Starship Asterisk*

Nitpicker wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:

Nitpicker wrote: Quite out of character, I woke up at 3:30am today and the clouds parted with perfect timing to reveal the light of this nova to my naked eyes (and fully clothed body). I got a few shots of it with Crux and the Pointers in frame, too.

Good show! I hope you'll post a link to your pictures.

Thanks Anthony. Here are my pics:
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 00#p215495

I didn't think mine were quite good enough to post in the same topic as today's APOD. I might try and get a slightly deeper telescopic shot soon, but doing that sort of thing before dawn is a challenge for me.

Excellent! And it's further good luck that you had earlier pictures of the same star field without the nova!

Anthony Barreiro wrote:Excellent! And it's further good luck that you had earlier pictures of the same star field without the nova!

Thanks Anthony. My March photo (one of my very first astrophotographs) helped to inspire me to get up so early this time. My Nikon D5100 (and perhaps many other DSLRs) has the nice feature of attributing each image file with all the settings such as ISO, exposure time, focal length & ratio, etc (which I don't otherwise record for all the images I take [as I do it for fun]). This allowed me to use the same settings for the December photo, which made for a better comparison. Having said that, I was using a zoom lens and failed to match the original 65mm focal length precisely, so I had to do some scaling. And as for the poor rotational alignment, well, I haven't yet installed any decent image editing software and was merely using MS Paint to do the cropping, reducing, scaling and annotating. I'm a little embarrassed about that, as I'm sure fine rotations, and other edits are a cinch in most packages.

I've also just noticed that, by pure coincidence, the stars in the before-and-after are within a degree of each other in my local horizontal (Azm,Alt) coordinates, despite being taken nine months apart. Freaky (in a nerdy kind of way). This time I set up a little to the right to avoid the "artistic" tree. My South-East horizon is not great for observing.