Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter from the Hoge Veluwe, Holland

[Ags]

Took these while out camping in the Hoge Veluwe in Holland. It is just about the only place in Holland that has rolling hills. It was overcast every night but one night there was enough clear sky showing through to give me a chance to point my camera upwards.

I took the AZ3 and my 1100D with my widest lens (the 18-55 kit zoom) into the middle of a big field in deep twilight and shot several panoramas. The Moon shots are two or three images stitched together, shot at F8 ISO200, 21 seconds, while the Venus pic is a single image.

This is my first effort at stitching together panoramas which I did using GIMP. As I can't afford a wider lens (or a camera with more megapixels) this is a technique I had better master!

This one is three images stitched together, showing the Moon and Mars and a few stars in Leo.

moonmars2 by Agnes.Clarke, on Flickr

This one is two images stitched together and shows the same objects.

moonmarsveluwe by Agnes.Clarke, on Flickr

And this one shows Venus clearly and I think Jupiter just above the trees. The objects were close enough to the horizon that a single shot at 18mm captured the objects and the horizon.

065 by Agnes.Clarke, on Flickr

[Ags]

I was quite pleased with these actually...

[Pete Presland]

looking pretty good,what did you use to stitch them together?

[Viv]

Nice - do like the last one.

such a shame for the clouds ............

[Ags]

Thanks. I stitched them using Gimp. I used a layer mask to fade the upper layer into the lower layer, and then cropped to a rectangular shape.