USVI-On-Line

St. John has marvelously dark, star-filled night skies, and it is so much easier to enjoy winter constellations when the temperature outdoors is in the balmy 70's. Orion is especially majestic from the tropics as it wheels nearly overhead. My photo taking usually stops shortly after sunset, but I have been hankering for some time now to try my hand at astrophotography. Friday night was wonderfully clear, with the moon near new, and so I set up an equatorial tracking mount (to compensate for the earth's rotation) on the deck at Plumeria, along with my Nikon D5100, and some fixed focal length, Pentax medium format lenses from back in my film days. These are early efforts; my polar alignment was a wee bit off, and I should probably have stopped the irises down a bit from wide open, but the results are promising nonetheless. VIOL limits attachments to 1000 pixels in the longest dimension, so these images are much lower resolution than the originals. Here's Orion with a 45 mm f/4 lens (sideways; rotate your display or head by 90 degrees to recognize it amidst a zillion background stars in the Orion arm of our Milky Way galaxy):
and a closer look at Messier 42, the nebula below Orion's belt, with a 300 mm f/4 lens:
The brightest portion of the nebula is overexposed, but in a telescope, your eye can make out four bright stars (the Trapezium) in the core. These are newly born stars, and this nebula of hydrogen gas is essentially a giant stellar nursery where they form.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of the Pleiades while I was still set up. I can just make out six of the seven sisters by eye, but the camera does quite a bit better, even capturing a hint of the nebulosity around Merope, the bright sister in the middle right of the cluster:
The Ursid meteor shower is set to peak on Monday night, and if I can fit it in, I'll try and shoot some star trails facing north towards Polaris from Maho Bay, hopefully catching some Ursids in the process. That would be on the way back from the wonderful Christmas concert of the St. John Singers, in the beautiful Moravian Church in Coral Bay.

All the best,

Kevin

Wow, Kevin -- those are amazing!

Good stuff!! Thanks.....Love looking up floating at nite down there........

These are great! Please post the meteor shower shots if you get any!

Kevin,
Thanks for taking the time to post those shots! Really cool!
All the best,
Tom in CT

WOW is right! Wayyyyyy cool! Thanks for sharing. Made my evening!

SteveO.

Thanks for all of the positive feedback! On Monday night, the St. John Singers' annual Christmas choral concert was wonderful, as usual. By the time the post-concert mingling with neighbors and friends was over, it was 9:30 PM, and I headed down to Maho Bay beach with gear in hand, this time with a fast, wide-angle 11-16 mm, f/2.8 zoom. I had originally planned to do an automated series of photos, and stack them to show the circular star trails as the earth spins beneath the heavens, hopefully catching some Ursid meteors in the process.

Upon arriving at the beach, several flaws in my strategy became apparent. First, I had forgotten that there would be boats moored in the bay, and their cabin and mast lights would now dominate the images. Also, there were significant clouds to the north, which the bay faces. It would also take 3-4 hours to capture significant circular arcs with my short focal length lens facing towards the earth's pole; this was more than I was up for, after a long day buying villa supplies on St. Thomas. Finally, the Ursid meteors were a near no-show; I saw one definite Ursid, but that was it, and it wasn't while my lens was open. Meteor shower peaks are hard to predict, and can only be narrowed down to within a day or two.

That said, I wasn't going to get this close without trying to capture some images. After waiting and hoping for better weather, the clouds began to thin, and I pointed the tripod-mounted camera a bit west of true north, and began medium exposure images. After a succession of attempts at various exposures, it occurred to me to briefly light the foreground sand with a wide angle LED flashlight, which helped bring that out nicely. The boat lights turned into colorful columns as gentle waves lapped toward shore; I really like the resulting images. Here is one from late in the evening:

The constellation at the upper center of the image, looking like the letter "M", is Cassiopeia, which lies in a rich vertical background of stars in an arm of the Milky Way. Polaris, the North Star, is a low 18 degrees off the horizon, matching our latitude. It is the brighter star above the yellow lit boat, second from the right. The stars below it are in the handle of the Little Dipper, with its bowl (and all of the Big Dipper) hidden beneath the horizon.

I then pointed the camera up through the palms along Maho's shore, capturing Orion the Hunter, Taurus the Bull, his quarry (the bright "V" of stars), and the Pleiades, or "Seven Sisters". Using the flashlight to accentuate the palms failed, as their tops are so high up that this mostly just made their lower trunks stand out. I ended up brightening the image to show the dark palm crowns against the stars, at the expense of adding some noise to the image. Here's the result:
It has been fun to try long exposure night photos while on St. John, and when I can, I hope to broaden the range of my compositions.

A Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night!

Edit, Saturday, December 27th: Headed down to Cinnamon Bay last night around moonset (10:45 PM), hoping to do long stacked images that would show circular star trails around the Pole Star. Unfortunately, some feature of my Nikon camera was set so as to disallow interval shooting (my plan had been to take several hours worth of one minute exposures and stack them in software). It pays to practice this stuff before you head out. I did take a few images; here's one of Cinnamon Cay and the stars, along with a mega-yacht, and the lights of a speedboat heading westward: Earlier that afternoon, Danielle and I had been sailing a Hobie-Cat out by Whistling Cay when the 68 meter mega-yacht, "Archimedes" approached from the west, passed right by us, and settled in at Maho Bay for the night. Very impressive from up close.

All the best,

Kevin

great photos

Amazing Kevin,
Thanks for sharing! I have been wanting to do this too or get a Telescope for our deck and this has just convinced me!

Kevin,
Thanks for your email note pointing us to this. Hubby and I are really enjoying your posts and pics. Last time we stayed at Coconuts, he loved being able to use the telescope. Thanks for posting!
Wishing you the best in 2015 and many enjoyable times at Coconuts and Plumeria!
AquaGirl and hubby