The Moon/Venus/Jupiter conjunction as no-one on Earth saw it

Recently there was a conjunction of the crescent Moon, Venus (also in crescent phase) and Jupiter.

It was captured by US Astronaut Scott Kelly, currently Commander of the International Space Station, with another planet added in—Earth!

Day 114. #Moon #Venus #Jupiter...#Earth Good night from @space_station! #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/GsOxOKt34S

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) July 19, 2015

It's rare for photos from the ISS to also feature the starfield background. There is just so much ambient light from Earth that it drowns out the fainter stars for photos. Unless you take one photo exposed for the Earth and another exposed for the stars, and combine them in Photoshop. But even then it's very hard not to have the Earth blowing out the stars where they are very close to each other.

NASA has been know to add in the relevant starfield from a completely different shot. And there's nothing wrong with that—our eyes see a much broader range of light than a camera can capture in one shot. So it's just using tools available to more closely represent what the astronauts themselves are actually seeing.

Which all makes the timing on this shot all the more wonderful to have achieved. But then, he is orbiting Earth every 79 minutes, so he probably had a few chances to get it right!

Kelly is well worth following on Twitter—he posts some great material from his unique perspective. Such as:

Significant chance of auroras tonight through mid-latitudes

Spaceweather.tv aurora projection

The wonderful Dr Tamitha Skov of Spaceweather.tv is reporting that we have good chances of visible auroras in the mid latitudes from tonight and through the next couple of nights.

For Australia, this means as far north as Sydney.

Click on this picture to click through to Dr Skow's full video report:

Of course you will want to try to capture such a rare event on camera. You'll need to get away from city light pollution, somewhere high with an unobstructed view to the south.

Set your camera on a fixed tripod. Put the camera in Live View mode and zoom right in on a bright object. At the moment, Venus, Jupiter and the crescent moon are all very bright in the early evening to the north-west. Set your camera focus to manual and get these targets as sharp as you possibly can. Then zoom right back out, being very careful not to touch the camera focus ring.

A kangaroo with a knot in its tail!

I was camping out at the Orroral Valley for a night of stargazing and photography. The next morning I ran into this young lady near the old historical homestead. It didn't seem to be holding her back too much. She could hop reasonably and perch - in a rather different manner from everyone else though!

Sunrise from the roof this morning

What's not to like about climbing up on your roof first up in the morning to catch a gorgeous sunrise?

Just a quick post with three nice pictures from this morning. Loved the reflection off the solar panels.

Wide shot, looking over Goorooyaroo Nature Reserve and Burnt Stump Hill:



Medium distance:

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Art Gallery, Canberra

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



This set is displayed on the National Art Gallery, and obviously draws heavily on the current major display...

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



This is Canberra's newest national landmark, the National Portrait Gallery, a beautiful contemporary building, with a very popular collection of portraits of famous Australians through our history.

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Library, Canberra

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



This one is titled The Federation Game:

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Questacon, Canberra

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



These photos are from Questacon, also known as the National Science Centre. There are quite a few in this set, all with gorgeous science themes.

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra

Artist: Martin Ollman

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



These photos are of the Old Parliament House, now also known as the Museum of Australian Democracy.



As a very long façade, it must have been a massive undertaking to light up this building, so there aren't many individual changes. It does look lovely with the reflections across the pond.

When Colin Legg went out to record the pass of Asteroid 2012 AD14, he got so much more...

Night Wanderers from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

The asteroid, a whole clutch of satellites, and a great meteor photobomb! Great catch by Colin Legg, of Western Australia.

As Colin describes it:

Asteroid 2012 DA 14 passed very close to the Earth on February 16th 2013, local time. Australians, and Western Australians in particular were in a great position to observe the asteroid, being on the night side of Earth as it flew by.

I captured this footage starting 3.24 am from a dark sky site 350 km east of Perth. Just after camera rolling, a beautiful meteor burned across the sky, and amazingly, passed right through my camera's field of view, lingering while the debris train swept up and out of view. In addition, the sky was also very busy swarming with countless man made satellites. The asteroid is the bright object at left moving down the screen.

The scene was captured at 50 mm, iso 8000, f/2.2, 8 second shutter, 9 second intervals.
For more details and other examples of my work, check out - facebook.com/ColinLeggPhotography

Related articles

• Asteroid 2012 DA14 caught on camera by Canberra astronomer Dave Herald
• Night sky viewing coming up - ISS, Comets, Flares and a Spy Shuttle
• Take a full tour of the International Space Station with former Commander Suni Williams
• Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...

Is this the most awesome selfie ever? And it's on Mars...

This latest photograph from Mars Curiosity really does set the benchmark. Gigapan have done one of their incredible photo merges to form this huge single image that lets you pan around and zoom in almost to the point of seeing individual dirt grains.

The screen grab on this page is only a fraction of the shot. You have to click through to GigaPan, go full screen, then immerse yourself! Look down to the left too, where you can see the red dirt scuffed off the surface, leaving a grey patch near a white gypsum vein. That's where Curiosity performed its first drill test just today.

