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Posted in Space, astrophotography on May 17th, 2010
I managed to get out on Friday night and take a shot at imaging the ISS again as it flew close (within 100 miles) to my town of Marlborough, Connecticut. Right on time it appeared in the Northwest as a dim reddish star. Getting brighter by the second the ISS brightened to a magnitude of [...]
Posted in Science, Space, astrophotography on Apr 26th, 2010
Good timing, great weather, and luck permitted me not only to see STS-131 land at Kennedy Space Center, but to see an Air Force “Top Secret” rocket launch on April 22nd.
A unmanned reusable spaceplane was launched into orbit aboard an 196 foot tall Atlas 5 rocket at 7:52pm under perfect launch conditions.
Built by Boeing Phantom [...]
Posted in Space, astrophotography on Apr 21st, 2010
Here some pictures that I took of STS-131 landing at Kennedy Space Center yesterday.
It was taken from Space Park in Titusville, Florida. Space Park is directly across from the runway where the shuttle lands.
This shot was the best one out of about 30 images that I captured as the shuttle landed. Taken from seven miles away [...]
Posted in Space, astrophotography on Apr 20th, 2010
Hello All!
I am writing this quick posting from Titusville, Fl. A little detour today from vacation plans put me within seven miles of STS-131 landing this morning at 9:08am. This images are still in the camera and I plan on getting them up ASAP. If not tonight, tomorrow for sure! It was quite a site [...]
Posted in Space, astrophotography on Apr 5th, 2010
Tonight was my last attempt to get a shot of Venus and Mercury together.
I had tried for several nights but the weather did not cooperate with me. It looked pretty good tonight so I thought I would give it one last chance.
As in previous nights it was cloudy at my observing location. Tonight was no [...]
Posted in Space on Mar 6th, 2010
Several weeks ago I successfully shot video of the International Space Station as it passed to the southwest of Connecticut. Tonight the ISS was going right over my house in Marlborough at 6:08 PM. I decided to try to make a still photograph of it with my NIkon camera. Passing over at a -3.5 magnitude it [...]
A friend in Washington D.C. mailed me a stack of photos of the early days of space exploration in the United States. They are very interesting to see how we looked at space in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I will start off this “Space retrospective” series that I will post here intermittently, with two photographs of “Sidewalk Astronomers” [...]
Posted in Astronomy, Space, astrophotography on Feb 22nd, 2010
The conditions were just about perfect this morning to try capturing the ISS in video mode on the Nikon D300s.
I set up in one of my dark sky locations in Marlborough, Ct. that had a good WSW view of where the ISS was going to appear at 6:07 am. The sky was starting to brighten [...]
Posted in Astronomy, Science, Space, astrophotography on Nov 25th, 2009
You get this first if it’s kind from NASA. It is an image the Crab Nebula with combined information from the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, Hubble, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. This very deep image shows that the Crab Nebula is producing energy equal to 100,000 suns. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Posted in Astronomy, Space, astrophotography on Nov 22nd, 2009
At work we got a few Nikon D300s cameras in this past week, and I thought I would take one out for a test ride. An astrophotography test ride.
On the “normal” photography side this camera is unique in it can shoot video and still images in the same body with interchangable lenses. That’s a HUGE [...]
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