A selfie of me looking up at the total eclipse of the Moon on January 20, 2019, using just the naked eye to enjoy the view. The Moon was in Cancer, near the Beehive star cluster and east of the winter Milky Way here at centre. Sirius is the bright star above me; Orion is at right. The object to the left of the Moon is the Beehive star cluster, Messier 44, in Cancer. I shot this from an oil well access road south of Lloydminster, just over the Alberta-Saskatchewan boundary on the Saskatchewan side, just east of Highway 17 which runs along the border. This is a single untracked exposure of 25 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 1600 with the Nikon D750 and Sigma 20mm Art lens, but with a shorter exposure of 1 second blended in for the Moon itself so it retains its color and appearance to the naked eye. Your eye can see the eclipsed Moon and Milky Way well but the camera cannot in a single exposure. The scene, taken just after the start of totality, just fit into the field of the 20mm lens. A little later in the night it did not. The temperature was about -15° C this night but with little or no wind and little frost to contend with.
One Canadian on Earth gazing skyward at another Canadian in space! Here I am looking skyward at the passage of the International Space Station, with Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques newly on board, having arrived with his fellow Expedition 58 crew members the day before on a Soyuz rocket. The ISS here appears in a set of time exposures as a streak across the sky, with the streak broken as it went in and out of clouds and with gaps from the one second interval between exposures. That gap also adds the mottled or herringbone effect to the moving clouds. The stars (and Mars to the south) are all slightly trailed as well. The timing of this passage early in the evening meant that the entire pass of the ISS was visible and illuminated by sunlight. The ISS was still in daylight. Any later and the ISS would have faded out at some point along its path as it entered Earth’s shadow and went into night. This view is looking south but the ISS passed just north of overhead. West is to the right, so the ISS passed from right to left in this scene and is flying away at left. This is a stack of twenty 10-second exposures at 1-second intervals, with the Sigma 8mm fish-eye lens at f/3.5 and Canon 6D Mark II at ISO 800, taken on a pass beginning at 5:35 p.m. MST on December 4, 2018. Stacked in Photoshop with Maximum stack mode, with a final shot with me in frame layered and masked in. Taken from home in southern Alberta.
A session shooting deep-sky objects in the rural backyard in Alberta, on a chilly November night, November 8, 2018. I was using the Celestron 8 HD tube assembly on the Astro-Physics Mach One mount, and was shooting Messier 27 with the Canon 6 D MkII. I shot this image with the Sony a7III and Venus Optics 15mm lens at f/2 focused on the foreground.
