screw-on lens... Not a happy camper. I have 4 lenses for my camera and 3 of them are gibbled now (plus the macro), but one telephoto was operable and ready to go...  Ugh.

BTW snolly, do you mean countenance? 

[snolly50]

6 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

mean countenance

Indeed, "countenance" is what my brain registered. There is no explanation for what emerged from my fingers.  Edited, to avoid perpetuation of the malapropism.

[snolly50]

Bored with her shadow dance, Selene playfully rose cloaked in a hue of Autumn...

 

 

[Missourian]

Eclipse sequence:

 

 

Not as sharp as I'd like, but I was able to capture the color and light

[snolly50]

Selene, celestial ecdysiast, dons the sheerest of cloud gossamer as she approaches the climax of her eternal, empyrean dance...

 

[snolly50]

The strawberry, super Moon...

 

 

[Ptychodus04]

She was big and bright Monday night. Great photo @snolly50

[Wrangellian]

I was taking pics of it in the early morning as it was setting, and it looked pretty full, sharp edges all around, so I knew it was close to the point of being fullest. A little while after it set I went online to check the actual time of the full moon and it was less than 20 minutes after I watched it set. My pics didn't turn out very well, though, hardly worth posting.

[Ptychodus04]

5 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

I was taking pics of it in the early morning as it was setting, and it looked pretty full, sharp edges all around, so I knew it was close to the point of being fullest. A little while after it set I went online to check the actual time of the full moon and it was less than 20 minutes after I watched it set. My pics didn't turn out very well, though, hardly worth posting.

 

Oddly enough, the Moon is one of the harder objects to successfully photograph. It's massive apparent size provides ample opportunities for turbulence (seeing) to distort even the most carefully taken picture. I find stacking multiple, insanely short, exposures to be the best way to catch Moon details

[Wrangellian]

14 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

Oddly enough, the Moon is one of the harder objects to successfully photograph. It's massive apparent size provides ample opportunities for turbulence (seeing) to distort even the most carefully taken picture. I find stacking multiple, insanely short, exposures to be the best way to catch Moon details

One of these days I'll figure out stacking but at this point it looks like there's more to it than click click.

It would help me if I had the right lens and such. I needed my telephoto but just didn't get my act together in time.

[Ptychodus04]

1 hour ago, Wrangellian said:

One of these days I'll figure out stacking but at this point it looks like there's more to it than click click.

It would help me if I had the right lens and such. I needed my telephoto but just didn't get my act together in time.

Check out the free program Registax. It’s pretty close to click click for alignment and stacking. It’s not as easy for adjusting levels and editing. I use another free software called Iris for that process.

 

Registax was originally developed to break videos into individual frames, delete the low quality frames, and stack the remaining. It’s more manual to use individual exposures from the start, but it works. The only downfall is that video frames have a lot less data than the files that come off my old 10mpxl Canon when shooting in RAW. I regularly crash the program when trying to stack more than 30 or 40 exposures of the moon or a large nebula like Orion. For smaller stuff like planets, galaxies, and planetary nebulae it’s nothing to stack several hundred images.

 

The part that hurts is manually imaging a subject 200-300 times at the telescope. BORING!!! I once took 60 individual images of the Orion Nebula (M42) @ 30 seconds each to make a stack. That was one of the longest half hours of my life!

 

It was much easier to take 200 1/60th second exposures of Jupiter for an awesome stacked image. I would up with a stack of 160, if I remember correctly, for the image below.

 

[Wrangellian]

2 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

Check out the free program Registax. It’s pretty close to click click for alignment and stacking. It’s not as easy for adjusting levels and editing. I use another free software called Iris for that process.

Registax was originally developed to break videos into individual frames, delete the low quality frames, and stack the remaining. It’s more manual to use individual exposures from the start, but it works. The only downfall is that video frames have a lot less data than the files that come off my old 10mpxl Canon when shooting in RAW. I regularly crash the program when trying to stack more than 30 or 40 exposures of the moon or a large nebula like Orion. For smaller stuff like planets, galaxies, and planetary nebulae it’s nothing to stack several hundred images.

The part that hurts is manually imaging a subject 200-300 times at the telescope. BORING!!! I once took 60 individual images of the Orion Nebula (M42) @ 30 seconds each to make a stack. That was one of the longest half hours of my life!

It was much easier to take 200 1/60th second exposures of Jupiter for an awesome stacked image. I would up with a stack of 160, if I remember correctly, for the image below.

One of these days I'll try it. First thing on my to-do list is to go down to a place in Victoria to get a few of my broken lenses fixed.

What if I just fired off 10 or 20 or 30 images of the moon, machine gun style, and then stack them? Would that at least average out any atmospheric turbulence, if not attain the full range of contrast that the human eye sees (moon vs surroundings)?