The only thing you can't see in this image is the robotic arm itself, because that's where the camera is mounted. In mosaicing the photos, they have to choose one frame with the arm right out of the way down low, or else there'd be bits of arm scattered across the shot. Of course there'll be some crazies out there who can't wrap their heads around this, and will be claiming the photo was taken by a person, meaning that it's all staged somewhere here on Earth. Let them have there delusions...but it's just like taking a 360-degree panorama shot with your smartphone with neither your phone or your feet showing. If you have an iThing, try it for yourself with the free app 360 Pano.

This is the official JPL animation showing how the photos were compiled:

Bioluminescent algae—great photos by Phil Hart

Phil Hart has done it again, with another set of gorgeous photos of bioluminescent algae—coupled with the night sky—from the Gippsland Lakes.

One of the most viewed articles on this blog, with more than 500 views, pointed people towards Hart's previous photos and story from three years ago.

More photos on his blog.

Related articles

• Night-time satellite images are pretty - like light reflecting off oil scum in wetlands is pretty!
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra
• Clear skies, no moon and a 14" telescope made for great viewing last night. With photos!
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Questacon, Canberra

Before the Canberra storm was the build-up... My 1:20 timelapse

iPhone shot out the other side of the house while the timelapse was shooting

No fireworks for this Australia Day - not the artificial kind anyway. But plenty of the natural white kind!

And before the big storm hit Canberra, there were some dramatic clouds during the build-up.

It was all very reminiscent of South-East Queensland actually...

Enjoy my first YouTube upload—1849 frames, four seconds apart, covering from 3:56pm to 6:20pm in one minute 19 seconds:



Pity Picasa doesn't fade out the sound at the end...

A still from the series

Related articles

• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra

Photos from tonight's very bright ISS pass

It was quite windy so I wasn't going to try to take photos of the magnitude -3.3 ISS pass tonight, but at the last moment changed my mind. So it was a rushed setup, plus I was trying to let a few people know via social media. So these photos are heavily cropped to remove a neighbour's treetops, as this was the only place I was semi-sheltered from the wind. And just 10 second shots too, due to the near full moon.

But interesting nonetheless. The first shot was as the space station was passing the Orion Constellation. Those are red supergiants Aldebaran in bottom left and Betelguese in bottom centre. Orion's belt and sword centre top. The stars in those are clearly blue, meaning they are extremely hot. Type O blue stars are typically >33,000 degrees, against Sol's 5770 degrees. (The middle one of the sword is actually the Orion Nebula.)



Tricky shooting straight into the moon! Had to boost the black and the contrast to counter the moon's wash-out. That's Betelguese again top centre-left.

Related articles

• Take a full tour of the International Space Station with former Commander Suni Williams
• Clear skies, no moon and a 14" telescope made for great viewing last night. With photos!
• How much water really is there on Spaceship Earth?

Canberra's bushfire sunset last night made for tricky photography

A smoky sunset after yesterday's bushfires scattered all around the Canberra region made for very challenging photography. For this beginner anyway. There was so much smoke, the sun was blowing out very badly. There are probably some Photoshop tricks to get around this, but I don't know them. I think the best photo is this one of Black Mountain - without the sun in it.



I liked the way the sun was reflecting golden off the grass seedheads in this next one, looking towards the mountains from Horse Park Drive. But the sun was blown way out... A little bit of post needed: I backed off the exposure a little and lifted the shadows to try compensate for the sun:

Beautiful timelapse of opening flowers - three minutes to warm your day...

Here's a video just under three minutes that is guaranteed to put a little warmth into your day.

Using a controlled environment and steady artificial lighting, Katka Pruskova has captured timelapses of a range of flowers opening—some over a few hours, and some over days.

Make sure you view this wide, and enjoy the music too.


Flowers Timelapse from Katka Pruskova on Vimeo.

She says it's her first effort at timelapse photography. Well wow...

Here's her description of the process:

After a 38 degree day comes a cracker storm! Check these lightning photos.

It was hot outside today, and it will be hot again tomorrow. But in between we've had a great series of storm cells passing over, with some excellent lightning.

I pointed the camera out the upstairs window, and set it on automatic shooting with a programmable remote control. Unfortunately there's nothing automatic about the processing stage...

But after sorting through some 600 frames of 30MB RAW files, it came down to 13 keepers.

A couple more:

Clear skies, no moon and a 14" telescope made for great viewing last night. With photos!



Great Orion Nebula

 One of the great benefits flowing from the $30 annual membership fee of the Canberra Astronomical Society is that you also get free use of the society's 350mm (14") telescope up on top of Mount Stromlo. A scope worth more than $10,000, with some gorgeous Nagler eyepieces, in an observatory with a roll-off roof. For $30? The only negative about this bargain is the chronic Canberra light pollution...

You can also attach a DSLR camera to the telescope to do your own beginner-level astrophotography.


47 Tucanae globular cluster

And that's just what I did last night. Here are a few of the better shots, with minimal and rushed processing this morning before heading off to work. Hopefully I'll be able to get a reasonable shot of Juptier out of the collection too.