Rick's Digital Desert
Photography by Richard B. Hardman
Artist's Blog
[30-Sep-2014] Wow. Life sure has a way of slipping away from the extra things you want to do when your busy. In the last six months had two Grandchildren visit, a beautiful Grandson and a beautiful Granddaughter were born, and to top it off... another just started kindergarten.
Started dabbling in astrophotography. Takes some serious time for one photo as the light from objects like galaxies and nebulas are so faint and so far away. To give a basic idea how how the process works, you take multiple exposures of the same object over and over again till you have enough good images to stack together into one to bring out detail and to reduce the noise cameras generate at these long exposure times. All this while trying to compensate for the effect of the Earth rotating to keep stars sharp and in focus. My first photo was Messier 13 (M13) and I took 90 exposures at 30 seconds each and ended up with 44 good ones to use. The result is in the Night Sky section.
Total Lunar Eclipse !!! Eclipse starts early morning on October 8th around 01:15am PST and the Moon will slowly enter the Earth's shadow until mid eclipse at 3:55 am. At that point the Moon may be a deep reddish color. Eclipse ends at 6:36am. These are times for my area.
Started dabbling in astrophotography. Takes some serious time for one photo as the light from objects like galaxies and nebulas are so faint and so far away. To give a basic idea how how the process works, you take multiple exposures of the same object over and over again till you have enough good images to stack together into one to bring out detail and to reduce the noise cameras generate at these long exposure times. All this while trying to compensate for the effect of the Earth rotating to keep stars sharp and in focus. My first photo was Messier 13 (M13) and I took 90 exposures at 30 seconds each and ended up with 44 good ones to use. The result is in the Night Sky section.
Total Lunar Eclipse !!! Eclipse starts early morning on October 8th around 01:15am PST and the Moon will slowly enter the Earth's shadow until mid eclipse at 3:55 am. At that point the Moon may be a deep reddish color. Eclipse ends at 6:36am. These are times for my area.
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Partial Solar Eclipse !!! WARNING Do not view with your eye directly!! Put a pinhole in cardboard and project this onto another piece of cardboard or if your lucky to have welders glass use that. Partial Eclipse begins at 2:14 PM when the Moon touches the Sun's edge. Maximum Eclipse 3:32 PM and Eclipse ends at 4:42 PM. These are times for my area. The farther north you go, the better this eclipse will be.
Any given night you can look up and see one to two meteors. The next meteor shower is the Draconids. The peak is October 08 and you can expect to see around 15 per hour. This meteor shower has produced major outbursts in the past. We'll have a full Moon so don't expect to much. The next one is the Orionids with the peak on October 21. This one you can expect to see 20+ per hour. Fortunately for us, the Moon will not interfere with observing during the the wee hours in the morning. It will rise around 4:44am PST and will be just a sliver.
See ya out there!