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Elsinore:

Unless Intolerant Jerk is shooting with the Hubble there is no way that is his original shot.

It’s people like that what cause unrest! 😯

Agreed. You’d need Palomar to get that level of definition on earth (and that with seeing-correction software only). Furthur, such colors are not seen in space. Colors come in red, blue, green, and violet (and browns when dust is illuminated. All else violate rules of physics. Yellow? I call BS. Let him protest, tell me where the shot was taken, and I’ll see what I can get with my 11″ telescope. I trust with my Whirlpool Galaxy entry that you can see what can be done from earth without stacking images and altering colors.

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There should be something man made in the picture that is composing the skyline. Thus, farmscapes would be valid but not just a series of trees.

Okay if there’s just ‘one’ manmade thing? I have a thought of a mountain range, one of which has a big “<—Phoenix" sign on it (back in the days before there were many roads, it's how people knew they were on the right track and not just lost in the desert). It should look lovely at sunset–if it's okay to use.

[ravnostic]

I have irfanview, used it for years though I didn’t care for it’s editing capabilities (the canon software seems better suited) it’s great for resizing and such. Where is the ‘save for web’ option, though? I looked for that today and couldn’t find it. As for hardware, I just upgraded to 4gigs ram in my lappytop–mmmm rammy goodness…

sorry for the late response.

the “save for web” is a plugin. go here for the download.

http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

Hrrm… guess they’ve come out with new plugins since I last updated. Time to reload my Irfanview, I guess! Thanks.

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$20?!? Someone didn’t know what they were selling! What a steal! If the OT holds up at work I’ll eventually get the $400 wedge mount for equitorial viewing for my scope. It’s high on my list.

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Well, I thought I was going to fark, but I guess I pooped instead. Dang.

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Congrats to Ranger–both the top two! Those were friggin outstanding farking pictures. I’m not in the least surprised; but it was nice to have one of mine place in the top 5 for a change.

[ravnostic]

I have irfanview, used it for years though I didn’t care for it’s editing capabilities (the canon software seems better suited) it’s great for resizing and such. Where is the ‘save for web’ option, though? I looked for that today and couldn’t find it. As for hardware, I just upgraded to 4gigs ram in my lappytop–mmmm rammy goodness…

[ravnostic]

Well this is a lot of useful info. I’m glad, Els., that you think Tamron lenses are a decent value for the price. I’d rather not get a film camera as 1) I have no patience for waiting to see what I got when half of what I shoot isn’t decent enough to pay for and 2) film processing is both expensive and harder and harder to find (I’m not a fan of kiosk film developers.) I was glad to get rid of my 35mm when I went digital.

There’s been lots of useful tips here, thanks to all for posting the info! My only regret is I’ll be working tonight and will miss a chance to try to catch a skygrazing meteor, which sometimes can be spectacular (if anyone’s up tonight, this is a good night for it; they’ll come from the southeast in the wee hours of the morning, after 2am; you might reasonably expect to see only 2-3 of the brighter, trail leaving ones).

I am due to get my DSLR serviced; I’m hoping to get rid of the dust fuffles that have accumulated in the 2/5 years I’ve owned it.

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Sure. We have gatherings of the AZStrobist crowd (http://www.flickr.com/groups/azstrobist) fairly regularly, 2-3 times a year. Or you can come out stormchasing with me next month… I generally log about 12,000 miles on the Forester every monsoon season. 😉

I used to go stormchasing with my old roommate; love to!!

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There are some good pics there that aren’t in a square format. Do you just disqualify them? Allow some leniency? What’s the protocol?

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I was thinking that, too LeicaLens! You should see it through the scope itself. The problem with astrophotography, even short-ish exposures, is there’s always some blurring of the atmosphere–it’s kind of like looking into a pool of water to spot a coin–and the water is hardly ever perfectly still. It’s a condition called ‘seeing’, and usually limits earth-bound photos to a resolution of about 1/2 arc second.

The arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, and the moon is 30 arc-minutes across, so you’d think that level of detail wouldn’t be important–and it’s not, in a view of the moon (which due to it’s brightness can be shot with quite short exposures, 1/100th to 1/1000th depending on phase your telescope and such) But a planet like Saturn is only 42 arc seconds across the rings, and less than 1/2 that in the body of the planet. So it’s kind of like saying that you can get a decent shot if your shot is 80 pixels wide. As such, my picture is fantastically clear. At 1/30th second exposure, it’s not as bright as I’d like, but longer would mean more camera blur as that magnification is not the prime-focus photography used in my panoramic shot earlier in the contest.

When you look directly through the telescope, however, there are brief, unpredictable moments of clarity; you can see the thin shadow of the rings on the planet right now, for example, or that shadows of Jupiter’s moons on the planet (when they cross, of course.) I can’t capture that on film. Yet. I’ve got my new cord timer, and I’ll try to get a better shot; with the new 16gig card I should be able to capture a frame every 1/3 second for about 25 frames, then wait for the camera to catch up, and do it all again. So eventually, I’ll get one of those iotic moments of atmospheric clarity and have something special, without stacking. (I’ll probably shoot for a 1/15th second exposure for color, though.)

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I’ve tried a couple freeware stackers and frankly, they suck. However, my scope does track, so for nebulas and such, it’s less important on the longer exposures. The planets are pretty much too small to capture without a lot of blurring (called seeing)–relative to their size, at least.

I did get a cord to let me take shots of more than 30 seconds with my camera (without holding down the shutter in ‘bulb’, that is–this also produces too much shake when viewed through a telescope. I’ll be trying that out next monday or tuesday night, I hope. Or maybe tonight; might bring the camera to work and use my breaks to try to capture a nice meteor fireball–long odds against that, but worth a shot perhaps.

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Those are nice shots, caradoc. Hey, we both live in the Phoenix area. Let me know if you’re up for going out shooting sometime. I’ll bring my telescope, if you’d like to try it out (I’m working out a piggyback system to use the scope as a tracker for long-exposure sky panoramas.

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Once again, I am blown away by the group’s photography skills. But Yay, me, I’m actually getting votes this week! I have two more shots to post in about two hours when I get home; I work up late for work and didn’t have a chance to square them up. Once is a bigger shot of Saturn (no moons, and frankly not particularly fantastic, but pretty big just the same), and one of the Ring Nebula (which I do like.) I might go for the Wild Duck cluster instead of Saturn; it’s *full of stars*

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No so worried about the votes as I am the skills. But dayum–camera lenses are SO expensive!! I can’t believe the costs for high quality optics (my 11 inch telescope costs 3 grand, and I’ve seen friggin camera lenses that cost that much–how can this make sense?)

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