Author Jeff Sullivan on Great Basin School of Photography. Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard at 200mm 5:40am Sunday morning December 5. Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard will probably get a lot brighter over the next week as it approaches its closest pass by earth on December 12. If it doesn’t break up as it approaches the sun, it could continue to brighten even further as it approaches the sun through December 18. But just in case you don’t have clear skies, you might want to try to catch Comet Leonard in the pre-dawn sky to the east now. And comets are notoriously unpredictable, so it’s best to capture photos ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Great Basin School of Photography. A dozen meteors from the Persied meteor shower, the night before peak August 12, 2021. The summer of 2021 will be remembered for drought, fires, and smoke, and definitely not for great night sky viewing. In the days ahead of the Perseid meteor shower, to increase your odds of getting a clean shot, it was useful to look at wildfire maps and some forecasts. Fortunately I subscribe to the Open Summit app, and its smoke forecasts for surface and sky smoke. We had a number of foreground locations in mind, but many had to be ruled out in t ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Jeff Sullivan Photography. Comet NEOWISE in the evening. Comet NEOWISE was discovered on March 27, 2020. By early July it was visible to the naked eye to the Northeast in the pre-dawn sky in the Northern Hemisphere. By July 13 the best visibility was shifting to the northwest evening skies below the Big Dipper. I was able to pursue images of the comet on multiple mornings and multiple evenings. Although it seemed brighter in the evening sky, clouds that had formed in the day often had not dissipated enough to get a good evening view before it set below the horizon. Co ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Jeff Sullivan Photography. In March 2020 I was out a couple of nights doing my normal thing shooting night photography and time-lapse sequences. On these two nights I encountered something I hadn’t seen before: streams of satellites streaking across my shots. On the first night I was out shooting a Milky Way panorama before dawn, and they were passing overhead the entire time I was shooting the panorama. I put the camera aiming down their path to shoot the composite star trails image above, as the skies were brightening from the oncoming twilight. The next morning befo ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Jeff Sullivan Photography. Moon, Mars and Venus Setting over Mount Whitney I’ve been reading reports that the moon will approach and cover Mars for about an hour and a half early tomorrow morning. EarthSky quotes the occultation time as 3:38:04 am, Mars will emerge from behind the Moon around 4:29:13 am. They will be to the southeast, not far from the Milky Way galactic center, with several other planets in the sky. Moon – Mars – Venus Conjunction Setting Over Mount Whitney from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo. The brightness of the sky will change a lot from 5:08 am the begi ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Jeff Sullivan Photography. Perseid meteor shower 2016 I’ve been chasing every meteor shower that I could see with my camera since 2009. This year’s Perseid meteor shower was one of the best I’ve experienced so far. These are composite images, where I’ve saved the brighter meteors where they occurred in the sky, then brought those into one image showing dozens of them. I also produced a time-lapse video that shows the hours of meteors fallingThe conversion to video effectively speed up the meteor shower, enabling it to be seen in a few seconds. The brief flashes are ..read more

Author Jeff Sullivan on Jeff Sullivan Photography. Dark sky night photography in Northern Nevada, before the annual temporary Black Rock City of 70,000 forms in August?September. Many photographers are taking up night photography, but with increasing population and development comes more light pollution. Truly dark nights, and dark places, are becoming harder to come by. So where can you to to find dark skies for miles, some of the darkest skies in the world? The Bureau of Land Management’s Black Rock Desert – High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trail National Conservation Area offers a view of the sk ..read more