Search results

Every year, people come from all over NZ (and elsewhere) to photograph the sunflower fields that surround Oamaru. This year, to mark the 20th anniversary (I think) of their planting, the company behind them decided to hold an open day and let people come and experience the flowers in 360-degree...

I've lived in Oamaru, New Zealand, for 15 years, and have often driven through the village of Waikouaiti when going to Dunedin. In all that time, I never once ventured off the main road and so I had no idea that there was a hidden treasure just a few minutes' drive away. The Hawksbury Lagoon is...

Our town is famous as the blue penguin capital of the world (or at least New Zealand), but they are famously mostly viewable during evening and nighttime. During the day they tend to be out to sea feeding, so imagine my surprise when I was at the foreshore today playing with my new camera and...

I only learned of this comet's existence the other day (I think it was a surprise to the people who discovered it, too), and I wasn't sure I'd be able to shoot it since it's rumoured to be heading away from the sun and it's only visible for a short time after dusk. But today we had the right...

This morning we had a partial (76%) solar eclipse as dawn broke over New Zealand, so I was of course out there to try to capture it. I was stymied by a bit of cloud during parts of the event, but it was clear for much of it. I had three cameras going, two focused on the sun itself (see my post...

I was manically checking the weather forecast for this morning's eclipse on a regular basis over the past several days, and it was a rollercoaster of changing predictions, going from 0% cloud several days ago, to 100% cloud on Friday evening and then finally 5% cloud for the key two-hour window...

I was fortunate to have crystal-clear skies for this morning's lunar eclipse, but I was unfortunate that it was going to happen just before dawn. Nevertheless I headed out at 3am or so to my still-under-construction (but on pause) new house where there would be no obstacles to the west so I...

We have been enjoying several nights of clear skies the past week or so, so I've set my monochrome rig to photograph one of my favourite nebulae in the winter sky, the fighting dragons of Ara. I decided to try something a bit complex--I set my ASIAIR to shoot through broadband filters (RGB) at a...

I had never heard of this target before last night when Telescopius suggested it as a good target for my 8" SCT telescope. It's a challenging target, very small and with a lot of contrast, so I gave it all night (10 hours) and was happy that almost all my subs were usable. Celestron 8" EdgeHD...

I am so happy that I have got the whole wide-field thing down now, since there's a lot of cool areas to shoot with a modest lens. The other day I installed Magic Lantern on my Canon 600D, giving it focus peaking, a bulb timer and intervalometer, all very handy to have. I did not realise that it...

As promised in my earlier post, here is the second shot of the area around Crux, the Southern Cross, this time shot with my unmodified Canon R5 and a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 70mm on a SkyWatcher StarAdventurer 2i. I bought the mount several years ago but have never actually used it...

Last night I did a little side-by-side comparison of the results of two wide-field astro rigs. My tried and true modified Canon 600D on a Benro Polaris with a nifty-fifty f/1.4 on the one hand, and a standard Canon R5 on a StarAdventurer 2i (that I’d never used before) with 70-200 f/2.8 lens at...

The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex has to be one of my favourite objects in the winter sky, so I have spent quite a few hours shooting it with my astro-mod Canon and a variety of lenses. The closer-up version is with my 100mm Rokinon f/2 and the wider one is with a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 at 70mm.

Several years ago, not longer after we moved to New Zealand, I had the idea of photographing the Milky Way over the Moeraki Boulders, an iconic landscape just south of where we live in Oamaru. Back then I had no idea about stacking, or about compositing images exposed for the sky with images...

While I was shooting with my Canon R5 for a Timelapse of the aurora last Sunday, I had my trusty 5DMkIV available to do some other compositions, including a 10-panel panorama of the aurora with bits of the Milky Way as seen here. 10 panels stitched in PTGui and processed in Photoshop.

All the apps I have that are meant to alert me to the possibility of an aurora were going wild yesterday, so I warned my partner that I would probably be dashing out as soon as it got dark. Sure enough, just around 6:45p a friend texted me to say "get out here!" so that's what I did. I headed to...

I have started to play around with more wide field astro images now that I have a good handle on using my Benro Polaris and an astro-mod camera with 100mm Rokinon lens (what a great lens!!). So last night I decided to shoot this gem of the southern sky, the Large Magellanic Cloud. I gave it...

Yesterday was dull and overcast all day, and it was expected to stay that way all night and then rain today. But at 7pm last night, when I took the dogs out, the sky was clear and looked like it'd last for a little while. I quickly set up my Benro Polaris with my astro-mod Canon 300D and Rokinon...

This has probably been the best week for astrophotography that I have had since getting started with the hobby in 2021. A week of consecutive clear skies meant that I could leave my rigs set up so I could do some really long integrations and compile several nights' exposures without having to...

This little "toy" telescope turns out to be able to produce some pretty acceptable images! NGC3372, my favourite nebula, aka the Carina Nebula: NGC3372, the Dragons of Ara: And a video capture of the moon, stacked and processed to reveal its colours: