ajamesmccarthy

Seven hours of sunrsie- watching the shadows on the moon

Last night I caught another transit- check out the flyby video attached!

A civilian transit- Our sun and a commercial airliner. Check the attachment for a video

See the video from the moment of capture in the attachments. This is our sun in hydrogen alpha light with a plane transiting the disc. 

Nothing too fancy- Just a close look at last night's crescent moon

80 megapixel image of the setting moon last night- only 9.4% illuminated

Every full moon of 2020 in a half second. In 4k!

Download is attached!

A 200+ megapixel image I saved for a rainy day- well, it's raining!

This was captured the evening before the grand conjunction, on December 20th. My focus was on the planets that night, so I didn't share this. But it turned out to be one of my favorite scenes of the year.

A cosmic Mashup- our moon and the California Nebula

This may be more art than science, but it's still a fun image to create. This is close to accurate scale for angular size. Image if nebulae were as bright as the moon- they'd be huge in our night sky!

Hubble's famous "Pillars of Creation" Before and after edits

the nebula is hidden deep within the data of my raw files, and is brought out during processing. Anyone that wants to learn this side of the hobby can do so- I share a dropbox file with all my calibrated RAW stacks to aspiring astrophotography patrons. I do have a free tutorial and dataset as well pinned to my instagram. See if you can get the same results as I do with the same data set!

Happy New Year! Celestial Events in January and 2021

Hello and happy 2021! In addition to listing January's celestial events, I'm going to throw in a few highlights for the whole year to look forward to. Don't worry, I'll still do my monthly notice so you will have a reminder before things happen. I will also start including "Observations challenges" for the New Moon days- featuring a prominent object to attempt to observe when skies are the darkest. 

January 2nd- Quadrantids Meteor Shower
This meteor shower will ...

Most likely my last shot of the year- A Cold Moon Rising

My Christmas gift to you... my clearest moon picture- EVER. This is 209 megapixels. Zoom in to see the details!

A Grand Alignment.

Can you spy the planets? An Industrial take on the great conjunction.

Quick note-my email for you

Something appears to be wrong with Patreon’s notification system and as a result several messages fell through the cracks. Each of you are always welcome to email me, for any reason, by using ajamesmccarthy@gmail.com. that’s my personal email. If I don’t respond to a message within 24 hours than there is a solid chance I didn’t get it/see it.

Also- I’ll be setting up a discord soon to facilitate communication as well. 

A spacecraft transited the moon this afternoon

See attached for a slowed-down video of the pass. 

My ISS transit shots tend to get the most questions, so I thought I would write up exactly how I get them. If this looks familiar, I posted it originally in here a couple months ago.

First- I check transit-finder.com.
This is a web resource that allows you to put in your location, a time frame, and how far ...

Our sun on November 29th.

My favorite high res capture from the recent lunar cycle. Clouds have been an issue but can really set the scene

22 Days of the moon in 4k

When I observe the moon nightly for an entire lunar cycle, funny things happen. I see the moon for what it is, a wiggly sphere caught in a perpetual dance with Earth. You can really see the depth to it in this timelapse. 

The gif is HD, but not 4k. Check the download to see this in full 4k. 

"Waxing Through November" a 100 megapixel composition.

Celestial events in December- an incredible month awaits.

An incredible conjunction, a fantastic meteor shower, and a total solar eclipse. What a month!

December 13/14- The Geminids Meteor Shower
This is the best meteor shower of the year, and it coinsides with a new moon. How lucky is that? I'll be travelling to dark clear skies around this time to watch the incredible show and take some pictures. Up to 120 colorful meteors per hour will be visible entering Earth's atmosphere. The radial point will be the ...

Lunar Libration visualized in a single photo- the product of 12 days of images

The "motion blur" is caused by the moon's angle to Earth subtly changing each night. 

81 megapixel image of last night's beaver moon. Also a penumbral eclipse

I'm thankful for my Patrons :) Here's the sun today you lovely people.

This is our sun's full disc as of this afternoon. The activity is clearly picking up, showing a lot of interesting features, with more on the way!

Tonight's moon- cutting through thin clouds and creating a swathe of iridescence

A shot of last night's moon in 81 megapixels

81 Megapixel image of the moon and Jupiter as they set last night

The colors and clouds etc all all natural, captured in camera this way. However, the position of Jupiter and the moon was adjusted to fit both in frame. Jupiter was much further away than this. 

I took a close look at Uranus tonight

A new active region on the sun- captured in detail here

I also attached a video that shows how it looked in-camera as it was captured. It is in monochrome, but the light striking the sensor was red. These images are created by stacking the best frames from the video and processing them to reveal their depth. One of my tiers for my patreon is 1:1 coaching if you would like to learn more about this. 

Saturn