Happy Thanksgiving: Hybrid Eclipse

Life has been just a teensy bit busy, and this is likely to be the last blog post for another year or so.  But since then, I've done some more sky photography I thought I'd share; this of the hybrid eclipse:

Enjoy; there's little commentary to be added here, except they were all shot with the Hoya ND filter, the 400mm f/5.6 AI-S lens. It was pretty chilly that morning—I was out by 6:45 to try to get the shots; it was about five hours' worth of sleep, since we fell back an hour that day.

Venus Transit

Well, it happened.  The last transit of Venus until 2117.  The viewing weather locally was pretty awful:  all clouds and little sunshine.  My dad's telescope was out, but saw nothing.

I paired my 400mm Nikkor (the old AI-S f/5.6 IF-ED version of the lens; not anything newer) with the D7000 and the Hoya ND400 (9-stop) filter, and I managed to pull out two shots between the clouds:

5 June 2012 18:16 EDT

5 June 2012 18:19 EDT

While the results were relatively meager, it was a successful use of the filter, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it in the future.  The weeks have been busy lately, and I'm hoping to get out to take more photos soon.  I have been continuing to work on my raw workflow, too.  More pictures after the jump.

The NL Filter is your friend

I'm not too familiar with Photoshop, never having used it.  I suspect that it has rather more advanced filtering than the Gimp, my usual pixel-editing program.  In any case, for those doing editing work that involves clean-up (as my latest moon shots have required), the NL filter is a huge win for you.  The link has the documentation.

Over-developed Attempts with TC-301

I've made my first attempts with the TC-301.  The results are a bit over-developed, but as a start it's probably not too bad:

400 (800) mm f/5.6 @ f/8(16), 1/100s, ISO 200

Upcoming Celestial Events

There's an annular eclipse coming up in May, and Venus will transit in front of the Sun in June.  The transit in particular is of some interest, since the planet will not make the transit again for over 100 years.  Hopefully I'll be dead when that happens.  While I didn't set out to do astrophotography when I bought my camera, I'm considering picking up a solar filter and a teleconverter (probably a TC-300 to mate to the 400mm—turning it into a 1200mm- f/11-equivalent lens on my d7000) to try to capture both events.  I'll probably do some tests on the Moon if I make the purchases.  I'm also considering extension tubes, which could have some interesting effects on the 400 as well, particularly in macro ranges.