Mercury and Venus conjunction, Iridescent Clouds

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On January 10th 2015 bright iridescent clouds were visible the whole day. At sunset the colors became even more intense and many people became about this rare atmospheric phenomena. Neighbours asked what those colors in the sky actually were.

At sunset I was able to take some images of the nice Venus and Mercury conjunction.

All cloud images are straight out of camera (SOOC) with no color, brightness or contrast changes. The conjunction images were slightly processed in Adobe lightroom to make the planets stand out more prominent.

Monster Sunspot AR2192

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Today I had the opportunity to see and photograph the giant sunspot Active Region 2192, it already has rotated a bit away from our direction, so the probability of a massive solar storm with possible damage to space and other infrastructure is reduced.

Full disc view of sunspot AR2192

Detail of the image above:

Closeup of Sunspot AR2192

 

The images were taken with a Nikon D7000 camera using a Astro-Professional ED80 f/7 doublet refractor. A Baader solar filter ND3.8 was used for filtering the sunlight.

Bright night, bright meteor

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With the so-called super-moon shining brightly outside the chances of successful meteor observations are pretty low due to the light of the moon washing out the fainter stars and of course meteors too!

But as the weather prospect for the next few nights is pathetic I set up the camera and took 434 shots using my Nikon D7000 with the Samyang (Rokinon, Walimex) 14mm f/2.8 camera at f/2.8, 2,5s and ISO3200. One of the frames actually captured a quite bright meteor:

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Spring Puddles

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Last week’s snow has almost completely melted and the stars are reflected in the resulting puddles of meltwater.

Spring Puddles

This image is a stack of 38 individual exposures: Nikon D7000, Walimex (Ssamyang) 14mm f/2.8, 30s at f/3.2, ISO 1600. Stacked in Startrails, edited in Photoshop (airplane removal) and Lightroom.

 

California Nebula

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The California Nebula (NGC_1499) is a HII emission region in the constellation Perseus, it was discoverd by E.E. Barnard in 1884 on long exposure plates.

Because of the red color and it’s faintness it is usually only visible in photographs.

California Nebula

I used my unmodified Nikon D7000 camera in combination with the Nikon AF-Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 for this photograph. 11 individual exposures of 120 seconds at f/2.8 were combined using Regim by Andreas Rörig. Additional adjustments were made in Adobe Lightroom.

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