Naming the stars

The eastern dawn sky this morning may look rather blank except for the unmistakable duo planets of Jupiter and Venus peeking out from above the rooftop but actually, there are zillions of stars that cannot be seen with the eye or a camera. My neighbourhood has too many street lamps that contribute to light pollution and moreover, my eyesight isn't what it used to be. Hence, I am unable to see more than a few specks of dim lights in a darkened sky.

So when I went outdoors this morning to take a picture of the four visible planets, I wasn't very hopeful of a good result. Nevertheless when I subjected the images to a little cropping and digital manipulation, I was happy to see minute speckles of light points appearing everywhere. Methinks, I did a pretty good job identifying many of these stars. Got to give myself a pat on the back!

The image on the left was taken with a Nikon D5100 camera fitted with a Tamron 18-200mm zoom lens. The manual settings were focal length 18mm, aperture number f/3.5, shutter speed 0.25s and ISO 6400. The settings were probably good enough for me as I wanted to take in as much of the sky as possible. However, the limitation showed up when I zoomed in to the 200mm focal length when I wanted to concentrate on the Jupiter-Venus pair. A lot of camera shake which even my tripod couldn't reduce.

Then I remembered that my Olympus E-PL7 camera gave me some acceptable results in the past. So I switched to using it with the tripod stand to photograph Jupiter and Venus together. No doubt, I shall be using the Olympus again tomorrow morning. Weather permitting, that it. Some more cropping and digital manipulation followed soon afterwards and I must say that the results more than satisfied me. The visible moons of Jupiter appeared very clearly in the picture below, with Venus hovering nearby.