sunset

After days of grey, clouded skies, last night’s sunset was finally visible. So I positioned my camera in my window frame and let my laptop take 200 photos in a little over an hour:

DSLR recording the sunset

When played at 20 fps, last evening’s sunset in timelapse looks like this:

Also, I worked a little more on my Dumbbell Nebula and got a pretty decent result considering the relatively low number of short exposure frames. After stacking, I masked out some of the noise, applied some high-contrast tone curves and made a star overlay, which makes the stars ‘pop’ and even makes them somewhat hexagonal (round with 6 small diffraction peaks due to the 3 bars in my telescope).

Stack of 41 x 0.8sec exposures

For reference, the original unprocessed frames look like this:

Single unprocessed frame

After exposure adjustment and noise reduction of the reparate images, they look like in the video below. The final image is the stacked image above.

A few days ago I finally got a Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera; a Canon 1100d with a 18-55mm zoom lens. It is the very first SLR camera that I ever took photos with, so the whole thing is quite new to me. On of the first pictures I took was this sunset image, which (accidentally) also shows 5 swallows hunting for small bugs.

One of the first photos I took using my new Canon 1100d DSLR

One of the best things about DSLRs is the ability to take long exposures. So I tried to take one. I found that focussing is difficult and that I should use as low ISO values as possible to reduce noise and skyglow. The image below is a 30 second wide field exposure at ISO800. I reduced the image size to 25% to hide star trailing (stars that seem to move due to the earth’s rotation) and the effects of my poor focussing. Next time I wil use live view on my laptop to get focus right and operate the camera without physically touching it. Later this week I expect to receive the rings required to attach the DSLR to my telescope. I’m looking forward to using that combination 🙂

Wide field 30 second exposure at ISO800 with 18-55mm zoom lens at 18mm.

Last Monday, I was traveling home towards Amsterdam by train when I saw this beautiful sunset. At that time I was still awaiting delivery of my DSLR, so I used my iPhone to take this shot.

Setting sun shot with an iPhone from a train moving at 140kph.

Another iPhone photo I took was of the Yucca that was on the verge of blooming last week. This time it is finally in bloom after the stem had been developing for months.