This was one of our planned astrophotography classes, but since my wife was ill, and I figured I could do it as easily from my yard, I did not attend the class at the observatory. I set my phone alarm to 1:35 AM (I thought) but somehow made it PM. I awoke a couple of minutes after 3 AM and hurried out the front door with the equipment I had set up the night before.
One dumb thing I did was attache my p0 ballhead to the K-01, instead of the Bigma's tripod foot. No idea why I did that, but the Arca-Swiss monoball p0 did a find job of supporting the whole thing with no sag, even racked out to 500mm. I was very impressed with that. I haven't had time to closely look at all of the images, but it was obvious on the Live View/Focus Peaking that there were moments of better seeing and other moments of blur, due to the atmosphere. I shot with the 2 sec self-timer to hopefully let any movement from my pressing the shutter button settle down. (No mirror flop to worry about with the K-01) Three images up on Flickr (sorry to those of you who hate it) The last image is a straight crop of the 2nd, which shows the full frame at 500mm. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/13871281925/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/13871747733/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/13871717785/in/photostream/ If it is clear for the next one in October, I think I will try to bracket and HDR to include some stars in the image. Hopefully I will be a little better acquainted with my tracking equipment and will be able to do a time lapse, of that one, as well. With a little planning I could probably be shooting both cameras on different tracking equipment (K-5 II and the K-01). On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Steve Sharpe <d...@eastlink.ca> wrote: > On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 22:20:53 +1200, Alastair Robertson wrote: >> Good views here in NZ - cloudless following a southerly straight from >> antarctica to clean the air yesterday. Unfortunately camera was at >> work! > > My wife, who's one of those Early Morning People, dragged me out of bed > at 5:15am to have a look. It was quite a pretty sight under a hazy sky, > with Mars and Spica nearby. Didn't photograph it, though. Went back to > bed, instead. > > --- > > Steven Sharpe - The Office Gallery > > d...@eastlink.ca > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs. ~ Alfred Stieglitz -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
