259,200 Minutes...

Astrophotography: share your photos & discuss techniques
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Apollo XX
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259,200 Minutes...

Unread post by Apollo XX »

...is how long each of these images was exposed - now that's some accurate guiding! :shock: :lol:

I've been intrigued with this thing called Solargraphy for awhile now, and a couple of years ago decided to try it out. Basically it involves drinking beer, building and deploying the cameras, and mucking with a computer in the processing phase. Easy peasy.

I made a display that shows the steps involved in the process. Some of you might have seen it at our May meeting at the Carpenter Museum;

Image

This past winter (yes that miserable period when we experienced record cold and record snowfall) I deployed four cameras around my property. They were up from December 2014 to June 2015. This image shows my little corner of the world. The letters and arrows indicate the locations of the cameras and the directions that the pinholes were facing;

Image

In this first one, the South facing camera, we see my house off in the distance, with the cul-de-sac circle in the foreground. The little scratchy lines down low are from cars traversing the circle at night.

Image

In this image the camera is in the front yard and closer to the house. I'd call this my "standard" location, as I've used it three times thus far;

Image

Moving around to the back of the house, we have my W/NW facing result. I was very surprised at the amount of solar noon captured by this location. The camera has a very wide angle of view - 160*+

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This final image is from the E/SE facing camera. Lots of light trails were captured from the kids comings and goings into and out of their parking spots at the end of the driveway;

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Of course the main subject is the sun's light trails across the sky as the earth revolves around it. The secondary objective is to capture something in the foreground that gives the picture some meaning to the photographer. That has proven to not be as easy as it might seem. I've had some remarkably good results and some not so hot results as well. This batch falls into the not-so-hot relatively speaking. I used a new paper in these cameras and the processing phase was ugly. Drawing out the foreground details required processing steps akin to mashing potatoes with a sledge hammer. Still, the results are a work in progress and it's fun to finally glean new details as the process moves along.

I wonder if others in the club would be interested in deploying solargraph cameras? It might be fun to do as group and compare the results.
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
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WCGucfa
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Re: 259,200 Minutes...

Unread post by WCGucfa »

Mike,

Excellent job on your project!! I've always been facinated by this process.
Thanks for putting in all the work to educate us.

I'm throwing away all my cameras and opening a six-pack!

Bill G.
Comets:40, Best Meteor shwr: Leonids '01, Best Aurora:Oct. '03.
Total.Sol.Eclipse,7/10/72 from Nova Scotia.Annular Sol. Eclipse '94,
Trans.of Venus 2004&2012.,ShoeLevy crash into Jupiter '94.
4/25/66 fireball-9 mag.,SN2011fe,N2012aw,DelphN2013.
Bruce D
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Re: 259,200 Minutes...

Unread post by Bruce D »

I like the color one, looks like some kind of art-deco office building was put up in your back yard
Bruce D
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Apollo XX
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Re: 259,200 Minutes...

Unread post by Apollo XX »

Thanks guys. Bruce, even though B&W paper is used as the collecting medium, the standard processing steps usually result in a color image like the third one in this post. With the particular paper I used this time however I struggled to extract details with the "standard" process, and found that desaturation helped on some of them. I've since refined the process with some new steps and got some very interesting and colorful results. I hope to print them and have them at the next meeting.
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
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