Often when you talk about astrophotography, first things that come to mind are Long Exposure and High ISO. For most of the time this is true but then there are times when you cannot use both at the same time and sometimes you just have to stick to short exposure times. Sometimes, the images produced with a short exposure will not have much detail of the sky, but if you are a dark site, it is sufficient enough to capture those details. I recently visited East Cape lighthouse, which is the easternmost point of New Zealand to capture the milky way rising next to the lighthouse. This was my first time so I did not know what to expect. These beautiful beams going across the sky looked so beautiful and I wanted to capture them with the milky way rising. As usual, I set up my camera to a 20sec exposure, ISO 6400, f/2.8 and not to be surprised but the lighthouse was overexposed and I did not capture any of those beams. A bit disappointed, I tried again with slow exposure and got better. Then I thought, the reason I am not capturing the beams is because, when on […]
I have been using the Astronomik CLS Filter for the last few years to get rid of light pollution in my astrophotos. The filter has done a really good job so far and have given me some good results, specially when doing deep sky astrophotography. I was planning on modifying my Canon 6D for astrophotography, so it is more sensetive to H-alpha. But before I could completely modify my camera, i wanted to give some other astronomik filters a try. Specially the UHC Filter and 12nm Ha Filter as these filters only allow narrow wavelengths (specially the 12nm Halpha.) Below is a comparison for the CLS and UHC transmission chart. As you can see from the above images, UHC filter has a narrow transmission and thus gets rid of any unwanted light (City Lights) The result of shooting through the UHC filter is that you get a better sky contrast hence the name UHC (Ultra High Contrast), The UHC works better on any kind of emission nebula: When a nebula is emitting light only at certain wavelengths, you may block everything else to get a very dark background with a high contrast: That´s the intention of the Astronomik UHC. I […]
How much does the moon affect when capturing the night sky ? Here is a comparison of what the camera sees when the moon is out and when the moon has set. The night / morning i captured this image, It was Waxing Gibbous moon with 95% Illumination. Moonset was in an hour and that is when i started doing a timelapse to capture that smooth transition from bright to dark sky. The images i used in the comparison are straight out of camera (SOOC) without any editing. The botton one is the first frame and the top one is the last frame of the timelapse. Exif: 15sec, ISO 1600, f2.8 at 24mm on Canon 6D
