The Moon (99% waxing gibbous), accompanied by Saturn and Jupiter, rises above Memorial Church at Stanford University. In terms of lining up the moon with a building, visit Photo Ephemeris, which is pretty accurate. In retrospect, I should have consulted it beforehand. Instead, I used the augmented reality feature in PhotoPills, which was not as precise.
Comet NEOWISE rising above the San Francisco bay. I love the soft pastels of the morning light, as well as the clear delineation between the night sky and the coming morning sun.
One of the cooler buildings on the Stanford campus, the Clark Center is home to Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary lab that pulls from researchers from the departments of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and medicine.
When I searched up NEOWISE on Starry Night, I discovered that there were multiple sky objects named after NEOWISE, the project searching for “near-Earth objects and comets that could pose an impact hazard to the Earth.” The one that we are all excited about right now is C/2020 F3, which currently is visible in the hour or so before sunrise.
This photo was taken at ISO 100, 200mm, f/2.8 and 8.0s. At 200mm, I should have limited the shutter to 2.5 seconds to avoid star trails.
Finally found the Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) on my third attempt. I couldn’t find it when I was scanning the horizon, but it showed up in a wide angle photo I took.
Got all the stars in the handle this time. Next time, I’ll try to get Polaris as well.
One of the easier to find star patterns in the night sky. The Big Dipper is composed of these seven stars: Phecda, Merak, Dubhe, Megrez, Alioth, Mizar and Alkaid (which I inadvertently cut off),
Been cloudy as of late. I found a rare few minutes last night when the evening moon emerged from behind the cloudy layer overhead. The entire time, I could see the clouds passing in the front of the moon.
When exposing for the dark side of the crescent moon, a lot of faint stars begin to appear. This one was taken at ISO 1000, f/2.8 and 1/5s.
If you are curious about the stars in your photographs, you can upload them to Astrometry.net, which will identify them with an overlay.
Testing the Mirror Up setting to see if the photograph of the moon came out any sharper.