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 […]
December 2014 has been a lucky month for all astrophotographers, as the comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) brightens up and makes a visit in the night sky. I recently purchased a new AT65ED Scope and an iOptron ZEQ25 so that I could spend my holiday in India capturing all the Northern Objects, but unfortunately had to leave them at airport due to baggage restrictions. I was disappointed when I saw all the amazing images from all over the world of the comet. I really wanted to take a shot of the same, as it would be my first ever comet capture. I looked up at my gear and realized i don’t really need fancy gear to capture the comet, i can try with the gear i have. So, finally on 29th December 2014, I headed out to the terrace of my apartment in Nagpur City and set up my gear. Pointed out my camera towards South at around 12:30 AM. At start it was really disappointed as i did not see anything apart from the stars i saw everyday. I was using Canon 50mm f/1.8 on Canon 6D and Tamron 70 – 300 on my Nikon D5100. It was probably because […]
