On March 20, 2010 the Moon occulted Pleiades (with only occurs once every 13 years) and I took a few images while throwing a star party at my house. This was a multiple exposure image combined into an HDR astrophoto taken with my Nikon D40 which shows the occultation from my yard in San Antonio, TX. The link above will show you the front page of Spaceweather for March 21, 2010.
Addition: NASA also selected this photo for Friday, March 26, 2010's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) .... I am very excited about this!!!, Here is the link: NASA APOD
Here is the full image:
This is lovely! I made a photo of this scene the other day, too, but I didn't do an HDR version of it, and now I'm sorry!
ReplyDeleteWhat 'scope were you using?
Ted, I used the Orion EON80ED for it. I wish I would have thrown my field flattener on the Nikon but it was ridiculously cloudy that night so I was hurrying to get some shots in the holes of the clouds.
ReplyDeleteYour picture is absolutely outstanding and beautiful. Can you provide some technical details as to the subs you used to produce this HDR image.
ReplyDeleteWonderful HDR work Anna. Congrats on the APOD presentation. What did you use to make the diffraction spikes? They certainly aren't natural coming from a refractor - wire in front of the objective or PS?
ReplyDeleteChuck - Subs I used were 3 seconds, 1.6 seconds, 1/1.6, 1/10, 1/25, 1/60 and then after processing the HDR with those I added a few layers of the 1/320 sub to bring more detail back into the crescent. All ISO 400.
ReplyDeleteDavid - I used my action set (Annie's Astro Actions) .... its linked over on the right. I just added a star-spike action to it and used that.