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My film Minolta X-700. With my recently hung mantle from Ikea and a glass vase I bought in Murano.

Currently the camera has a roll of color processing black and white Ilford film. Since I don’t process my own film true BW film is expensive to process and hard to find someone that even does it.

I love shooting a roll of film once in a while. I believe you’re a lot more selective when shooting film focusing more on composition.

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My two images of the Lagoon Nebula. The up-close one is at 200mm and roughly a 12 minute exposure. Just above the Lagoon Nebula is the smaller Trifid Nebula.

The wider one is at 70mm and a single 90 second exposure and you can see more of the Milky Way.

Both images are done using my Ioptron Skytracker and my modified Canon T2i (550D) which I discuss in detail earlier.

Location is an hour and a half outside of Toronto.

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Once again this image was snapped right off the back of my camera with my phone. This is M8 - The Lagoon Nebula which is in the heart of the Milky Way. Canon T2i 200mm f2.8 ISO 800 90 seconds Tracked with ioptron skytracker

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Andromeda fail! After driving 2 hours to find darker skies I finally set up my equipment to take images of Andromeda and then a pesky plane (or satellite) managed to pass directly right through the middle!!

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One of my images of the Milky Way taken right off the back of the camera. I used my Canon 6D and a 10-20mm Sigma not designed for FF cameras, and used the iPhone to take a picture of the picture. No tracker was used, just a normal (really old and cheap) tripod.

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After purchasing the a Ioptron SkyTracker, they recommend that you purchase the Ioptron app $0.99 which tells you the exact location that Polaris should be within the retical. Some may argue that you shouldn't have to purchase the App but others may argue that an addition dollar on top of the purchase price isn't enough to warrant complaining. I tried to find free that would give me the same information, and came across a wonderful FREE iPhone app called "Scope Help". Scope Help provided all kinds of useful information for your night of viewing including all GPS information, moon data, offers a "red light" and provides a Polar Align diagram. After downloading I wasn't sure how this translated to the Ioptron retical so I decided to purchase the original Ioptron App. I compared the two apps and provided a screen shot above. On the free app "Scope Help" if you flip both the horizontal and verticle and set the FOV to 5 degrees it will provide you with the same information as the Ioptron App. You'll notice the little green dot on the image on the left is where Polaris should be within the finder scope.

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One of my first attempts to capture M31 Andromeda. I'm not happy with picture for three reasons. 1 - the skies weren't very dark. I was about 55min outside of heavily polluted skies. 2 - I only got a couple of pictures because the weather didn't cooperate and either did the equipment. 3 - my post processing skills are not very good. This was taken using a Canon t2i and 70-200 f2.8 at 200mm and a ioptron SkyTracker. August 2014.

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Saturn using my Meade LS6 and my Canon T2i in video crop mode. This is taken from a busy intersection in Toronto. The quality of the sky was terrible but I've got to take advantage of a clear night.

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Without realizing it my basement has turned into a little gallery of Astrophotography. Two of the pieces hanging are mine, and the third is an antique lithograph I purchased of our solar system. Of my pieces one is a large 20x30 print of the Milky Way. And the other is a small square image of the Transit of Venus.

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Lunar eclipse coming in April 2014.

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This is the set up inside my Canon T2i. I’m getting rid of the Infrared and Ultraviolet absorption glass!!

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Modified DSLR - Taking the Plunge

After much consideration I’ve decided to get my Canon T2i modified with a Baader UV/IR replacement filter.

Here’s a little background on what a modified DSLR entails. 

Camera manufactures (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc) internally put a filter directly in front on the camera’s sensor to block any non-visible light that might affect an image.

Here’s a depiction of the visible light spectrum in relation to the rest of the wavelengths:

But what if I wanted to see the InfraRed (IR) to the right of the red? or UltraViolet (UV) to the left of the violet? You would have to modify the internal workings of your camera to remove the built in IR/UV filter.

Why would one want to do this you ask? There are many reasons. One is that InfraRed terrestrial photography is a whole other bread on it’s own. While it’s definitely fascinating, I don’t think it’s for me. For some examples have a look at http://www.lifepixel.com/

Which brings us to another reason why would want to modify the DSLR, the 656.28 nanometer wavelength known as H-Alpha. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia "It is difficult for humans to see H-alpha at night, but due to the abundance of hydrogen in space, H-alpha is often the brightest wavelength of visible light in stellar astronomy.” Modifying the camera will allow for more H-Alpha light to be photographed.

I’m not an expert in this but from what I can there seems to be two types of modifications that are popular:

Full Spectrum

A more mild filter (Baader or Astrodon)

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. To sum it up, the Full Spectrum will give you the ultimate control but requires additional filters and know-how. A more mild filter seems easier to use, does not require additional filters, but does not give you the full spectrum.

Looking at the below graph it has been measure that the original Canon filter allows 20% of the HA light through as opposed to the Baader filter which is closer to 95%.

I’ve been reading more and more about this process, and it seems that if you want to do the modification right, you’re better off getting someone else to do it.

After loads of research and lots of searching, I’ve decided to get my T2i modified by Gary Honis (http://dslrmodifications.com/). Gary’s modifications are well respected. 

