Happy New Year’s everyone!
Last night my nephew and I were looking at the stars and I pointed him to the Orion Nebula (using my dad’s high powered binoculars you can see astonishing amounts of detail) and I thought I could try and take a picture. So I grabbed my tripod and camera with the 70-200mm 2.8 lens and quickly took a picture. It’s potato quality but you can still see some details:
Also a picture of Burg Linn in Krefeld:
You must be kidding!? That’s a great picture of one of my favourite deep sky targets!
I guess it’s pretty good for a single exposure taken at 200mm, f/2.8, 2s, ISO 6400 but you could do a lot better if you stacked a bunch of images taken at something like f/4, 1s, ISO1600 (the EF70-200mm f2.8L IS II USM isn’t very sharp at infinity if you shoot it wide open) and used a filter for the light pollution, not to mention what you could do if you stacked multiple, tracked long exposures. If you look closely you can see the stars already start to trail in my picture and it’s pretty noisy.
Another one of Burg Linn:
I was back at work today and on my way home I took this picture of the bridge across the Rhine in Wesel during blue hour:
I stacked the 10 best images I took of the Orion Nebula, pretty cool result, even without any darkframes:
“A big airplane!”
Waiting to board our ride back to Auckland, sadly. Central Otago is a beautiful place!
Which stacker software do you use?
Deep Sky Stacker. Seems to work really well considering the pictures aren’t very good. I’m honestly amazed with the result.
Visited Münster yesterday - it’s a beautiful town
Traditional Brewery with a bar and restaurant - the food was great and the beer even better!
Some intentional camera movement with this photo. Nothing says Münster like a cyclist. It’s a town that was one of the first in Germany to push for better cycling infrastructure and it shows. There are more cyclists than cars.
One of the many Churches in the old part of the town
CAVETE - one of the many bars in that part of town. This one also calls itself the “Akademische Bieranstalt” (academic beer institution)
More pictures to follow in the next days 
Actually December 2019… Sunrise over the Pacific (somewhere near Samoa IIRC)… Some British guy sat over in the left seat.
Ah…4AM pager…dropping into Wilmington this morning with the sun starting to lighten the sky out over the Atlantic…
I was there in…1996…! Oh my… That’s half my life ago 
Why does it feel like yesterday?
Because you are old.
Time accelerates when you get older.
My late Father-in-law once told me that life is kind of like an hour glass. To start with the sands seem to take forever to flow, but at the end the opposite is true.
In the words of Jeremy Clarkson…
(When you are 5 a year is a fifth of your life…and that’s a long time!)
At home last night ( for a few hours at least), testing my new iPhone 11 Pro. The camera has a night mode, which stacks a burst of short exposure images, just like we do with Astro-imaging. Pretty neat.
Orion
Leo
Not bad for a phone!
