Images Taken
Updated 12/22/2005 |
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Click each photo to see a larger, higher-resolution version.
Mercury and Venus
This was taken at 0644PST on 1/14/05 from around Stockton, CA (enroute from
San Francisco to Dallas/Fort Worth) at about 20,000' MSL. Fog fills the San
Joaquin Valley below and the Sierra Nevada mountains are on the left.
Mercury is about 25 arcminutes away from Venus in the dawn sky.
The clouds and ground are slightly blurred by the aircraft's motion, as this
picture is actually a composite of 11 frames taken over a 7 second period
using a Canon S500 Digital Elph in rapid-fire mode (1/13 sec. exposures,
22mm FL at f/4.9, ISO 400), hand-held braced against the window frame. The
images were aligned and stacked in ImagesPlus; levels, curves, cropping and
sizing were accomplished in Photoshop CS.
Centaurus and Crux
Alpha and Beta Centauri towards the left, with Crux (the Southern Cross) to their right,
above the skyglow of Mexico City. Omega Cen can be found at the 1 o'clock position
from Beta Cen, passing one bright star to the "fuzzy" star.
Taken 6/13/05 at 2022CDT. Canon PowerShot 500 "point and shoot" camera.
A min-max excluded combination of five 5-sec images, ISO 400, with a
median-combined stack of 5 dark frames subtracted, translate and rotate aligned,
with some levels adjustment, all in ImagesPlus.
The stars are slightly elongated vertically due to the tripod's slight rotation in the pitch axis
as it was descending at about 500mph. :)
