I've been getting into astrophotography!

and I'm posting about it here because it will feature heavily in my Mars Trilogy video, but also just because I'm excited to show you some stuff I've been working on lately :)

My disclaimer is that my camera is far from cutting edge. It shoots in 1080p which is good enough for YouTube videos so I haven't seen the need to try and upgrade. It actually took me getting into photographing the night sky to finally learn what half the settings even do. I didn't know what ISO was. Above is a picture containing the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, Jupiter and Mars, without a telescope from a place with very low light pollution (see my Red Planet ZAD doc post for more details) as a sort of best-case example of taking pictures of the night sky with just my camera. This is a place where the Milky Way was very faintly visible to the naked eye

Since space has been a passion of mine for absolutely forever, and my girlfriend is really into it too, and I'm now working on a video about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, we decided to get a telescope (6" aperture) to do some astrophotography together! Right away it was incredible being able to see Jupiter's galilean moons, and after not long I was even able to set up the camera so that jupiter's bands were faintly visible as it moved across the frame. I think patreon's compression will do bad things to this already very shaky and faint gif, but to me this moment was absolutely thrilling!

(the reason the planet moves across the frame, as with the moon in the video at the top, is the Earth's rotation. you are seeing the movement of the Earth in real time)

This was extremely exciting to me, so we started making expeditions to the nearest big park with friends to do more astrophotography and soon lunar photography as well! I got a (very distant) picture of Mars, I made a composite picture to put Jupiter's bands and moons in the same shot, and I got a fuzzy picture of the crescent phase of Venus. On the left are my best pictures so far, and on the right are pictures from wikipedia

It will take trips to darker sites with the telescopes and probably some intense long sessions of exposure stacking and compositing lots of pictures together to get better pictures of the planets, which I'm looking forward to but will probably mean it's a little while away. One of my ongoing projects with my current setup however is to put together a little map of the orion nebula. Seeing a star glow through the telescope is a stunning moment. Getting the exposure settings right so it glows even more in the photo is absolutely breathtaking

The lunar photography has become my biggest ongoing project though, as I realised that the naked receiver on my camera held up to the eyepiece barrel of my telescope with no magnification can take a decent single photo of the moon in one go, but with magnification I can composite together much much higher detail images.

Here above is an example of the single shot and below is a composite from the same night for comparison

I've been collecting my own pictures of phases of the moon, and though I was able to get the full moon this month, I wasn't able to get a picture of the lunar eclipse (blood moon) which happened on the morning of the 14th myself because of the weather conditions in London, though it was still a fun adventure trying to get it.

 My plan is to put together my own pictures (and possibly one of someone else's for the blood moon if I have to, because I want a blood moon next to the full moon picture) into a big composite to print and frame in my house. My gf and I are going to use the different phase composites to generate a height map image for the centre as well, because as the shadow moves across the moon its craters are partially illuminated showing their depth

 These are all the phases I have so far (interrupted by weahter and the ZAD trip) and when it's done I'll probably make it available somewhere online including on here if anyone is interested. For the centre image I'm considering retaking some of my pictures with the moon filter which increases sharp contrast (and is also why the moon is blue at the top)

Anyway, that's been my astrophotography adventures so far! If you want to see regular updates as I share them, they'll be on my instagram story and my bluesky, and occasionally my tumblr, all found via my linktree! Some of this will all obviously also be in the Mars video, but some astronomical developments (my first meteor shower with the telescope and the return to visibility of Saturn's rings!) will only happen later in the year after the video is finished, so stay tuned for those as well!

As the sun moves across the celestial equator and we transition from Winter to Spring, let me leave you all with my favourite picture that I've taken so far of the sun, with three pairs of sun spots on her surface

In love and solidarity,
Sophie