Nirvana is a nice dark sky zone known to Members of RASC where one can go for astronomy. That weekend there were over 9 of us out there, from planetary observers to DSO (deep space objects). Even one expert who spent the entire astronomical night watching meteors plummet to the earth. Continue reading →
Tonight was a clear night with several visible ISS flybys. Using the GH2 for the first time I mounted it on my telescope mount to track the stars so that only the ISS itself was streaking across the stars. The above picture has a bit of a jitter as I was trying to capture the fast moving ISS station and reposition the camera to take the shot.
This shot is of the Uras Major (Big Dipper) as the ISS station passes close-by constellation. While waiting for the ISS station to do the flybys I also set-up my telescope with the GH2 to take some pictures of M13, the Hercules Cluster.
Although not the largest cluster in the sky (that is the Centauri cluster) it is the largest in the northern sky whereby North America and Europe and Russia can see.
So I gave my brother Alan a ride to his softball game and took some pictures of him at bat. The first time he was at bat I used the GH2’s 40FPS 2MP picture mode. Where the camera takes 40 two megapixel photos in 1 second. The picture above is a 100% crop.
I don’t know what the camera does to make this high-speed shot possible but it shows little artifacting although the colour IQ is lower than a full resolution image would normally show.
Next is a video using the GH2 and Lumix 20mm f1.7 lens at 24fps. Although If I remember correctly I punched up the shutter rate to 1/250 of a second in order to get a bit sharper image with less blur.
Alan made a wonderful play at first base a few moments after I snapped this shot but alas I didn’t capture the moment and neither did Graeme.
I finally got my hands on the Lumix GH2 from Panasonic. I’m very excited with this camera due to its small form, light weight and with an adapter I can use all my Nikon Lens. All the shots are handheld, most unchanged (beyond size reduction) but a few have some minor changes in post to their raw files to JPEG (crop, sharpen, white balance).