Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Getting people into your astrophotography



My grandmother once chided me saying, "You really should include people in your photographs, otherwise, how am I to know who's there?" It has been difficult accommodating her in my astrophotography. This photo is one exception. There are people in the object making the streak across the sky, as it is the International Space Station, possibly at its brightest (as of July 6, 2009).

Double click the photo to enlarge.

Photo: July 6, 8:14pm PDT, 100 ISO, F5, 28mm lens, 109 seconds.

4 comments:

Tom said...

Love that picture. What sort of scope do you have? Still using binoc's here, though I'm waiting for a nice big bonus check (ha ha ha) to get my first telescope.

jg said...

Thanks for your comment. This photo was taken with a 28 mm lens on my Canon digital SLR. Other photos I've posted (e.g, one of the moon and Venus) were with a Televue-76 attached prime focus to the Canon camera. Lately, I've been using the TV-76 with a focal reducer, but haven't produced many photos with this combination yet. I'm stepping cautiously into the realm where I have to process many frames on the computer -- a whole new learning curve when I get the spare time.

jg

Tom said...

The Televue-76 is a very pretty scope. I have been looking more into buying a light bucket because everything I've read/and everyone I've talked to, has said that if I try to get into astrophotography, it'll be a surefire way of getting me to give up astronomy altogether.

I'm not a photographer (and still a poor astronomer), so I'll probably go very slowly in this area, and in the meantime I'll gaze upon the beautiful pictures those more adept than I am post on the web. :)

Keep up the good work.

jg said...

Buying a light bucket is good advice. It was similar for me, but I bought a Schmidt-Cassigrain first, which had the side benefit of being easy to use for astrophotography because of the generous range of focus.