Making the invisible visible

Today I did an experiment with some infra red photography. I wanted to capture a scene in IR-light and then colorize it with normal colors. First I took a normal photo of the scene, then an IR photo of the same scene and then by using the colors from the first shot I colorized the IR photo.

The end result looks quite interesting and it's exciting to think that it contain details that we actually can't see :-)

IR photo colorized

IR photo

Normal photo

Solar and lunar halo

Earlier in March this year I took a shot of me standing in a winter landscape under a lunar halo. Last week I returned to the same spot and redid the shot, but this time during a solar halo. I didn't get the exact same angle but it was pretty close.

Viking sunset

Last night I got the opportunity to shoot two vikings during the sunset. These guys are experienced actors and it was a blast working with them throughout the night. The light was just amazing and I don't think I ever experienced a session that has resulted in so many good images, almost every shot is epic in some way.

Solar halo

Today I've been hanging out with a beautiful reflected solar halo, the first halo for this summer season. It varied in strength throughout the day but I could never see any trace of the 46° halo or arcs. These 22° halos are quite common but for them to reflect in water they need to bee quite strong as it was today. Read more about halos at Atmospheric Optics.

Mercury Transit

Yesterday I spent the entire day outside following the Mercury transit. The weather was great more or less the entire time with a few clouds moving by from time to time. I have seen both Venus transits in 2004 and 2012 (Read about my Venus transit in 2012 here), but this was my first ever Mercury transit. All in all I'm very happy with the results and I'm really glad I got to follow Mercury during the entire transit.

Here's a photo showing my location and the gear I was using.

As you can see, I used both my 80mm H-alpha solar telescope and my 8" SCT telescope on my SkyWatcher AZ EQ5GT mount. Here some shots I took during the transit.

Solar telescope 11:15:30 UTC

8" telescope 12:27:14 UTC

Solar telescope 12:43:12 UTC

Solar telescope 16:37:23 UTC

8" telescope 18:37:16 UTC

May the 4th be with you!

Happy Star Wars day everyone and May the 4th be with you!

Aurora Arc - Astronomy Picture Of the Day at NASA

Today I'm featured as Astronomy Picture Of the Day at NASA with my photo Aurora Arc. It was taken on the 12th of April 2016 at 23:20 UTC just 2 km outside of down town Östersund. It's a panorama made from 6 photos (Two rows with 3 photos each) covering 180° of the sky.

Earlier that night me and a couple of friends had been out watching for the Aurora but the clouds blocked our view. Later at night when I was on my way home I stopped by this pier to take one last look and suddenly this really bright perfectly shaped arc emerged. It lasted for 5-10 minutes before fading away.

Annotated version