ajamesmccarthy

My first shot of tonight's eclipse

How big is Saturn in the sky? Here's a composite image showing how tiny the planet appears.

Saturn Last Night

Jupiter Io, and Europa this evening. See if you can tell which are moons and which are stars!

Messier 78- 20 hours worth of exposures to resolve this

People often ask how these images look without edits, so here it is: 

This type of photograp...

By the light of Venus

A few unedited shots from tonight's conjunction

After I spend some time editing I'll share the "HDR" shots I liked the most, but in the meantime here are some that were straight from the camera. 

The moon with enhanced elevation- full res

Sorry this one was late folks! I was travelling and the patreon app is awful, always crashes when I try to post images for you. Thankfully I'm home now and can spam your inbox with images again ;)<...

Celestial Events through the rest of 2021

Howdy folks! Here's a rundown of what's happening in the sky the rest of the year, but first, a personal note.

This year has turned out to be a difficult one for me as far as producing images...

A remastered version of my favorite waning shot- I call it Southern Moonset

It was too high resolution to post to patreon, so get the full size here: 2021-10-29 20:18:46 +0000 UTC View Post

A quick HDR shot of tonight's full moon.

From the camera to your feed- the steps each frame goes through.

The raw images as they are captured by my camera. Bit of wind shaking the scope, but looks great otherwise! It is intentionally underexposed, which allows me to reduce bloating of bright features w...

Last night's waxing gibbous moon, in 400 megapixels.

Venus- shot in IR/UV to reveal cloud top detail

The Iris Nebula- 12 hours of exposures to reveal what the faint interstellar dust looks like.

The Triangulum Galaxy

My first completed deep sky shot from my new backyard in Arizona, This is my favorite galaxy. I'm absolutely obsessed. 

If you're in my "aspiring astrophotographer" tier the data for thi...

A video of some of my favorite moon images played in sequence. Don't view if you are sensitive to flashing lights.

The horizon of the sun- an image from a few days ago

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Slowly working towards being able to post daily again. A lot of work to do between now and then, between setting up equipment, my office, and just having the tim...

A family Portrait

The Moon, The Sun, and our celestial family in one shot. I couldn't get a picture of Earth for obvious reasons, but the international space station makes for a nice representation of Mankind!

The backside of Jupiter- plus a timelapse!

I captured a timelapse of Europa and its shadow last night. This is about 4 hours of rotation on Jupiter... looped, and every time it loops it gets faster, because why not. 

A colorful harvest moon

A detailed look at Solar activity from a few days ago. See attached for a 30 minutes timelapse.

An earlier one I never shared, I call it "The Drifting Desert"

A file so large I had to downsize it to finish my edit. Here's "Just a Phase", a 900 megapixel moon.

The full size is a bit oversampled, so I find the 81 megapixel downscaled version really looks nice even though a few detailed areas might be undersampled. I'm sure enough of you may want to see ho...

My best Saturn so far. Love the details on this little guy.

I've been watching this group of sunspots make its way around the sun

My first shot of Venus of the season

Like the moon, venus shows phases. Right now it is in a waning gibbous phase, as it will become more shadowed as it rounds the sun towards Earth. This will also make it appear Brighter and larger, ...

Last night's 4% moon. Shown here with Venus. This is the highest resolution I've ever done at this phase.

Venus will be joining the moon tonight in a conjunction, but not quite as close as shown here. This is a composite image created from a 10 panel mosaic. 

An image that took me 4 months to finish- the Lunar Eclipse tucking behind the mountains

This was complicated to shoot because it involved using shots from multiple telescopes and multiple cameras, with tracked and untracked shots. Editing the final composite image was difficult, and I...

Celestial Events this Month

There's really not much happening this month in terms of major events, so I'm including events that will be for more advanced stargazers/astronomers. Now that I'm settled in my new place, I'll hppe...