*photography

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by lurgee.

*howto

Adding video to channels (Howto) - requested by ant.

Hadfield is a Boss

Clean your windows... sheesh.. how dirty can they get anyway. Also f/16 is well into being hurt by diffraction. His subject is fixed at infinity focus so f/5.6 on a lens like that would be much better.

Disappointed with this guide. Not once did he explain how you get into Space in the first place.

Interesting info:
The colourful dots you see all over the shot at the start as he is talking, are pixels in the CCD of the camera that have been hit by radiation from space!

The pixels have been exposed to energetic particles with such intensity that they no longer see a gradient between light and dark, its all light....the pixel has been 'saturated' to the point of damage.

The detail is best seen in full screen @720p. You wont see them in the lower-resolution streams.

Charlie I get those on my CCD on Earth. The trick is that I expose my camera for usually 10 minutes at a time (under the stars.) Even so, only 1 out of 50 gets a good solid cosmic ray hit.

They stay that way in all proceeding pictures? Or just the long exposure ones?

I would assume the latter, cosmic rays slow down and lose quite a bit of their energy by the time they hit us down here on the ground....exposure to one in space though will certainly kill a pixel for good.

Saturation of light sensitive photodiodes (ill call them PD's henceforth) (essentially what the CCD is PACKED with) causes damage over time. You can just over-saturate the PD, to the point of damage (usually around 3dBm above its rated saturation point), and it will bounce back ok. The sensitivity of the pixel will be harmed dependant on the time and the level above saturation it was exposed at.

You can see a similar phenomenon in video footage of nuclear reactor survey footage from drones, or....stupid people that are way too close....where the reactors have a nasty event.

Yeah, taking the pictures is just the easy part.