• Astrovlography Vlogs

    Below are links to the astrophotography videos we've created since building the telescope pier in 2020. I can't promise that new videos will appear on a set schedule, but rest assured that as soon as I finish any new project you'll find it at the top of the list on this page.

  • all_night_aurora

    October 7, 2024 -- We don't often see the aurora borealis in Wisconsin, but this year has been an exception. In May there were a few nights when the Northern Lights came out and really put on a show.

    In this video, taken overnight from October 7 to 8, the lights are out all night long.

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    The prediction was for the big night to be on October 6th, so I set up my camera to take photos all night. We did see Northern lights, but it was mostly a red glow low in the sky. I got a few nice pictures and plan to use the other frames (1500 of them!) for a star trails photo. I was working on the star trails project in the evening of the 7th when Debbie informed me that people were posting photos of the Northern lights again. So... grab the camera and set up for night two! This time I started earlier and ran longer, taking 2200 images in the course of the night.

    I changed my camera settings to 8-seconds, ISO 3200, f/4.0. The high ISO is a little noisier, but I like a shorter exposure to get "wave" detail in the aurora. Longer exposures tend to smooth the movement too much.

    For the time-lapse video, I wanted to emphasize the all-night aspect, so I worked out a way to add a timestamp watermark over the main movie. It wasn't easy, so I hope you appreciate it!

  • revisiting_orion

    February 18, 2022 -- Join me on my first night out with a hydrogen alpha filter in my camera. Spoiler alert: it didn't go so well. But despite the problems, it was still nice to work on a familiar target: Orion. Orion and Messier 42 are a favorite for me and many others so I'm not surprised to find it in many of the photos I've taken over the years. While looking back at these Orion photos I find lots of other images that were &dlquo;firsts&drquo; for me, and it reminded me that with practice comes improvement.

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    I was recently invited to talk to a group of middle-school students who are just starting out in photography. The teacher who extended the invitation wanted me to show some of the astrophotography work I've been doing. Although I was happy to accept, I didn't want to just show a bunch photos taken with equipment and techniques that are a good step beyond basic photography. I ended up preparing a set of slides that show my progression in astrophotography -- from blurry hand-held shots to fun Milky Way and star trail photos to more recent telescope images. This progression was on my mind when I got my latest astro-gadget in the mail: a new Hydrogen-alpha filter.

    My excitment to try something new changed to frustration and a bit of disappointment when my first attempt using the new filter didn't go so well. But that's what learning new things is all about, right? So that idea became the point of this video: When new things don't do so well it's worth some time to look back at where you started and realize how far you've come. Then go at it again with a little more experience and a lot more confidence that some day this will seem easy too.

  • eclipse11-2021

    November 19,2021 -- A cold but clear morning for the longest eclipse of the century. After considering a few ways to photograph the event I decided to attempt a time lapse. I wrote a script that used gPhoto2 (http://gphoto.org/) to take photos at different exposure times to try to match the changing brightness of the moon over the course of the eclipse. In the end my settings and timing were a little off so a few of the frames are partially over exposed. But it was fun, and good practice for the next eclipse!

    If you are interested, here is my script. You can see that I more or less guessed how long the camera took to process the image and used that guess to adjust the wait time between exposures. In practice this wasn't as accurate as I had hoped and the camera was still taking photos 30 minutes past the time I had planned on.

    #!/bin/bash
#
# Average capture time is 6 seconds
#
# Shutterspeeds are 19 (1/60) through 31 (1/4) # eh... probably too long.
# Shutterspeeds are 7 (1/1000) through 25 (1/15)
#

PARAMS="--set-config imagequality=6 --set-config capturetarget=1 --capture-image"

# Total delay between shots should be 24 seconds (24 seconds * 900 frames = 6 hours)
# Since the camera takes about 6 seconds per image, the SLEEP delay should be 18 seconds

# In practice, start 2.875 hours before peak which is 2021-11-19 00:09:30


DELAY=18

echo "$(date) : Starting eclipse run!" > eclipse_run.log

# Lead-in loop 

for SSPEED in {7..24} 	# 1/1000 - 1/15 sec
do
	for I in {1..24}
	do
		echo "$(date) : Exposure $I of 24 at shutterspeed $SSPEED" >> eclipse_run.log		
		/usr/bin/gphoto2 --set-config shutterspeed=${SSPEED} ${PARAMS}
		sleep ${DELAY}
	done
done

# mid-eclipse loop 
# 1/15 of a second

SSPEED=25
for I in {1..36}
do
	echo "$(date) : Exposure $I of 36 at shutterspeed $SSPEED" >> eclipse_run.log		
	/usr/bin/gphoto2 --set-config shutterspeed=${SSPEED} ${PARAMS}
	sleep ${DELAY}
done

# Lead-out loop

for SSPEED in {24..7}
do
	for I in {1..24}
	do
		echo "$(date) : Exposure $I of 24 at shutterspeed $SSPEED" >> eclipse_run.log
		/usr/bin/gphoto2 --set-config shutterspeed=${SSPEED} ${PARAMS}
		sleep ${DELAY}
	done
done

echo "$(date) : Ending eclipse run" >> eclipse_run.log

# Done
exit 0

  • moonrise

    September 18, 2021 -- This short video shows the almost full moon rising at the end of the day and becoming brighter as the surrounding sky gets darker. The original video was 30 minutes long but I sped it up so you see it all in 3 minutes.