[Ptychodus04]

1 hour ago, Wrangellian said:

One of these days I'll try it. First thing on my to-do list is to go down to a place in Victoria to get a few of my broken lenses fixed.

What if I just fired off 10 or 20 or 30 images of the moon, machine gun style, and then stack them? Would that at least average out any atmospheric turbulence, if not attain the full range of contrast that the human eye sees (moon vs surroundings)?

I’ve stacked as few as 3 images of the moon and achieved increased sharpness in the stacked image compared to each individual. 
 

The software will automatically exclude any images with a quality lower than the programmed threshold. Depending on the seeing during your imaging session (and your ability to focus properly), with 10 photos you will get a stack of anywhere from 3-7 images. The more you take, the better your results, until you crash the program due to the data amount. Raw images of the moon on my camera are around 4 MB each. The individual image of Jupiter in the photo above were around 15 KB each.

 

If you shoot in .jpg your file sizes are smaller but editing is more limited. Stacking is step 1 in the process. The real details come out as you fiddle with the levels in the editing software. Iris has around 10 different adjustments for different sized features in the image. You can make some stand out and others be less obvious. This allows you to tease out certain details.

 

Another option is to connect your dslr camera at prime focus to a fast telescope. This essentially makes your telescope the lens. My telescope has a 1,000 mm focal length and is f 4.9. That’s a really fast telephoto lens. This is a single image using this setup.

 

[Wrangellian]

15 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

Raw images of the moon on my camera are around 4 MB each. The individual image of Jupiter in the photo above were around 15 KB each.

 

If you shoot in .jpg your file sizes are smaller but editing is more limited. Stacking is step 1 in the process. The real details come out as you fiddle with the levels in the editing software. Iris has around 10 different adjustments for different sized features in the image. You can make some stand out and others be less obvious. This allows you to tease out certain details.

 

Another option is to connect your dslr camera at prime focus to a fast telescope. This essentially makes your telescope the lens. My telescope has a 1,000 mm focal length and is f 4.9. That’s a really fast telephoto lens. This is a single image using this setup.

Interesting.

What about jpg files limits your editing, just the lower quality? Are jpgs always somewhat compressed, even at higher quality settings? I set my camera to take max quality jpgs, and the files are around 2MB. I've tried shooting in RAW (NEF files), the files are 4MB but the pics don't look any different and I can't edit them in the usual software anyway.

[Ptychodus04]

8 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

Interesting.

What about jpg files limits your editing, just the lower quality? Are jpgs always somewhat compressed, even at higher quality settings? I set my camera to take max quality jpgs, and the files are around 2MB. I've tried shooting in RAW (NEF files), the files are 4MB but the pics don't look any different and I can't edit them in the usual software anyway.

Jpg files are somewhat compressed and some of the data is locked once the file is created. I’m not very technically knowledgeable about the process but the way I understand it, all data in raw photos can be manipulated where certain aspects of jpg files can’t. Also, I believe there are pixel sized artifacts produced as a result of the way the data is generated with jpg files.

 

This could all be propaganda from the folks who designed .raw for all I know.  All the good photographers I know shoot raw, so I follow the lead of people who know more than I do. You may need a higher end photo editing application to really make use of shooting with this file type. I know just enough to be dangerous. I believe @snolly50 might know a lot more about the details than I do. I have a memory of the .raw/.jpg conversation in the deep past and I think he was pretty knowledgeable on the subject, especially for a sax playing scalawag. 

[digit]

43 minutes ago, Ptychodus04 said:

This could all be propaganda from the folks who designed .raw for all I know.  All the good photographers I know shoot raw, so I follow the lead of people who know more than I do.

I could go on at length (you know that already ) but very briefly (for me) here is some good reasoning behind using RAW files at the start of your image processing workflow.

 

Raw files save the actual values directly from your camera's sensor. Your camera actually uses color filters to direct red, green and blue colors to different pixels on the sensor. Those pixels are grouped into 2x2 blocks and for technical reasons green pixels are repeated.

 

http://shutha.org/node/842

 

 

When a JPG image is converted from this raw data, the values for the red, green and blue channels are averaged out. So for example the pixel representing the upper left blue square in the image above can use the value recorded there as its blue channel but to determine the red channel value at this location the 4 red pixels surrounding this pixel (at each corner) get averaged together. Likewise, the green channel value is determined by the 4 green pixels bordering the blue. This effectively allows there to be contiguous red, green and blue channel information for all pixels even though the underlying sensor hardware is recording it in this odd 3-color checkerboard arrangement. Again, low-level minutiae here but one way in which even a lossless JPG image differs from the RAW image.

 

More importantly for us photographers is the bit depth. More bit depth (more bits/pixel) results in a smoother image capable of holding more color gradation information. Here's a simple grayscale image demonstrating how less bit depth results in fewer gradations. Imagine this for each of the red, green and blue color channels.

