Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Rough-Winged Swallows

I spent an enjoyable morning watching some Rough-Winged Swallows monitoring their nests. 
The highlight was when a Carolina Wren tried to invade their territory. They quickly chased it away!








Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Planets and Moon Align....





On April 14 and 15, the alignment of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were visible in the pre-dawn southeastern sky.
Both mornings, I took a chance on having clear skies and headed out back to try to get some images.
For these images, I used the "Starry Sky" autofocus mode on the Olympus EM1M3 with the Zuiko 14-150mm lens. The Starry Sky mode allows sharp focus of stars for hand-held exposures; almost impossible to achieve with standard focusing. Both images were 3 second exposures; with a double exposure of the moon for corrected brightness.

Using the website Time and Date (Night Sky Map), I was able to see when the best alignment woould occur. I planned my shots based on this.





Image editing included levels and curves in Photoshop, as well as double exposure of the moon. Without stacking a spot metered moon, the moon was very overexposed in the base image. 

The previous morning, I had been able to shoot the linear alignment.