Generally speaking, cold is good for the noise performance. Too cold and you run into mechanical issues and, I guess, frost. Some astrophoto websites might have some rituals for the cold you can search up.
Here’s Orion’s Belt and Sword from a chilly November 2015 overnight shoot- 200 exposures stacked in DeepSkyStacker.
My T3i did fine in the weather, which was not cold at all by Toronto standards. I had the screen turned off to reduce temperature and the viewfinder covered to reduce the light leakage.
Our forecast Sunday night is overcast with a low of 9 degrees (F). Not promising, but I’ll keep an eye out the window and if the clouds break I might dash outside and take some quick snaps. I much prefer lunar eclipses in the summer!
I’m looking forward to seeing the photos everybody else takes. Please post yours.
If anyone’s in the Chicago area, check out the viewing party at Adler Planetarium. Even if the clouds don’t break, you’ll have the Chicago skyline to photograph which is not a bad consolation prize.
I’m in Toronto too, so I am looking at the same challenges. Check the Goog for “cold weather photography”. There are plenty of articles discussing what you need to do to keep your gear working and free of condensation. Here are a couple:
But none of the tips would solve clouds dumping the snow… i̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶u̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶k̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶v̶i̶e̶w̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶t̶o̶g̶r̶a̶p̶h̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶T̶o̶r̶o̶n̶t̶o̶.̶ My weather app is showing the sky clearing Sunday morning in Toronto and staying clear, so maybe we will actually get to witness/capture this one.
Hope so. The forecasts change all of the time in real time. It is hard to tell what will happen. If not us, I am sure that someone is bound to get something marvellous!
We are having slight breaks in the clouds this evening as they have been promising on the news. Chances of a photo have increased. The moon enters the penumbra in just an hour.
Well it’s totally raining now; who’da thunk it. The accuweather minutecast has us wet for the next hour. The radar shows a possible clearing in time for maximality, but we will see… In the meantime: for my fellow meterology nerds, here is last night’s Lunar Halo:
Here in the UK, the moon shone brightly through thin cloud for most of the night. But when the eclipse started, the cloud thickened and the moon hid away. Oh {expletive deleted}. My bed beckons.
I wish I had planned better. I first set up the telescope, but discovered the mirror was out of whack, so I packed it up and got out the camera and tripod. Earlier, I got the Nikon email about how to shoot the eclipse, and they had a link to an exposure summary so I brought that up, but I ended up just doing a lot of random bracketing, all on ISO 400, f8. I did a couple of rapid bracketing sequences from which I might try to stack a few.
Nikon D7000 with my old Nikkor 18-200 lens. If I’d thought it through, I’d have dug out the Raspberry Pi I set up with gphoto and the QDSLR-somethingorother server, and sat inside controlling the camera. And, I’d have also planned out a sequence.
Here’s one more, where I used a log curve to pull up the data, and my new wavelet denoise, yanked from dcraw:
Mine was a 1:1 crop. Camera is a Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 55-200 lens. I set it to 5.6 @ 200mm, and also experimented with iso (800-3200) and shutter speed (1/4 to 1"). I haven’t checked the whole sequence yet. But so far I’m really happy with how it turned out, I didn’t expect that. @ggbutcher your log curve is to transform data from linear space?
Yes. I usually use a straight line curve between the desired black and white points, but this just pulled the dark area into noisy prominence. I have a tone tool with a selection of transfer functions I’ve coded up, the first image is using a log curve similar to what @anon41087856 put into dt filmic. The second image, however, didn’t do as well with it, and I ended up using a Reinhard tonemap and then a rgb curve.
Really, just messing around…
Edit: Actually, I don’t remember which got which treatment. It’s in the exit description…
Astrometry.net has an online tool that shows you which constellations and stars appear in your images(!!!) Here’s the resultant overlay from my 50mm shot:
Looks like thats Cluster M44 “The Beehive” I’ve captured near the bottom!
If not us, I am sure that someone is bound to get something marvellous!
