These are all of my eyepieces. Back row: Televue Panoptic 41mm, Televue Nagler 22mm, Televue Delos 12mm, Televue Nagler 9mm Middle row: Celestron Plössl 32mm, Orion Expanse 15mm, Celestron Plössl 12.5mm, Orion Expanse 6mm Bottom row. Meade MA 40mm, Meade MA 25mm, Meade MA 12mm The TeleVue 41mm and 22mm have 2″ barrels. The Meade …
This is a cell phone camera video taken through the eyepiece of my new telescope. It shows Mare Serenitatis at 222x maginfaction. You should probably mute it as the sounds is just the wind on the microphone. As I get to know the equipment better I hope to start taking nicer pictures, so this is …
I recently turned 50, and a couple of nights after my birthday, I tried to do something with my Orion StarBlast 4.5″ telescope and I had trouble with it. The RA setting circle just doesn’t work at all. I tried fixing it, but despite my best efforts I was unable to get it to work. …
Tonight I made my first photos using my new tracking mount for my camera. Alas! I live in the heavily light polluted skies of suburban Houston, so I could only do 30 second exposures before the image got too washed out. I also don’t really know my way in image processing, yet, but here are …
Tonight the skies were a bit more clear, so I tried talking photos of M42, the Great Nebula in Orion. It’s not exactly a Hubble image, but it’s at least recognizable. I tried experimenting with different settings on my camera and lens to see what worked best. This image was taken with Camera: Canon 50D …
So lately I’ve become more curious about what kinds of photos of the stars I can make with my equipment. Tonight, clouds moved in fairly early, so I wasn’t able to do much, but I did get this image of the Pleaides. A few things I note are, in no particular order: The image was …
Continue reading ‘Pleaides – more experiments in astrophotography’ »
I can’t really take decent astrophotos with my equipment, but the Moon, at least, is accessible. This was taken November 9, 2014.
No, not a rocket launch. Just my first attempt at astrophotography. Tonight I set up my telescope and camera to take a photo of the waxing half moon. First, the photo itself and then a description of how it was made. I’ve never seriously tried astrophotography before, so this was a bit of a challenge. …
Today, Venus passed directly between the Sun and the Earth, an event that only happens every hundred years or so. I was at work today, but I took one of my telescopes with me and when the transit began, about 5:09pm CDT, I set up in the parking lot and projected the image onto a …