I got up early and setup, polar aligned, etc. Started taking images just before it started and got a few during the eclipse. After the eclipse, I got a few more images of the sun and its spots.
Bonus!
Tele Vue Optics, Inc., put a link and screenshot to the animation I posted on Instagram in an article on their blog. Click here to see the story: “Tele Vue Optics’ Blog – Rings of Fire: 14 October 2023 Annular Eclipse Photos”
Tiny Mars right below the full moon of Dec 2022. Here in Cajun Country, we saw a near miss of Mars being occulted. Further north and west was where you could see it go behind the Moon.
I used the smallest scope I have to take this (only 180mm of focal length) because it was ready to go and I didn’t have much time to prep. Sure wish I would have had my old C-8 for this instead. Oh, well…
This crop is at 100% of the camera’s native resolution.
A beautiful evening for the Moon and Mars conjunction on October 2, 2020. Condition were so good that I was able to capture the moon rising behind a tree. Usually the muck is so thick at that altitude that I would not be able to get a good image, but this night it was extremely transparent.
The moonrise shot was a single frame. I had to do a composite for the still image of the Moon and Mars together. 10 frames were stacked in AutoStakkert of just the moon and 2 Mars frames were combined for the disk of Mars.
The MP4 video file is the first time I have tried including one in a astrophoto post. It is small enough in size to download in a reasonable amount of time. Video editing software I used was rudimentary and I really couldn’t get the background color corrected very well. I’ll have to find something that can do that job for future projects like this.
An image of Jupiter, finally! Its been ages since I shot it with a high-res setup. The 6 inch, F/8 Newt I used was barely up to the task, but it did produce a usable image. Seeing was poor, but otherwise it was a beautiful morning with beautiful and very transparent skies.
A beautiful conjunction of the moon and two planets made the last evening of Jan 2017 quite nice. The Moon joined Venus and Mars on this evening and I just had to get some shots.
I could have used a tripod for these, but I took the images by propping the camera on the top of a car. Consequently, I had lots of rejected images due to motion blur. But, luckily, I got a three steady ones that were good enough to post. The forth image below was a repair job, but it came out OK after correcting it for my unsteady hands. 🙂
These last two are actually composites. The one right above had motion blur and as mentioned previously, I was able to fix it. But, fixing it messed up the trees. So, I had to composite the good trees back in from the original. In the second image above, the moon was replaced with a better version from the 200mm lens.
Update October 20, 2014: The above image is an update with more time added. Compare it to the image below which was made with only 20 minutes of data shot at ISO 6400 (20×60 sec sub-images.) I took an additional 30 minutes of 3 minute sub-images at ISO 1600 and added it in, so the combined total is 50 minutes.
Well, the big comet encounter of the year took place tonight, Oct 19, 2014 and Mars and Comet Siding Spring (C/2013 A1) both survived. LoL. Seriously, it was a very close encounter if you had darkness when it was closest. Here in southern Louisiana, it took place during daylight, so I had to catch it after closest approach as C/2013 A1 was bidding Mars farewell.
I had a strange night with some issues, but I managed to get some decent data and also lucked out with some good weather for this event. This image is from the first set of images I took and it is a composite of comet-only processed and star background processed image stacks. The comet moved a good distance in the twenty-five minutes it took to get the sub-frames, so I had to isolate it with different alignment and stacking techniques than I use for normal deep-sky images.
Jupiter taken with my Celestron 8 inch SCT.
Single image of the transit of Venus across the solar disk . This link is an animation of all frames captured.
One of my better Mars images from the 2005 apparition.