We at cadsas.com had an excellent observing night, tonight.
“Spring Guide to the Night Sky” public event.. totally horrible, rainy and windy weather at 5pm. Event starts 6.30pm..
All clear! Plus very clean skies, after all the rain. Looked at 1st magnitude stars as they appeared from the twilight, then observed Orion and Saturn.
We also saw two great fly-overs of the International Space Station (ISS) – the second pass was particularly bright.
About, 25 Cub Scouts came along with their Cub leaders.. made for a busy event.
Plus, I tried my Canon Digital SLR Camera
in the mighty Alan Young 22.5″ telescope.
Fitted well mechanically, but poor images..
Here’s an example of an out-of-focus Betegeuse in Orion.
In Sufficient Focusser In-Travel On Star Betelgeuse
Insufficient in-travel on the focusser… It was not possible to move the camera in close enough, to bring the image to focus.
The difference between the Canon and the Mintron camera that’s usually used with this telescope, is the position of the ccd chip within the camera body. The Mintron has its chip very close to the front of the lens opening. The Canon’s chip however, is much deeper within the body.
However, we were much encouraged by the likely light-gathering power and plan to modify the focusser to move it’s travel inside of the tube. (We did consider moving the mirrors instead, to push the focal plane further outside of the telescope tube, but felt this would be too radical)
Stay tuned!
This will work, one way or another and deliver good results!
At last, the skies over Kent cleared last night for a few hours. I was finally able to photograph Comet Lulin.
This is something of a relief…
For the past three weeks, I’ve been making maps of Lulin’s projected position for literally thousands of visitors.
Lulin close to Regulus, plus "streak", Feb 27th
What if I hadn’t seen it myself?
Anyway, I have now. :)
The image on the right shows Lulin close to the star Regulus, in the constellation of Leo.
Between them is an orange ”streak”. I’m not sure exactly what it was, probably an aircraft. But it’s interesting.
(PS. It has since been pointed out… if you look carefully, you can see the periodically flashing white and double-red lights, of a high-flying aircraft)
The image was captured with my Canon 1000D dslr camera, through the ED80 600 mm focal length refractor.
It’s a single frame of 2 minute exposure at ISO 800.
I actually took about 15 frames with different exposure times. I shall try my hand at stacking some of the best, to see if I can produce better images after processing.
Here’s the best single frame shot of Lulin I have found, so far. It was a 3 minute exposure. You can see from the star shapes, there is some tracking error. I need to work on a better North alignment of the mount.
Comet Lulin, February 27th (click for larger)
I wrote yesterday about my remote imaging of the Orion Alnitak area.
Well, Robin Scagell read it and noticed my image of the Flame nebula.
I said in the post, the images were unprocessed – just straight downloads from the Canon camera. So he quickly ran the small image I had shown, through his Photoshop software.
To my surprise, he pointed out that the Horsehead nebula was discernable in the image, after auto-adjusting the color levels. …continue reading Image Processing My Orion Alnitak Flame Nebula Capture
