While going through my blog entries and setting redirects from my old Blogger posts to the new ones on this new site, I realized that the migration wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to have been. The old content now has a lot of layout and formatting issues as well as many broken images. Continue reading “Blog Migration Woes”
Year: 2016
LensMuff™ – Affordable Dew Control For Your Camera Lenses or Telescope
If you’re into night photography or astrophotography, you’ve likely already encountered the scourge that rapidly puts an end to any photo session – dew. It’s a problem that has plagued night photographers and astronomers since these pursuits have existed. Over the years, many techniques and products have been developed to help combat this problem. Many are quite effective, but have their drawbacks. Continue reading “LensMuff™ – Affordable Dew Control For Your Camera Lenses or Telescope”
A Shift In Focus – Widening My Horizons
Welcome to the new Dark Arts Astrophotography blog! It’s been a long time since I posted a real blog entry – barring yesterday’s announcement of my new site and blog. Now it’s time to get back into gear and start posting more regularly once again. I’ve been neglecting my blog over the last several months, partly due to being busy with photography and other stuff. But laziness has also played a part in it, not to mention my frustration with the Blogger platform. But I digress. This blog isn’t about my lack of activity, but rather about what I’ve been doing over the last several months!
New Dark Arts Blog and Web Site
I started the Dark Arts Astrophotography blog back in November 2013, about a year after having started with astrophotography. At the time, I knew very little about astrophotography, and even less about blogging.
While searching for a blog site, I came across Blogger. It seemed to be a good choice. It’s owned by Google, ties into my Google, G+ and YouTube accounts. It seemed to make sense. But after a couple of years, I started to realize that I didn’t like Blogger much. It just seemed to clunky, its plugins were a mess at best, and the customization options just weren’t there or left a lot to be desired. Well, unless you want to link to other Google services, that is.
Continue reading “New Dark Arts Blog and Web Site”
Getting Started in Astrophotography
Getting Started
One of the questions I get asked the most often is how one gets started in astrophotography. More specifically, what kind of equipment is required in order to take images like I do. In this article, I’ll try to clarify that. Note that this won’t be covering technique or procedures in any way, but rather just what you need to get into it.
The first thing to mention is that there are 3 types of astrophotography:
- widefield / landscape;
- solar system; and
- deep sky.
Each of these types will require vastly different equipment and techniques, as well as software and technique for post processing. I’ll be covering each of these 3 types and what is required to get the best results.
The Effects Of Deep Space Image Stacking
In my last article, I discussed lunar image stacking in detail. Since then, I’ve received a few questions on deep sky stacking and what images should look like at the 3 major stages of processing: raw, stacked, and final product. So I’m going to briefly show what the results of stacking are in this article. Continue reading “The Effects Of Deep Space Image Stacking”
Lunar image stacking. Is it worth it?
To stack, or not to stack? Most astrophotographers will agree it’s necessity with deep sky images, but is it really necessary for lunar imaging when the moon is so big and bright in the sky? There are a lot of single frame photos of the moon that show incredible detail, so is it really worthwhile going through the process of taking dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of images and then stacking them? Are the results really that visible? In this article, I we’ll go through the process of stacking a lunar image and see the results at each step along the way. Continue reading “Lunar image stacking. Is it worth it?”