It’s interesting to see how far sensor technology has come in the past generation or two. On the night of January 6, the sky was clear (but not photometric) after a very stretch of iffy weather. Walking to the house, I admired the majestic Orion riding high in the southern sky. I wondered, “Have DSLRs become capable of photographing the night sky handheld?” Orion, being full of bright stars would be my test case. Here is the result using a fast lens and ISO 32,000. Can you spot Orion at the upper right and α Canis Majoris (Sirius), at the bottom?

For comparison, here is a 10-second exposure at a lower sensitivity (ISO 3,200 rather than ISO 32,000) with the camera on a tripod without tracking. Most notable to me is that faint wisps of cloud appear here and there, showing that the night was not actually “perfectly” clear (termed “photometric”). The image shows the Great Orion Nebula (M42) in Orion’s sword and also the Rosette Nebula as a diffuse smudge far left of Orion’s sword. Notice the bright red giant star α Orionis (Betelgeuse) in Orion’s upper left armpit. That’s my house at the bottom.

Finally, here is a 15-second exposure, unguided, adjusted to include the Pleiades cluster at the upper right. Look carefully and you will see the Pleiades enveloped in the bluish glow of nebulosity enveloping the cluster and illuminated by its hot B-type stars. Sirius is the bright star near the bottom. The Milky Way is visible stretching vertically, left of Orion. Again, notice the faint reddish patches of cloud near the center and horizontally along the bottom — definitely not a photometric night!

Although the lunar eclipse on the evening of 20 Jan 2019 was seen by countless millions across the Americas, Arizona was not the place to be! Clouds of varying thickness covered the entire state, including my location in south central Arizona.

The image below shows the eclipse during totality with Praesepe (the Beehive Cluster) at bottom. The moon’s aura was caused by the thick cloud cover (which also blocked the stars). Two bright stars of the constellation Cancer are visible near the cluster: To the left is γ Cancri (Asellus Borealis) and lower right is δ Cancri (Asellus Australis).

The photographic sequence below shows 59 images taken 3 minutes apart, from 16:10 to 18:04 UT on 21 August 2017. From beginning to end, follow this sequence left to right and downward. I used a 200 mm f/2.8 lens and north is toward the top. The location was East of Sells, AZ, where the Moon’s maximum coverage was around 65%. In front of the lens, I placed a 12,000x neutral density filter to keep the camera from catching fire.

August in southern Arizona is usually cloudy, as the big surge in July precipitation peaks before introducing another 10 months of dryness. Thus we were fortunate the weather was completely clear for the entire event!

This was my first attempt at photographing the central portion of the Orion Complex. This region contains the Orion Giant Molecular Cloud which envelops the constellation Orion but is directly observable only in the millimeter wavelength portion of the spectrum. In the visible regime, the sky from Orion eastward into Monoceros is chock full of diffuse nebulae, some of which are shown in this photo. In Orion’s sword are NGC 1976 (Orion Nebula) and NGC 1973,5,7 (Running Man Nebula). Near the left star in Orion’s belt, ζ Orionis, are NGC 2024 (Flame Nebula) and IC 434 with the less distant dark cloud, Bok 33, which together create the Horsehead Nebula.
This is a 168-second exposure at ISO 4000 using a 200mm lens at f/2.8. It was tracked but not guided, and the sky was clear but not especially dark, with a measured zenith V-mag of 21.5 per square arcsecond. I plan to re-image this region on the next good night using a series of many exposures to go deeper.