Milky Way from Karpata

 We had a couple of pretty clear starry nights this past week. I took a bunch of photos, and will post some as I process them over the next week or two. 

Here is one taken from where the snack shop at Karpata used to be.

 

Moon, Mars and Venus

Venus and Mars were close together tonight, about the one Moon diameter apart. Mars was pretty impossible to see with the naked eye, but easy in binoculars. Here is a picture of the moon and of Mars and Venus. Both pix are full frame and the same scale. They are pretty dark, but if i make them any brighter, Mars loses its color and the craters on the moon disappear.  Looks like you'll need to view them full size in order to see Mars.

 

Stars are still good.

 

The night sky has been quite nice the last few evenings. We did some Summer Milky Way gazing on Monday. While I was waiting for others to arrive, i snapped off six ten second exposures of the Southern Cross setting behind some of the slave huts. I then combined them with StarryLandscapeStacker.

If it is clear again tonight, I'm planning to try to go deep on the Rho Ophiuchus region and see if i can improve on an image i made a number of years ago.

 

 

More starry nights

 

Here is a shot of the TWR towers from last week. I drew in the basic shapes for Scorpius and Sagittarius. 

There was some haze and cloud action that night.

 

Saturday and Sunday nights were much clearer, so we went further south in order to see the summer Milky Way in all its glory.

 

 

First Starry Night in Months

It is sunny and hot today. It started clearing up late yesterday, and last night was the first night that i could see a lot of stars in quite some time.

I zoomed out to the TWR antenna field to get the Southern Cross behind the towers. I tried a few different things but what worked best was to have the stars a teeny tiny bit out of focus, which made the bright ones easier to see on a small image.

The circles on the image below show, from left to right, Alpha and Beta Centaurus, the Omega cluster, and the Southern Cross.