OK. Last night I made yet another attempt at photographing M42. This time I took a series of 90 second exposures, got all the needed flats, darks, and bias frames, and processed them with slightly more understanding of how to manipulate photos. Behold! The red colors are still very faint, and I had to crop …
So earlier this month I took a nice photo of M42, but it was an off the cuff event that I really didn’t plan out. Last night I made a second attempt and I was prepared this time. I bought a Bahtinov mask to help me get sharp focus, I took proper dark frames and …
Last July I bought a nice new telescope – an 8 inch Meade LX-200 – but since then I’ve only really tinkered with it visually. Tonight was a clear night, and I’ve been meaning for months to observe M42, so I set up the scope on the deck in the back yard and took a …
Continue reading ‘M42 The Great Nebula in Orion – My First Serious Astrophotography Target’ »
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’ »