NASA photographer Lauren Harnett captured this photograph of the International Space Station passing in front of the moon. What’s amazing is that it didn’t require any fancy astronomy equipment — Harnett was shooting from a parking lot using a Nikon D3S, 600mm lens, 2x teleconverter, heavy duty tripod and sandbag, and a remote shutter release. She shot at 1/1600, f/8, and ISO 2500 in burst mode, and then combined the resulting photographs into this one image.
Astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard captured this time-lapse video showing Comet Lovejoy rising above the Andes mountains like a giant paintbrush stroke across the sky. Guisard shot four different sequences with four different lenses to zoom into the scene.
While most 14-year-old boys are hooked on things like video games, Laurent V. Joli-Coeur is busy using astronomy and photography for crazy science projects. A few months ago, he had the crazy idea of photographing a shadow caused by Jupiter’s light. He then spent 7 hours building an instrument to do so, and used a Nikon D700 and 60mm Macro lens lent to him by Nikon to capture the image:
I took three photographs to prove that Jupiter could indeed cast a shadow. The first one, a five minute exposure at ISO1600 with an in-camera dark subtraction, was taken to photograph a shadow: the results were conclusive. Indeed, after stretching the image in Pixinsight, the gnomon’s shadow was clearly visible on the projection screen (a gnomon is the object that creates the shadow on a sundial). However, this wasn’t enough to prove it was Jupiter’s. The second exposure was taken to prove that the light causing the shadow came from the sky, not from the instrument itself: I slightly moved the mount in right ascension, expecting the shadow to move sideways… And it did. The third and final exposure was taken in a region of the sky far away from Jupiter. As the last image showed no sign of the gnomon’s shadow, I concluded that the only possible explanation for the shadow in the first two images was Jupiter!
As far as Joli-Coeur knows, it’s the first photo of a shadow cast by Jupiter ever made. You can find a more detailed account of his experiment on his blog.
Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson spent three months hunting thunderstorms at night in central South Dakota using a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 60D, and Canon T2i. Capturing both the storms and the Milky Way in the same shots proved to be a difficult task:
One of the challenges in making this video, was trying to get good storm and star shots. The opportunity doesn’t come along very often, the storm has to be moving the right speed and the lightning can overexpose the long exposures. I had several opportunities this summer to get storm and star shots. In one instance, within a minute of picking up the camera and dolly, 70mph winds hit. One storm was perfect, it came straight towards the setup, then died right before it reached it. [#]
In the end, he captured enough photographs to create this 3-minute-long time-lapse video showing the galaxy floating overhead while storm clouds roll in. Lightning photos are one thing, but seeing storms sweep across the scene at night is incredible.
Astronomy and photography enthusiast Alex Cherney spent 31 hours over six nights shooting photographs of the Milky Way over the Southern Ocean using a Nikon D700 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens. The resulting 2.5 minute time-lapse video was named the overall winner of this year’s STARMUS astro-photography competition.
What you see above is the largest true-color photograph of the night sky ever created, shot by 28-year-old amateur astrophotographer Nick Risinger using six astronomical cameras. It’s not just the view of the sky from one location, but is instead a 360-panoramic view of the sky taken by trekking 60,000 miles across the western United States and South Africa starting in March 2010. The final image is composed of 37,000 separate photographs. Check out the massive zoomable high-definition version of the photo here.
After a seven year journey that involved being slingshotted around the planets in our solar system, NASA’s MESSENGER probe entered Mercury’s orbit on March 17th, 2011. Yesterday the probe beamed back the first photograph ever taken of the planet from orbit (seen above). Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been thinking of trying your hand at lunar photography, tomorrow night might present the perfect opportunity to do so. It’s when the Moon will be the closest it has been to the Earth in 18 years, making it 14% larger and 30% brighter than when the full Moon is furthest away. Miss this opportunity, and you won’t see a Moon like this until about 2029 — who knows what we’ll be shooting with by then!
You probably won’t believe this, but this fly-by video of Saturn wasn’t created with 3D computer graphics. Instead, it was created using thousands of high-resolution still photographs captured by the Cassini orbiter.
This is a stunning time-lapse video of an entire night at the ALMA Array Operations Site in Chile (the largest astronomical project in existence). The antennas point at the same part of the sky at any given moment, so their movements are perfectly synchronized. If you think watching a sunset is beautiful, wait till you see our galaxy come into view in this video.
P.S. This video could do with music. We recommend playing some Sigur Ros in the background while watching this.
