Some pictures of planets...

As is usual after a heavy storm, the skies were crystal clear last night. In a 4am-induced flash of brilliance, I decided it would be a good idea to get the tripod and camera out and take some photos of the sky.


Not this kind of tripod.

Here's the thing. Taking awesome pictures of the sky is really easy. You don't need a telescope, you don't need millions of local monetary units in camera gear, and you don't need a lot of skill. The stars do most of the work by being so unbelievably cool.


My baby.

I use the Canon 400D (known as the Kiss Digital X here in Japan), and I only have the stock lenses that come with the kit. I can zoom out pretty far, and zoom in pretty far, and since that's the extent of my knowledge on how cameras work, I'm good.

(For the geeks, I'm using the stock EF-S 18-55mm and the EF 55-200mm kit lenses. After crop factor is taken into account I can cover from about 29mm to 320mm.)

Some of these pictures are a bit fuzzy - the exposures were long, and it was 4 in the morning - and you'll see some streaking in the stars as they move across the sky, but since seeing the stars move is also cool, I like the streaks.

Venus (big bright one below the TV aerial) and Saturn (directly above the aerial) rising over the neighbour's house. I think the bright star above Saturn is Arcturus. Or maybe the bright star over Arcturus is Saturn. I'm not exactly sure. I don't even know what an Arcturus is.


Here's a slightly fuzzy Orion, my favourite constellation because it's appearance marks the return of winter. Every year I look forward to it coming back, because it is invariably accompanied by the smell of snow on the air. There's never any actual snow, just the smell. It's probably psychological.




Here's a closer shot of Orion that suffers a bit from streaking due to the 25 second exposure. If you click on the picture and zoom in on the middle of Orion's sword, you can just barely make out a brightening that seems to be the Orion Nebula. Or I bumped the camera.



Looks pretty lonely, doesn't it?



This last one's a bit off-centre, but it's my favourite.



If you get the chance, crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and see what you can do. You will need a tripod, a camera with an adjustable shutter speed, and a forgiving spouse or parents, but with those anyone can take some really awesome pictures of the night sky.

(If you want to see the nebula, visit the NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site and do a search for Orion Nebula. You can also download full-size JPGs of these pictures (2.5Mb-3888 X 2592) from my flickr account.)