ajamesmccarthy

A 40 megapixel image of the sun as it appeared yesterday

Another image of the eclipse.... told you I had a lot more of these!

Eclipse-inspired artwork in 240 megapixels. Made using real data, but getting creative with moon placement.

Yes, another eclipse video... would you believe that I have several more shots coming?

The embedded link is a gif, you can download the video if you want to check it out in higher quality!

My favorite one will come in a few days, but meanwhile here is another eclipse shot in 81 megapixels

This time I tried to simulate exactly how it looked to my eyes, which was a challenge. Cameras simply don't operate the same ways our eyes do. I desaturated the image, because to our eyes, we only see a hint of the red. The top of the moon almost seemed to twinkle as the moon hung there ominously. 

A Blood Moon Sets over Mount Whitney

The Partial Eclipse, not long before totality. A good time to view the way the light color splits as it bends around Earth.

Last night's Total Lunar Eclipse- an unedited shot.

The first of many of my eclipse shots, here's one straight out of the camera (mainly because I'm exhausted from 14 hours of driving and no sleep). This is how it looked as it set over Mt Whitney

Last night's Waxing Gibbous moon in 55 megapixels

I just captured one of my clearest photos of the solar chromosphere today. Earth for scale.

One of my favorite representations of the lunar cycle

This is the next in my remastered series, called "Phased". I'm not sure what it is, but there is something about this image that just feels magical to me. 

A remastered composite image of the 2019 blood moon

There is another one of these next week for those of you on the west coast! It will be visible across the entire pacific. 

Sneak peek at another remaster: A Lunar Transit

This was my first transit capture where I could see the details of the ISS clearly. I was absolutely blown away when I saw the clear silhoutte of the panels and radiators. I went back to this image with fresh eyes and created a dramatic crop, corrected some of the colors, and cleaned up a lot of the details so it would look good in a large print. Definitely one of my favorite images of the last two years. 

Another remastered image from this series- the Andromeda galaxy

This is a part of the remastered collection that I launched my website with. It's also the only deep sky object that I treated when doing this project. This image is interesting to me, because I absolutely love it, but I'd probably never process an image like this againI tend to keep my stars smaller now, but for some reason with this image it just works. 

Another sneak peek at a remastered image- plus early access to my new website

As a thank you to those of you that have supported me by becoming patrons- I wanted to give you early access to my website. You can check out all the images I remastered for this launch, and get in early if you wanted prints for yourself. 

Website:
www.cosmicbackground.io 

Password: (case sensitive)
CosmicPatron 

This image is my launch image for the website because of what it represe...

Some images of the sun from yesterday. Including a 162 megapixel mosaic.

I decided to start sharing more of what ends up on the "cutting room floor" with you. As a lot of this sort of thing never makes it to my social media accounts. This is from yesterday's sessions examing the various features on the sun. 

Here is what a single frame of the sun looks like:

And that same area after images are stacked, sharpened, and contrast is adjusted:

2021-05-13 18:43:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Another Sneak peek from my remastered series- "Earthshine"

This image is around two years old, and was one of my first where I really started to rethink how I approached lunar photography. For the remaster, I completely removed and re-added the stars , fixed banding issues in the gradients around the moon, and highlighted the "earthshine" color- as the blues from our oceans are actually visible in the reflected light. This remaster closely resembles the original image, but on a technical level it is much better. If you zoom in- it looks pretty good!<...

Sneak Peek: A completely remastered image of the martian occult of 2020

I'm going to be re-releasing a collection of images, after completely going through and remastering them. That entails going through the raw data and reprocessing the image from start to finish, and in some cases, collecting new images (like in this case, the clouds were not captured properly the night of the event). The result is a completely new image that brings more drama and detail to some of my favorite pieces. Some of my work will have drastic updates done to them- while others will ju...

The phases of the moon visualized with one of my recent solar images. A reminder of the depth of space.

The shots of the moon were captured in order through the end of 2020. By showing an illumination source in the image, I hoped to convey the depth of space, as the moon's phase has to do with where the sun is relative to it. 

Bonus- there are a few easter eggs in this image. See if you can find them!

Since the original image is so large, I also included it as an attachment in case it isn't loading for you. 

Celestial Events in May- do I spy an eclipse?

Hello Patrons!

Here's a quick rundown on what we can look forward to this month:

May 6-7th -ETA Aquarids Meteor Shower
This is Earth passing through the tail of Halley's comet, which will produce about 1 meteor a minute on average if you catch it during its peak. You'll want to get to dark skies to properly experience it, and will see the most meteors after midnight (the morning of the 7th) but before the last quarter moon rises. 

May 11t...