The T2i has an interesting feature that no other Canon Rebel before (and most after it), it records video at a 640X480 crop mode at 60 frames per second. The Rebel’s following the T2i lowered the frame rate down to 30 fps.

My modification isn’t scheduled to happen for some time, so I’m not trying to get too excited but once I get it back I will definitely take it out for a test drive and let you know how it goes.

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After last Friday’s Full Moon, this week the Moon wanes and jumps eastward to its Last Quarter on Saturday. In the wee hours of Wednesday and Thursday, it leapfrogs across the duo of Mars and Spica. The sight is best enjoyed after midnight or before daybreak, when they are all high in the...

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I found this 1901 print of our solar system and other information for sale at an antique market and picked it up. I grew up in an era when Pluto was considered a planet. I find it neat that this document pre-dates the discovery of Pluto which was 1930.

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I just snapped some pictures of the back of the ioptron SkyTracker with my phone.

So in the back of the tracker we see the battery compartment. 4 AA batteries are required to make the SkyTracker work. There is an option for DC power but that defeats the purpose of buying a portable tracker.

The big switch at the bottom is clearly the power switch. But there are 2 smaller switches that may be unknown to some.

The leftmost switch gives the options of “S” or “N” for the Southern or Northern hemisphere. The switch on the right is an interesting concept. It’s options are 0.5x or 1x. This is to give you the option if you want to track the stars at full speed (1x) or half speed (0.5x). Why would you purposely want to track at half speed you ask? If you were trying to compose an image that involve sky and ground this would allow you to exposure relatively long images without blurring the ground (or the sky). This is one of the neat options that separates this tracker from the Vixen Polarie. Maybe not too useful for diehard Astrophotography enthusiasts, but a neat option nonetheless.

I also tried to capture an image of what the Polar Alignment scope looks like. I find this method much more difficult than what the AstroTrac uses and it can’t be perfected without the use of a purchased App for your smart phone.

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Larger images from the post below.

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Rule of 500, Ioptron SkyTracker and Deep Sky Stacker

To understand why/when you need to use a tracker you need to understand the “Rule of 500”. There’s a rule of thumb in astrophotography that to avoid visible star trails (or elongated stars) you need to keep your shutter speed below 500/focal length. For example, if I were using a 50mm lens then maximum shutter speed before getting star trails is 500/50 which equals 10 seconds.

Of course, this needs to be adjusted if you’re using a crop sensor camera like a Canon Rebel, or the Canon xxD series. Because a 50mm on a crop sensor Canon becomes a 1.6 x 50 = 80mm. And then using the rule of 500 you only get 6 (500/80) seconds. 

A tracker will move/rotate at the same rate of the stars thus eliminating elongation or trails of stars. This will allow you to expose an image longer than the rule of 500 allows.

I was out a couple of nights ago with a full frame Canon 6D and a Canon 70-200 f2.8. Unfortunately is was a weekday and I couldn’t get out of the city into darker skies, but I tried anyway.

This time of year, Orion is the obvious target. It’s easy to find, there’s lots of interest, and to be honest, relatively easy to photograph.

The first image below is a single exposure, straight from camera with no post processing. The details of the image are: 

148 mm

F/3.2

15 seconds

ISO 320

I recognize that this is not an impressive image, but I think it’s important to share the what the entire process looks like not just the final result.

Upon review of the image, I’m super happy with the focus, the stars look pin-sharp. I find this amazing for 2 reasons. One, getting sharp focus on the stars is really challenging. Two, the image is taken at 150mm meaning I should have only been able to expose for 500/150 = 3 seconds before seeing trails, but I exposed for 5 times longer!

I could have zoomed in an extra 50mm to the maximum 200mm focal length, but I chose to take a wider image hoping to find the Horsehead nebula. I think it’s fair to say I failed.

Happy with the image, I took another 12 consecutively with the exact same specs. 

This brings us to Deep Sky Stacker (DSS). For those of you that don’t know DSS is a free Astrophotography image stacking software. Used by amatuers and professionals alike, it is very powerful and very popular. I’ve tried to use DSS in the past, and after hours and hours of stacking and editing I never saw an improvement from a single exposure. Clearly this is a user problem, and my understanding of how these images work is not where it needs to be.

But I figured since I had 13 clean, sharp images maybe this is a good time to try to use DSS again. Without changing any of the default settings I loaded the 13 images and stacked them. Then following the steps from this website: http://flintstonestargazing.com/2009/06/26/my-quick-deepskystacker-tutorial/ 

I was able to produce an image that was a noticeable improvement. Here’s a screen shot from DSS showing the number of images and total exposure time in the top left corner. The vignetting is REALLY bad. I’m not sure what the cause of that is, but it definitely had to do with the post processing steps.

After cropping the image, and a couple of final touches in Photoshop, below is my final result. Considering this is in the heart of Toronto and I was using a 150mm lens I’m very happy.

Coming back to the Ioptron SkyTracker, I’m disappointed that I didn’t take one image with the tracking on and one with it off. But considering I was able to take 15 second exposures with a 150mm lens with a simple alignment (i.e. I did not use the App to polar align - see my other post) and see no trails, I’m happy.