Galileo's Camera

You can see a very bright star in the evening skies these days. Have a look at the western skies, just after the sunset, you will see a very bright star. It is so bright, that you can see it just after the sun sets and the skies are still blue. This is not actually a star. It's the planet Venus. It is easy to identify as it is pretty much the most brightest object in the night sky (barring the moon) and appears only right before the sun rise or right after the sun set and stays on for about two hours. This made the ancients call it the Morning Star and the Evening Star. The Babylons understood that these two stars are in fact the same. Here's my very first attempt on capturing Venus: Venus - 50x1/800sec at ISO100 If you are wondering as to why it seems to be a partial disk, more like the Moon, it is for the exact reason. Just like the Moon, Venus has phases, but instead of just 28 days, the cycle lasts 584 days. And right now it is in a "halfway" through a p...

The very first constellation I learned to recognise was Orion. Perhaps it's fitting that the very first presentable deep space image I did was also related to it. The Orion Nebula (M42/NGC1976) The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye, but cannot see much details to fully appreciate the beauty of it. The nebula is essentially what makes up the second star of Orion's sword. A wider field view of Orion with the nebula visible as a large bright blob is shown below (copied from Wikipedia): Orion (from Wikipedia) The first photo shown was taken from a Canon 550D fixed to NexStar 4SE on prime focus. 32 frames of 2seconds stacked with 10 dark frames on Deep Sky Stacker and then readjusted on Photoshop. It is obviously far from perfect. I think you need about 100 shots to make a good composite image. But as a beginner's attempt, I think it is pretty good.

Crescent Moon and Venus (top). The other star visible closer to the moon is Spica, the brightest star of Virgo