Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Nikon D200 problems, part 3

Unfortunately, again problems with my Nikon D200 body. This time it is visible in the the raw -images already.

There was noticed strange banding all over the image area. Narrow stripes are located closely to each other. In a portrait image, stripes are visible as horizontally. The phenomenon gets worse, when the camera is exposed to low temperatures, like -20C and below that. I am not sure, is this a typical behavior for D200.

Two images attached, lower one is scaled from original to 800pix in height. Banding is only slightly visible. Upper image is direct crop in the middle of image, without scaling.


Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Winter scenery and halos

Little bit over one month ago, I had a trip to Pallas / Yllästunturi national park at northern Finland. We were snowshoeing there, with few colleagues from my company's photography club. These was cold and fresh winter air available, here's two halo images as sample:


Monday, March 19, 2012

ISS and Moon (19.3.2012)

Yesterday I got another alarm from CalSky -service, this time also ISS crossing the Moon disk. It happened at 19th March 2012, little bit before 8am - in Finnish local time. Not even a chance to observe, sleet was falling from the sky. Waiting for the next passing then...

Sunday, March 18, 2012

ISS and Moon (18.3.2012)

Approximately one week ago, I got email alert from the CalSky service. It predicted that the ISS would pass across the Moon disk at southern Finland, on Sunday morning 18th March 2012. The time for the crossing was 07:13:02 local time, re-checked yesterday - schedule was 07:12:57.

I tried to prepare equiment for taking image sequence of the ISS, with Nikon D200 and C8 OTA. Also found out that memory buffer at D200, fills is pretty quickly - max 5s sequence at 6fps. It would have needed at least 10...15s of buffer, because the passing of ISS would propably (?) change some seconds of the predicted time.

Another problem would been carrying the C8 scope to suitable place, since I do not have a car. On top of the building - there would be high place, but metal fence blocks the visibility. So then, waiting for the next passing of the ISS over moon or sun disk...