Randall's Photo Blog

I usually post cool photos on my FaceBook or Picassa account but for those who are not FB friends or others who stumble across my blog I'm posting some recent images.

The first is a photo taken in my back yard. I wanted to capture the fireflies that were all over but they are not easy to image. I wound up taking many 15-30 second exposures at ISO 6400 and combining 15 of them into a single image to get the effect I wanted. I know it sounds like cheating but the camera didn't pick up all the fireflies in each shot so this is more like what it really looked like. I used GraphicConverter to combine the images.

I also had one of my digital cameras converted to image the full spectrum. Most cameras have an infrared (IR) cutoff filter over the sensor. If you want to image IR this cam be replaced by an IR filter - which will allow only IR to pass or a full spectrum (glass) filter and use an IR filter to take IR images. I opted to have a glass filter and use the external filters as this would also allow normal use with a "hot filter" or astro-photography. Here are some of my IR images:

The last two were taken at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln MA.

Here are some astro-photos:

Two exposures of the moon combined.

A supernova in the whirlpool galaxy - M51 that Rebecca & I imaged June 18th.

This one is of globular cluster M3 and has a satellite fly by in the frame.

This shot is also a combination of two long exposures to capture lightning from my back porch. This storm produced a lot more lightning than rain.

This is an old shot of me sitting in front of my trusty MacPlus:

Some things never change:

This is just for fun:

Enjoy!