What a night!

Unbeliveable show of auroras happened on St. Patric's Day 17. - 18.3. I was absolutely blow away by the bright corona dancing overhead for 8 hours! I let the auroras speak for themselves through these images, enjoy!

Corona and rocks

Northern horizon

Believe it or not this is a view to the southern sky! :O

Corona

Purple auroras

Solar eclipse

Miracles apparently happen, since weather forecast was awfully cloudy just couple days ago. We still had clear skies for the whole eclipse but clouds rolled in just 15 minutes past the eclipse. What a timing!
This was my first time seeing one live, and it was truly magnificent sight to withness. You could see lunar mountain silhouettes along with the sunspot AR 2303.

Unfortunately seeing wasnt good enough to take closeups of the lunar mountains, but atleast I saw them briefly with my telescope. These are stacks of 50 images to compensate turbulence in atmosphere. Cant wait to see solar eclipse again someday!

Partial solar eclipse 20.3.2015, you can see the sunspot AR2303 on the left.

This is as close as we got to totality from Kuopio, Finland. Only place in the world to see 100% totality is Svalbard and Faroe Islands.

Sun, sunglasses and the shadow of the moon.

Bring out the big guns

Hi ho hello, finally I found a suitable scope for my use. 200/1200mm f/6 Newtonian reflector made by Orion UK. Havent had a chance to test it out yet because of the weather, I am also gonna do some modifications to the platform. Planning to put some large screws on the bottom of the plate so I could use it on uneven ground aswell. Also I need to shed weight from the platform (45 kg of solid steel!), I am probably gonna cut off pieces to make it more X-shaped.

Cant wait for clear skies! I am also gonna buy some eyepieces for planetary / deep sky observing. :)

Behold the rusty mightiness!

Comet and stuff

Horray! First clear night for ages, decided to go for Comet Lovejoy. After a bit of searching with binoculars I found it  near Pleiades star cluster. Chilly - 25C here in Finland, thankfully there was a fireplace near by so I could go warm up between the shots.
Alignment turned out great aswell, although I am a total novice in it because I dont have my own tracking mount. My friend came with me and he has Astrotrac. By pure luck I managed to get it aligned fairly well. 6 minutes without trailing at 50mm, so I stacked 8 of them to gather more light.

On the left side of the comet, you can see Pleiades star cluster, in the middle the is extremely faint reflection nebula complex, called Perseus molecular cloud. The red emission nebula above it is California nebula.

8x6min | f/2.0 | ISO 200 with Canon 6D and Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2

Clouds, clouds and more clouds

Argh, its been almost 3 months with 100% cloud cover here in Finland. Luckily we had a break in weather last night and I quickly planned another moon shot with TPE.
This one didnt go as planned, I tried to get the moon directly behind the tower of Puijo (Fantastic viewpoint located in Kuopio). However I estimated the position of the moon bit off, I still quite like it.

Moon and Puijo
(5 EV HDR)

Moonrise over the city streets

Moon is one of the most photographed celestial objects, 99% of the shots are moon in black background. It gets kinda boring after a while, what Ive done is trying to get something else for scale and to keep things intresting.

Using a software called The Photographers Ephemeris I calculated the direction of moonrise. Luckily there is plenty of long streets in my hometown that go from east to west. This software is very easy to use (Google Maps style interface) and also extremely useful for photographers looking for that perfect sun- or moonrise shot.

Moonrise over the city streets

First piece of the puzzle

Couple weeks ago I was searching internet for new subjects to photograph in the night sky. Ive tried to find one are that has alot of large nebulas in tight group for a panorama. I ended up with constellation of Auriga. Last night the clouds cleared for couple of hours so I managed to get some data to play with. It isnt as good as I would like it to be, because my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 suffers from missaligned elements and stars on the left side are out of focus. I probably have to shoot this again with 105mm macro wich has terrific image quality from corner to corner compared to 120-300.

The downside is that with such a short focal lenght there is not of pixels for zooming in the good thing is that I can get consistently 2minutes with 300mm lens. With 105mm it would be 6 minute subs and no tracking errors if everything is normal!
I would like to complete this with my 300mm but just isnt an option until I get it repaired, if its even repairable... :(
Anyways, here is first try. I probably need around 8 images with 105mm macro to complete my panorama. Might add this are as a separate image to it aswell.

Largest and brightest red nebula on the upper right is IC405, below that is IC410 on the far left surrounded by IC417 is star cluster M38. With just one hour of data I am suprised how well the extremely faint dark nebulas appeared on the upper right corner.