Meteors

The height of the Geminid meteor shower was supposed to be last night, so I made an attempt to get some images. All I managed to prove is that the AC power adapter I recently got for the 6D and 5D works perfectly. I set up the 6D and fired off 735 shots in about 7.5 hours. The exposure time was 35 seconds, which is a bit too long to avoid some trailing if I had gotten any worthwhile images.

One problem is the Moon is the brightest object in the night sky, by far. The most recent star trails I shot were 800 ISO at f/2.8. This image was 100 ISO at f/4, so if I am doing the math right the stars are only 1/16th as bright as they would be under a moonless sky. If there were any meteors, they were lost in the glare.

What you can see in this image besides the moon is Jupiter and Orion to the left.

Fox and deer

I've had the Browning #11 on the post facing northwest for almost a month. Two questions have been answered: The post does sway in the wind and cause false triggers, but not very often. And the camera will trigger on animals on the other side of the fence. No moose in the past few weeks, but the camera did get quite a few occurences of deer and fox. Melted Browning #6 also got the same critters at its location facing southeast toward the shed.

The newer Browning doesn't freeze night shots. The deer has to be totally still to get a clear image. The fox never stops moving, so all I get is a blur. The running deer during the day shows a shutter speed of 1/861, while the night shots are 1/12. The older Browning actually had less motion blur (shutter speed 1/40), so I need to check the settings to see if I am missing something. (I also need to set AM/PM correctly on #11.) Here are four images from #11 followed by two images from #6.

Mosaic

After travel over the holiday, we returned to clear skies in Montana so I got the Seestar out to try the mosaic function again. It isn't a foolproof process, but I was able to get some results. I shot Andromeda first, getting 61 minutes of exposure time spread over 2 hours and 40 minutes. At that point it was consistently giving me stacking errors, so I switched to the Orion Nebula. For some reason the Seestar did not produce an image on the phone, which gives total exposure time, but after about an hour and a half it also was giving stacking errors. Then I went back to Andromeda and got 81 minutes of exposure time over just under three hours.

The images I edited are the stacked JPGs saved on the Seestar. I run them through Siril just to remove the green cast, and do the rest of the editing in Photoshop. There still was a bit of noise in the corners, but a lot of that was cropped out in these images. The Andromeda image is about equal to what I posted a month ago. The Orion image maybe isn't quite as good as what I posted before, but the previous one wasn't a mosaic. I also shot a few stills of Jupiter. Shown below is a composite with different exposures for the planet and the moons. The planet shows a very slight amount of detail. From left are Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Not great, but better than I can get with a long lens on a DSLR.

Andromeda mosaic

Orion nebula mosaic

Jupiter and moons