I’m not feeling well, but I wanted to share these images from my October trip to the dark site and the recent partial lunar eclipse.
I’ve made a few trips out to the dark site this fall and winter. This last trip took place in October and I got eaten up by mosquitos, despite saturating myself in repellant. I still had a good time and captured 2.5 hours of exposure time on the Triangulum Galaxy. I tried shooting this galaxy a year ago with my Nikon D5300 from my backyard. You can see it in this previous post.
This pic has been roughly processed (and uses old flats… I haven’t taken new ones lately), but it’s definitely much improved due to the combo of my EOS RA and a darker sky.
Speaking of darker skies, the last few times I’ve been to the dark site, I’ve been able to see the Milky Way with my naked eye. I snapped this with my Galaxy S20.
Moving on, I stayed up past 4 a.m. to get some snaps of the partial lunar eclipse on Nov. 19. I took a couple dozen with my Galaxy S20. I couldn’t use my Orion Starshoot Mini because the viewing angle is too small; I just get part of the moon. I did try, though, and got some video I haven’t tried to process, yet. I also used my trusty Orion XT8.
Lastly, I was feeling lazy but wanted to try to get a decent picture of Venus. So, I set up my Orion XT8 in my front yard, so I wouldn’t be viewing through the heat shimmer coming off my roof, and used the Orion Starshoot Mini. This little camera is supposed to be excel at this kind of imaging, but I always find the results kind of lackluster (and green tinted). But to be fair, I think it’s my best Venus pic yet.
