Welcome to the July 2008 Cloudy Nights Imaging/Sketching Contest poll!

Each month the best images selected from the individual Cloudy Nights Imaging and Sketching forums will be presented for the userbase to vote on. The monthly winner receives the coveted Cloudy Nights t-shirt! At the conclusion of the poll, the entry with the highest total will be the winner of the contest..

Please choose your favorite out of all the images. This poll will remain open through August 15th at midnight EDT.

Here are the entries for July!

Beginning Imaging's Finalist - Nils_Lars:

M20 - 30 mins of 3 min subs with 5 flats 1 dark shot through the C6S at 6.3 on a CG-5 with a unmodded 400D

Film Astrophotography's Finalist - huckabuck:

Orion and surrounds

this was taken from my dark sight near the Savannh River. 35 miles from Statesboro Ga. i used an Olympus om-1 with a Zuiko 135mm 1:2.8 lense. lense set @ F5.6 and exposed for 7 mins. Fuji Superia 400 asa. hand tracked using my home-made plywood eq mount

DSLR & Digital Camera Astro Imaging & Processing's Finalist - weatherandsky:

On July 5, 2008 I had the pleasure of observing and photographing the stars at a local conservation area and dark sky site in Binbrook, Ontario, Canada. I imaged this scene with an unmodified Canon 40D, Sigma 17-70mm lens (17mm @f2.8) and standard camera tripod with no tracking. This is a stack of 15x20sec exposures @ ISO 800 on the Milkyway down to the tree line, and another single 20sec exposure on the rest of the landscape below to create a two frame composite. Stacking was done in Deep Sky Stacker and processing was done in PS with layers. I was really lucky that the the water was beautiful and still enough so that the stars casted a nice reflection in the water.

CCD Imaging & Processing's Finalist - Jared:

M13--The Great Globular in Hercules

July 12th, 2008 at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California
Astro-Physics Mach1 GTO mount, Vixen VC200L telescope @ f/9, SBIG STL-11000M camera
x2 five minute exposures for luminosity; x1 each exposure for RG&B
Captured in Equinox Image; calibrated in Maxim DL; post processed in Photoshop CS3
Dark frames, synthetic flat frame, Lucy Richardson deconvolution

Solar System Imaging's Finalist - iceman:

Jupiter with GRS, Europa and Shadow, Ganymede and Io.
12" newt, 5x powermate, DMK21AU04 on an EQ6.
Central Coast, NSW Australia

50 seconds each channel, ~600-700 frames stacked in each channel using Registax. Further processing in Registax, AstraImage and Photoshop CS2.

Sketching Forum's Finalist - markseibold:

Moon, 2 days past full July 20th 2008 Midnight ~ 2 AM, observed through Nexstar 5i with 32mm Plossl and 12mm Plossl for close-up inset image in detail.

*Sky clear, calm; seeing estimated as 9/10.
*Temperature 63 deg F dropping to 58 with dew point rising fast.

Observed through a Nexstar 5i at low and medium magnification, my original intention was to render this sketch as the whole moon.

Materials used:

Canson Mi Tientes medium tooth Blue Indigo paper of 20” X 24”.

Old antique pastel chalk sticks in square sticks and round include Sargeant, Grumbacher, Eagle Prismapastel, and various carbon greys as Swan Stbilo CarbOthello brand; I have purchased a few new ones as small square sticks. These are NuPastel. I have never used a blending stick. Only cotton swabs, Q-Tips and occasionally my bare fingers although I abstain from that as I know that it destroys the paper surface. I have never used a fixative on any of my works so they are vulnerable to smearing, thus kept stored until determination of whot to do with them in many requested prints now. Occasionally but not too often I accidentally smear some chalk in the void blank areas. I will lightly clean off or erase those areas with a dampened cotton swab before photographing the work with a 5.1 megapixel Sony Cybershot under north daylight or photoflash at night. If exposure is insufficient, I will drop brightness in Photoshop by a fer points and raise the contrast an equal amount. Color balancing is done with the camera settings per the ambient light- True north UV daylight or photoflash.

This was the first time I also used new chalk pencils by Faber Castell in snow white and a Swan Stabilo in cream white.

Much of the color on the whole moon was left as unblended with the exception of some small portions as you can see. That image is to be somewhat impressionistic yet I have rendered the actual craters and maria as accurate in position and placement as I could in under 2 hours (25 ~ 30 minutes of that time was spent on the close-up inset detail which actually became the final work for this forum.) Finally my left hand was omitted from the lower potion of the work with Photoshop erasure so as to not clutter the subject matter, hence the vignetting in the lower edges of the blank blue indigo paper.

Good Luck to all our finalists!

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