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    This video is more of an experiment than a film. I like the idea of using my SkyGuider Pro to track more than just deep space objects. I have a few disconnected ideas for a new video project but they haven't come together yet. For now, please enjoy the simplicity of “moonrise”.

  • A Full Night of Astrophotography

    March 19, 2021 -- After a very cloudy winter in general we finally had a good clear night, so once again I gathered up my gear and set up for some astrophotography. I wanted to show my whole process from planning to pictures and that means this video is a bit long. My hope is that the extra time spent explaining the all steps will give an idea of what is involved in photographing deep sky objects with entry-level equipment.

    Someday I'd like to get a better mount, better telescope, and use a guiding system and all that, but for right now I want to get the most from the equipment I can afford right now. I don't think I'm alone in that. If you're with me then this video might help you out, or maybe you'll see something I'm doing wrong and help me out. I welcome comments and questions, but if your only advice is for me to get a better mount then please send me one!

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    Naturally, there was a lot of filmed dialog that needed to be cut from the final video. Some of those cuts may make it difficult to follow my train of thought. If you watch and have questions, please let me know in the YouTube comments, or Facebook, or even email. I tend to go over things that I found difficult at first, so if i gloss over something that you would like me to cover more in depth let me know.

    Another thing suspiciously missing is a discussion on processing the images. There's a good reason for that: it takes me longer to process my images than it does to take them, so if I were to cover that I'd do it in a separate video. And while I don't say I'll never do that, for now I highly recommend Adam Block Studios for a thorough yet understandable series of tutorials on PixInsight, which is, in my opinion as a programmer, one of the best pieces of software ever written. It's not fancy looking, and it's not “automatic”, but it is exceptionally powerful. It lets you do just about anything -- even make mistakes -- while not doing anything you don't tell it to do. That's perfection in software as far as I'm concerned.

    Other tidbits of trivia... The video starts with two Whooping Cranes that I saw earlier in the day. Baraboo Wisconsin is home to the International Crane Foundation but these particular birds are wild. There are three of them that spend their summers in the fields near our house, and on this day they happened to be walking close enough to the road to get a decent shot with my cell phone. Then there's Scooby, our sheep. Scooby is always half curious of what we're doing and half terrified by us, but he's fun to have around.

    One sad note: Our dog Gracie appeared in my two earlier videos and in all of the Stellarium landscapes that I made. Gracie is no longer with us. I like to think she's running across the sky with Canis Major and Canis Minor. She'll become “Canis Alacris” maybe. In any case, we miss her like crazy. This one's for you, Gracie.

  • Setting up for Astrophotography

    November 7, 2020 -- Often I am asked “How did you get this picture?” when I show someone one of my astronomy photos. I decided to make another video to answer that question. My aim was not to produce a how-to video, but rather just show, to a mildly interested person, some of what is involved. What you see is the way I do astrophotography now. It's not necessarily the proper way and certainly not the only way.

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    My son Kip filmed the setup process of dragging camera equipment to the pier, assembling the parts, focusing, and polar aligning. Then, while I was photographing the night sky, Kip assembled his clips into this amazing video. Our only regret is that we need a lapel microphone that will reduce the wind noise. Always something! But I am extremely happy with the result and hope you enjoy this next chapter of my journey in astrophotography.

  • Building a Concrete Pier for Astrophotography

    May 9, 2020 -- Spent the day building a new concrete pier on our hill. The solid mount will hold my camera steady enough to take photos of deep sky objects, and since the mount is permanent, I won't have to go through the tedious process of polar alignment every time I want to do astrophotography.

    This video gives a good idea of what the project involved but it's not exactly a how-to video.

    The royalty free music used in this video is from www.fesliyanstudios.com

    The inside scoop...

    I really don't know why I decided to film the construction. I didn't plan to from the start. I did do quite a bit of research on how to build a telescope pier and based most of my ideas from a paper titled Pier Design Fundamentals by Dennis Persyk. I decided on an 8-inch diameter concrete pier and then ran my ideas past a structural engineer I worked with for advice on how far in to the ground to go to avoid frost problems. I used on-line calculators to figure out how much concrete I needed. After that, I just worked out the rest on my own.

    I guess I set up the camera so that I could show friends how I did it. Or maybe I had watched too many landscape photography vlogs and thought I would give it a try. Maybe I was just looking for things to do during COVID-19 lockdown. But for whatever reason, I took out the camera and starting filming the work. Eventually Kip got involved with the project too, and from then on we've done the videos as a team. I hope you like them, but I doubt you'll enjoy them as much as I've enjoyed working on these father-and-son projects with Kip.