A few weeks ago I spent a few hours at the London Wetland Center.
It's a wonderful place just in the middle of London, where you can relax and enjoy the company of lots of wildlife creatures.
I got to see the cormorants assembling for migration, lots of ducks and gooses, and I even spotted a gull feeding his chick.
Here's my photogallery:
This is the third processed image from my trip to Namibia, probably the best one of the entire set, since it has the most data: almost three half nights of "gross time", but barely 4 hours after discarding bad frames.
Lagoon and Trifida nebulae
To the right, you can see the big and gorgeous Lagoon nebula. On the left side, the much smaller, but still nice and interesting (and more coloured) Trifid Nebula.
They're both also known respectively as M 8 and M 20, from the Messier catalogue.
Technical data:
Camera: ASI183MM
Mount: Star Adventurer (no autoguiding).
Telescope: TS Apo 60mm F/5.5 with 0.79x focal reducer (focal length: 265mm).
Filters: Astronomik LRGB Typ IIc
Shooting software: AstroPhoto Plus
Processing: Pixinsight
More details and...
Another update from my trip to Namibia. Here's a second processed image, the Tarantula Nebula, this time inside the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Tarantula Nebula
This is a star forming region, very similar to the famous Orion Nebula that we can see from our latitudes, only this is way bigger. If the Tarantula Nebula was as close to us as the Orion Nebula it would even cast a visible shadow.
Technical data:
Camera: ASI183MM
Mount: Star Adventurer (no autoguiding).
Telescope: TS Apo 60mm F/5.5 with 0.79x focal reducer (focal length: 265mm).
Filters: Astronomik LRGB Typ IIc
Shooting software: AstroPhoto Plus
Processing: Pixinsight
More details and full resolution image on the Astrobin page
After long planning I finally went to Namibia, under one of the darkest sky on the planet, with the main intent of a fully astronomical holiday. The trip was exausting, and I've barely started processing images. Here's a first image:
Small Magellanic Cloud
It's a zoomed detail of the Small Magellanic cloud, one of the two dwarf companion galaxies of our Milky Way.
Technical data:
Camera: ASI183MM
Mount: Star Adventurer (no autoguiding).
Telescope: TS Apo 60mm F/5.5 with 0.79x focal reducer (focal length: 265mm).
Filters: Astronomik LRGB Typ IIc
Shooting software: AstroPhoto Plus
Processing: Pixinsight
More details and full resolution image on the Astrobin page
As spring seems to have fully arrived in London, our garden looks quite full of life.
I spent some time this afternoon taking snaps and a few videos of the local parrots. In the morning they come in flocks of 10 or 20, while in late afternoon there's usually 2 or 3 at time.
During the evening, our usual male and female foxes came visiting, quite unusually at the same time, so I took the chance to make a few pictures of them together
"Hunting" for deers pictures, but with a few extras, on a cloudy day in Richmond Park. Also proved as a good test for my new camera, a Canon EOS 80D,
Since I've never blogged about this project, there's quite a lot to catch up, so I'm gonna make a first summary with all (or a good part of) the content I've captured so far.
Let's start by videos: here's a youtube playlist with all the videos captured so far
Open in Youtube
The playlist is ordered starting from the most recent going backwards in time, so the first videos are actually the last.
In addition to the equipment described in the previous post I occasionally am also able to take zoomed pictures with my DSLR cameras, a Canon EOS 700D at first, an EOS 80D more recently, and a Sigma 150-600 zoom lens.
These are the best albums so far
First encounter
A few pictures taken before I started feeding them (back in January 2018), with an old telelens. The quality is pretty bad, actually, but I put it here anyway, as it's a nice memory.
Roughly more than a year ago I started this little project: feeding local foxes, that were already visiting very often our garden, mainly to try and get as many pics as possible.
When I started I just took occasional pics with a DSLR and telephoto lens, I then installed a first Raspberry Pi with an Infrared sensible camera and a single IR light to monitor the garden during the night, studying their habits and how to best interact with them. IR lights are essential to get a light source without disturbing the foxes (and the environment) with too much visible light.
As I started getting results, I started improving my setup times and times. Firstly I added more IR lights This is my current setup as it stands.
There are two raspberry pi cameras: one inside a waterproof box, getting closeups, the other indoors, with just the camera and its cable getting out of the window. There's a set of three infrared floodlights: the smallest two are visible in the picture, and they illuminate t...
This august I was able to go with our astronomical group to our usual appointment at Colle dell'Agnello in Italy, very close to France border.
The place is very dark, but the weather can often be a problem. Sometimes too windy, clouds covering the sky pretty quickly, sometimes even surrounding us (massive humidity, lens and mirrors getting wet).
During one of these nights I tried to get NGC7000, only to get inside a cloud right 5 minutes after finishing setting up everything and starting exposures.
It lasted a while, and I didn't have much time left, so I decided to get a quick shot at an old classic, M31.
Here's the result:
M31 from Colle dell'Agnello
A classic astrophotography subject, startrails can show how much the celestial sphere rotates in just a few hours (in this case, 4).
This one in particular also highlights how many airplanes wander above our heads, you can see lots of them quite clearly, straight intermittent lines striking the perfect circles drawn by the stars.
City star trails
Lots of planes passing by, as it's very clear by the trails they left.
A timelapse generated from the same set of images can be found here: [url=https://vimeo.com/270318537]https://vimeo.com/270318537[/url]
This simple yet effective tecnique also has the side effect of allowing to build a timelapse using the very same set of images.
Technical data: Canon EOS 700d,...