On vacation in Brittany, France I spent one evening doing Astrophotography using the Polarie for tracked exposures: Read More
Creating Double Page JPEG images from PDF
While in the process of making a photobook in Lightroom I wanted to review the book before actually ordering it. For this I wanted to have the pages in JPEG format instead of one big PDF.
It turns out that with ghostscript one can easily extract the images.
I am using cygwin on a Windows 7 64 Bit operating system to work with ImageMagick, Ghostview and the like.
But before I was able to use ghostscript I had to fix this error I was getting about the font Arial.ttf not being found, after some research I found that creating the missing directories and adding a link to the font in the Windows directory fixes that issue:
mkdir /usr/share/fonts/ mkdir /usr/share/fonts/TTF ln -s /cygdrive/c/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/
Bright night, bright meteor
With the so-called super-moon shining brightly outside the chances of successful meteor observations are pretty low due to the light of the moon washing out the fainter stars and of course meteors too!
But as the weather prospect for the next few nights is pathetic I set up the camera and took 434 shots using my Nikon D7000 with the Samyang (Rokinon, Walimex) 14mm f/2.8 camera at f/2.8, 2,5s and ISO3200. One of the frames actually captured a quite bright meteor:
Colorful Moondogs
When I went outside this evening to check if the sky is clear enough to do some meteor photography of the Perseid meteor shower I noticed that the moon was accompanied by two colorful moondogs (parhelia). Bits of the 22° Halo are also visible.
22° Halo with parhelic circle
Fisheye view created with Hugin
Today I was surprised to see a very prominent parhelic circle (http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/parcirc.htm) while having lunch with friends on our terrace.
Sun activity on the rise
Inspite the low solar maximum that we are experience currently, the sun showed a quite active surface today:
Spring Puddles
Last week’s snow has almost completely melted and the stars are reflected in the resulting puddles of meltwater.
This image is a stack of 38 individual exposures: Nikon D7000, Walimex (Ssamyang) 14mm f/2.8, 30s at f/3.2, ISO 1600. Stacked in Startrails, edited in Photoshop (airplane removal) and Lightroom.
2014-03-27 Moon and Venus
Yet another month has passed and the Moon joins Venus in the morning sky.
Moon and Venus, 1/50s at f/5.6, Nikon D7000, 180mm f/2.8, cropped
California Nebula
The California Nebula (NGC_1499) is a HII emission region in the constellation Perseus, it was discoverd by E.E. Barnard in 1884 on long exposure plates.
Because of the red color and it’s faintness it is usually only visible in photographs.
I used my unmodified Nikon D7000 camera in combination with the Nikon AF-Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 for this photograph. 11 individual exposures of 120 seconds at f/2.8 were combined using Regim by Andreas Rörig. Additional adjustments were made in Adobe Lightroom.
Iran 2014
Some Pictures from my trip to Iran earlier this year… Read More