 

 

And now (finally!) the key fact that underlies RAW vs JPG and why RAW images work better to start. All modern cameras (including those on smart phones) have sensors that capture each color channel (red, green, blue) with more than 8 bits/pixel in each of those channels. My DSLR has a sensor that records 14 bits/pixel in each of the 3 color channels (42 bits total/pixel). The JPG image format was designed to be able to compress images and it is based upon the fact that it only uses 8 bits per color channel. This is generally not a problem as that allows 256 shades of red, green and blue to be combined into 2^24 = 16,777,216 different colors (which seems quite generous and more than anyone would need).

 

It is difficult for our eyes to see much difference between the 8 bit and 16 bit grayscale bars above. So as an example to make this clearer lets pretend for the moment that our camera can record 5 bits/channel but a JPG reduces that to 3 bits/channel. This will simply magnify the point I'll make next and you can assume it applies as well in the case of the actual higher bit depths.

 

Let's say I took a rather backlit image of someone against a brighter sky. The camera's sensor looked at the incoming brightness and decided to compromise resulting in an image where the details in the white clouds are rather blown out and the face of my subject is rather dim and underexposed. In post processing I can make corrections for the limitations of the camera having to make compromises in recording a single image. In post processing I can bring down the highlights and try to recover some of the shaded details in the clouds. As a JPG image (again assuming the meager 3 bits/channel) I have fully bright white (what most of my cloud was recorded as) and my next available option darker from that is already a fairly dark gray. I would expect to see some really ugly banding artifacts when I tried to reduce the brightness to suck out some detail in those overexposed background clouds. If, however, I had all of the RAW data available (again assuming 5 bits/channel in this example) I have a lot more subtle shades of off-white to choose from and banding or other harsh artifacts would not be nearly as apparent.

 

On the flip side, the underexposed face of my subject is recorded nearly black and brightening the low end also results in ugly artifacts primarily due to the fact that there are simply too few choices to choose from. Brightening dark areas in post processing quite often results in digital "noise" that can make an image look overly processed.

 

If you are able to shoot a perfectly exposed image and need to do very little or no post processing (white balance, brightness/contrast, exposure compensation) then a JPG image may be just fine. Subtle and slight post-processing tweaks can often be done leaving little or no artifacts that are hints that the image was tweaked. If you need the flexibility to make more substantial changes (either to compensate for a tricky shooting situation or as a creative desire) then the flexibility of the extra pixel depth means you have more gradations and an image that will stand up to more tweaking without looking any the worse for the wear.

 

I tell people that JPG images are more "stiff" and will "break" with any more than very subtle post-processing. RAW images are exceedingly flexible and will accept a good deal of manipulation without showing any hint at all of the manipulations done to them.

 

Basically, there is nothing magical about RAW images other than the extra bit depth than normally gets truncated and tossed away when converting to 8-bit JPG images.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[minnbuckeye]

@digit Excellent presentation! My question is why use jpg at all? Should all of my pictures of any nature be shot in raw? 

  

Mike

[snolly50]

Sorry to be late to this interesting exchange; but I was occupied at a saxophone polishing seminar at the Scalawag convention (SACS, Southeastern Association of Certified Scalawags). @Ptychodus04 Kris has provided relevant and helpful comments regarding Moon imaging. I am especially pleased as this clarity may be an indication that his rehab from capsaicin abuse has been salutary. I am further heartened, that the brain fog commonly seen from his constant inhalation of matrix dust also appears somewhat improved.

 

@digit Ken (as expected) has provided a scholarly exposition regarding RAW/JPEG. I can think of no reasons beyond storage woes and no time/interest for post-capture processing; that would recommend JPEG over RAW. 

 

The images I capture of the Moon are always in RAW format. The camera is a well-worn Nikon D600 (a full frame format instrument). Here is the info on the image above. The lens employed was a used Nikkor 200-500mm zoom, tripod mounted. In the example above, the shutter speed was 1/640". At that shutter speed handheld is fine; but for multiple images and no shake, a tripod is optimal. Shutter priority mode was used with ISO at 100. An intervalometer was employed and the resulting 20 images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in Photoshop Elements and slightly with Topaz Denoise. It's not perfect. Note the faint color artifact at the lower edge of the lunar disk. This is a result of my ham-handed use of the saturation adjustment in Photoshop. However, that image is, I think, representative of my current supply of equipment and skill.

 

I really enjoy photographing the Moon. It is such a fascinating object. I cannot think of a tribute that surpasses this lady's beautiful voice.

 

 

 

[doushantuo]

You may like:

 

edit: Highly recommended

Edited June 18, 2022 by doushantuo

[snolly50]

@doushantuo I did enjoy that very much.