Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently captured a remarkable image of a rare sight. It immediately sparked my imagination and reminded me that we’re connected to our universe in all sorts of ways.
The latest JWST image shows two stars “dancing,” forming trails around them. There are at least 17 concentric dust rings around the pair, and they are surprisingly alike human fingerprints.
If you’re a regular reader of DIYP or you’re an avid astrophotographer then the name Andrew McCarthy should be familiar to you. We’ve featured him numerous times, you’d think we’d be getting bored by now. But no, every single time his work just keeps getting better and better! And he’s really outdone himself with his latest set of images that show the sun in incredible detail with no less than a 150,000 image composite!
Black panthers are not only beautiful creatures, they’re also very rare. Photographer Will Burrard-Lucas was determined to photograph this amazing animal and he released his first images in 2019. But he wanted to raise his project to a new level. He combined a black panther with a starry sky in a series of photos that were a challenge to capture – but they were well worth the effort.
Images of space are valuable for researchers to find out more about our solar system, our galaxy, and way beyond. But us regular folks enjoy them as well because they’re often quite an eye candy. The European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory has just released the most precise and detailed 3D map of the Milky Way to date. It doesn’t only look gorgeous of course, but it also takes the astronomers to both the future and the past of our galaxy.
Have you ever wondered what the largest lens in the world looks like? It belongs to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and its diameter is 1.57 meters (5.1 feet). It will be paired with a massive three-ton camera to study the sky and take enormous 3.2-gigapixel images every 20 seconds.
The Independence Day is just around the corner in the US, and it means we’ll get to see (and shoot) lots of epic fireworks. But they can hardly be as epic as the one NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently captured. It started exploding 170 years ago and it’s still continuing, and NASA calls it “the galaxy’s biggest ongoing stellar fireworks.”
Star stacking is a commonly used technique among astrophotographers. It helps you to reduce noise and end up with better images of the night sky. But how many photos should you stack to get the best results? The answer isn’t as simple as “take X photos and stack them.” But, Michael Ver Sprill aka Milky Way Mike shares some tips to help you determine the ideal number of photos to stack.
Introduction
This guide will be a walkthrough on the basics of Milky Way photography. It is best for beginners, but even intermediate and expert photographers might find something new! Plus, I always find it never hurts to refresh yourself on the basics.
Before we get to the good stuff, I’d like to start by saying that I hope you find this guide to be a bit different from the rest. I have found that most guides go on way too long and provide more detail than you could possibly need. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but it creates a problem. With that much information available, it tends to be overwhelming and hard to retain what you learn. By the time you’ve read through the countless pages, you’ve forgotten where you started!
Did you know that stars can fight with each other out there in space? Thanks to this magnificent image captured by European Southern Observatory (ESO), we can see what it looks like. Located 650 light-years from Earth, these two stars were captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope in a dramatic cosmic fight.
Did you know that meteors can be colorful? Our eyes can’t detect the different colors of meteors, but our cameras can. Photographer Dean Rowe managed to capture a magnificent, colorful meteor during Geminid meteor shower. He was kind enough to share with DIYP the details of his photo and tell us how he made it.
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