Astrophotography at Bortle 5

Casual Observation Series:  Taking Photos of the Moon with your phone So where to start your astrophotography journey in the night sky?  How about just starting using your mobile phone to take some shots of the moon?   My fellow astrophotographer and friend Aaron Chick captured the above photo of the moon using a Samsung phone.  You can follow him on Instagram here:  https://tinyurl.com/4mjn5tcw Trying your hand at new hobbies can be challenging.   When introducing our daughter to swimming, we certainly didn't start at the deep end!  Our town's public pool is perfectly designed for beginners.  It features a pool-wide slope from level ground that slowly gets deeper over half the length of the pool.   Ideal for babies, tots, and newbies to enjoy the water with little risk.  If you had some disappointing lunar photos in the past - its okay!  Let's see if we can improve on those skills.    Every mobile phone is different.   Camera quality.  Camera settings.   The age of the pho

Spring for astrophotographers is galaxy season.   However, this spring season has brought lots of rain and storms at my home as of late.    So until I can get a clear night at home, I'd like to revisit my photo of Comet Neowise in 2020.   I used my old Canon DSLR Camera and placed it on a tripod along side a side road on a dark night.   It seem like it took forever for me to locate the comet in the sky.   But I found it and snapped up a few pictures featured below. There are rules for setting exposures to avoid star trails on cameras.   Sky and Telescope features a great article on this topic:  Sky and Telescope .    Astrophotographer Trevor Jones at Astrobackyard has an in-depth article on taking pictures of the stars at night at well found here:  Astrobackyard Comet Neowise 2020 Comet Neowise is a long-period comet that was discovered in 2020 by astronomers using the NASA NEOWISE program.    Learn more about the wildly successful NASA mission below. Neowise Project Comets are mos

Sometimes you just can't get a break in the cloudy and stormy nights when you are finally home from your travels.   So I decided to try to get a night time-lapse of a thunderstorm using our GoPro Hero 9.    I was hoping for some dramatic lightning and clouds.   Turned out to be just a bunch of flashes of lightning in the distance.   But it was cool to see streaks of light in the sky and road from passing jets and cars.     Check it out below on my YouTube channel! Until next time, clear skies! What is your favorite season of the year and why?  Share below!  Enjoy learning more about Astronomy and Astrophotography?   Come explore with me with my newsletters and YouTube channel. For my Astrophotography at Bortle 5 website, visit https://astrophotography-at-bortle-5-omsmyt.mailerpage.io/ Visit my YouTube channel for more astrophotography https://www.youtube.com/@astrobortle5 For the latest Blogger updates, subscribe to my Newsletter https://tinyurl.com/2arry74k

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in orbit for over 25 years!    The astronauts that orbit our planet have been doing incredible science that impacts our lives.    Medical studies, robotics, climate monitoring, and science education.   To learn more, check out what is going on in the ISS on NASA's website. NASA International Space Station Meanwhile here on Earth, our daughter has here own Space Station in her room.    Last night, our little Astronaut slept in orbit.    Was she dreaming of the stars?    A few nights ago, I made my f irst attempt at getting some star trails using my GoPro Hero 9 camera.   I hooked it up on the backyard fence and it snapped 240 pictures in two hours.   I later found out that my laptop computer can't handle that many pictures at once.   Oh well!  The photo below is composed of 50 pictures combined, which is about 25 minutes of elapsed time.     When did you first learn about the stars and planets as

Jupiter (October 2022) through my Meade 80mm Refractor Telescope You've seen the pictures.   Larger-than-life lunar craters that make you feel like one of the Apollo astronauts in orbit around our moon.  Eye-popping images of nebulas, the nurseries of star formation.   But is that what I can expect to see in a telescope eyepiece lens? The answer is maybe.    Before you even setup a telescope, what kind of night sky will you have?  Clouds are the bane to every night gazer.  Light pollution is a factor at your star gazing location (see my story on Bortle).  The darker the sky location, the better.  Most rural locations are ideal.   Higher elevations are better.  Okay, my viewing conditions are good to set up my telescope!  Now can I see everything?   If you are using a telescope to make direct observations through an eyepiece, what you see (given a sturdy mount tracking your target) will depend upon the telescope and your eyepiece lens.   There are beginner, intermediate, and profess

I am excited to share my love for the night sky with my daughter.   She loves to help her Papa set up the "telescope".     We are already learning about the planets in our solar system through the "Planet Song" on YouTube =>    https://youtu.be/mQrlgH97v94 Last night was supposed to be a "bad seeing" conditions night.   Out of three hours of capturing light from the M51a Whirlpool Galaxy, I got at least two hours of great light frames (3 minutes exposure each).   According to NASA, the Whirlpool Galaxy was "discovered by Charles Messier in 1773.  M51 is located 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici".   The Whirlpool galaxy is estimated to be about 88% the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, with it's mass estimated to be 160 billion solar masses.    On one of it's outer arms, is another galaxy named NGC 5195.   They are interacting with each other. I got to also capture some videos of the Moon that I stack

So what in the world is "Bortle 5" in your title exactly mean?   An American amateur astronomer by the name of  John E. Bortle created this useful scale of the quality (brightness) of the night sky.  His work was published in  the February  2001 edition of "Sky and Telescope." The nine-point scale goes something like this:  Bortle 1 :  Excellent Dark Sky Site,  Bortle 2:  Truly a dark sky site ,  Bortle 3:  Rural Sky Site,  Bortle 4: Bright rural sky,   Bortle 5:  Suburban sky,  Bortle 6: Bright Suburban sky,  Bortle 7: Suburban / Urban transition,  Bortle 8: City Sky,  Bortle 9 : Inner City Sky What makes the sky more light-polluted are the amount of lights in the area, such as streetlights, floodlights, security lights, advertising, and building lights.    Light pollution hides the beauty of the Milky Way from 80% of Americans.   I am fortunate to live in Bortle 5 skies outside of Atlanta.  However with more growth and development in our area, the light-pollution