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Space Mission

February 9, 2009

Orion from my backyard (not tonight, obviously)

orion-from-the-mission-pano2

No, not the iPhone, but rather the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5.  15 second exposure, rather surprised it came out this well — only slightly adjusted the white and black levels on this one.

The Lumix has a 10x optical zoom which I quite like, but it proved next to useless with my amateur astronomy efforts to capture the Pleiades:

pleiades

Oh damn you, rotating Earth!  Same for anything longer than a 15 second exposure.

Now, our neighbors down at the Lick Observatory in the hills above San Jose, THEY have some serious zoom:

moon-station

That’s the International Space Station transiting the moon.  It crossed the disk of the moon in just half a second — now there’s some good timing.

And here’s a picture of the ISS along with the Space Shuttle Atlantis in front of the Sun:

iss-atlantis-sun

One Comment leave one →
  1. February 25, 2009 2:51 am

    Oooh, I cannot convince my TZ5 to photograph the stars yet, must keep trying :)

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