Partial Lunar Eclipse from Sydney, Oz

Before I went to the footy tonight to see Collingwood belt Sydney, sigh, I was able to grab a picture of the moon. This was before the partial lunar eclipse due an hour or so later. I shot this photo through my Galileoscope with my Lumix Lx3. No special tricks or anything. I just pointed the telescope at the moon and raised the camera up to the eyepiece and fired away.
The photo was F/2.8, at 1/200 sec and ISO-80 and taken from Sydney at 5:47PM. I've flipped the photo to correct the inverted image from the telescope. Click the picture to embiggen.

Unfortunately the eclipse coincided with the annual blockbuster between Sydney and Collingwood out at the Olympic stadium. I probably should've stayed home and tried to get some proper shots of the eclipse because Collingwood smashed Sydney. I did manage to see the eclipse during the the quarter time and half time breaks and from the top of the car park after the game. Pity I didn't have my telescope with me. The picture below is about as good as I could get with a digital camera which only has a 65mm zoom. This photo had an aperture of F/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/500 sec and ISO-80 and taken from Sydney Olympic Park at 10:09PM. Click picture to embiggen.

Southern Cross image fixed.

Thanks to another suggestion from Ian at Astroblog I've re-done the photo of the Southern Cross. Instead of just stacking 3 images I've rotated each to match the rotation of the sky in between shots for a far better result.

A couple of shots of the Southern Cross from Beechworth

Before we went to Victoria a couple of weeks ago I'd been reading Ian Musgrave's Astroblog and he'd written a post about using The Gimp for astrophotography. The Gimp, or Gimp 2, is a free open source Photoshop. It does almost everything Photoshop does but it is free. I've been using Gimp for a while - it was my photo editor of choice for use on my little EeePC for our recent trip to Japan. Using a digital camera you can take multiple exposures of the sky and then stack them in Gimp to create a fairly decent astrophotograph. The stars are quite a bit brighter when stacked.

So armed with my trusty Lumix Lx3 and Gorilla Pod mini tripod I spent an hour or so on a freezing Beechworth night snapping the Milky Way.

For the images below I stacked 3 individual photos. Each of the exposure was around 30 to 40 seconds. As you can see there are some star trails around the edges of the photos. The sky rotates fast enough that a 30 or 40 second exposure creates quite a trail. Next time I'll do what Ian suggested and take a few more photos but limit the exposure to about 8 seconds.

But as a first attempt I'm pretty pleased. By the way the main constellation in both photos is the Southern Cross.

Stars - mucking around after midnight

The smoke has cleared and, for Sydney, the sky is brilliantly clear. There are actually stars in the picture. Depends how bright your monitor is I suppose.
8 second exposure at F/2 and ISO-100.

Australian Museum

The Australian Museum is hosting the the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the moment so we took a few minutes out of our not so busy weekend to check it out. Click here for this year's winners at the WPOTY website.
The museum also had what they called My Photo Space as part of the exhibition. You bring your own camera and "take pro shots in this fully equipped interactive studio space". They've got some live insects and spiders for macro shots and a couple of stuffed animals set up to photograph. So I did.
The first photo isn't from the museum. We were lazy and caught a train. That is Michelle sitting on the train.

Lightbox cat

Make a lightbox to take photos of Michelle's latest creations and Copernicus decides it'll make a nice place to plonk himself down in.

Iced coffee

National Geographic Your Shot Daily Dozen

Yay!!! One of Michelle's Antarctic photos has made the National Geographic Magazine's Daily Dozen. Every day a dozen photos are selected from the hundreds (or thousands?) of photos submitted to be displayed on the NGM website. Then each month two are chosen to be printed in the magazine. Michelle's Adelie penguin posing on the ice in front of the Akademik Shokalsky was one of the photos selected for June 3rd. Click on the picture below for the Daily Dozen. For the rest of today (3rd June US time) you can even see a thumbnail of our favourite Adelie Penguin on the National Geographic Magazine homepage.
w00t! Epic Win!

Home made macro photo studio

Thanks Chris for the idea. This is my home made macro photo studio and then a couple of subjects I shot tonight with the mobile... as usual.
I followed the instructions for the box from Strobist. Total cost - zip, nada, zilch, nuffink. I used my video light on one side and just an ordinary bed side lamp for the other.

Michelle photographing baby spiders

Another award winner (look down the page for the Competition 4 winner)? We'll see.