JupiterAbout a week and a half back, I was trying to capture the Geminids. Given the awful location I live, it was a complete no-joy. However, just scanning the skies, figured that Jupiter was actually visible and decided to have a shot at it.Photo above is a single shot of Jupiter with Canon 550D, prime-focus on a Celestron 114EQ with ...
About two weeks ago I finally got my hands on the motor drive for my Astromaster 114EQ. I was debating whether I really need it or not and finally decided to just go for it. And over the weekend I had it installed and tested.To start off with, the motor drive arrived with minimal instructions. But that wasn't really a ...
As usual my sense of timing seems to be impeccable, I decided experiment with image stacking for deep space imagery when the monsoons are about to start. Ever since I made the decision, it's either been raining or completely overcast. I even had some difficulty in trying to do solar photography.Luck turned my side when I went on a trip ...
For about a month's time, I wasn't able to do anything interesting on astrophotography owing to the bad weather. I started some experimentation on solar photography and well that is not going that well either. However, last week I managed to snap some decent pics of the moon. For the longest time I thought that lunar photos do not need ...
In the last post, I wrote about what is collimation and what sort of an effect a non-collimated telescope has on imaging. Taking it from there, let's see what are the equipment we can use in collimating a telescope.No-Tools:Firstly let's ask the question whether we can collimate a telescope without almost any tool. It is possible for someone with real ...
For any reflecting telescope, collimation of the optics is one of the most important and regular tasks. Collimation simply refers to aligning the primary mirror and the secondary mirror along with the eye-piece. However, the job it self is not that simple.If a telescope is not collimated, the image it creates would not be in the same plane as the ...
We are going through the monsoon season again, and well needless to say, not a very great period for astrophotography. Had somewhat of a clear sky today and decided to snap some quick photos and stack them using Deep Sky Stacker.Crux - The Southern CrossIn the image above, in the thumbnail view, the main stars of crux is quite obvious. ...
With all the preparation yesterday and day before, I was quite hopeful that I could get a few decent shots of the transit. I was specifically planning for one good shot through the telescope and a time-lapse shot of the transit across the solar disc. So imagine my delight when I work up today morning and found this greeting me:So ...
Just a quick post on viewing the transit of Venus tomorrow:Timing You can find timing related information from http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/venus/city12-1.html and http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/transit12.html. For those of us from Sri Lanka, the transit will be visible from the sunrise it self. The peak of the transit would be around 07:30 AM. The transit will end around 10:21 AM. The latter link actually has ...
After getting necessary film to cover the whole aperture of the lens, I decided to try out a few shots in the morning. Starting off with the highest shutter speed of 1/4000, I realised that even that gives a VERY bright picture (as opposed to the 1/80-1/40 shutter speed which gave a "reasonably ok" view yesterday).Now here's a bit of ...
I noticed quite late that we are going to have another Venus - Solar transit in a few days and that is going to be the last Venus transit for almost a century. I have not done any serious solar viewing or photography before this. But the rarity of the event and the equipment I have now wants me to ...
For anyone who wants to get in to astrophotography, one of the obvious first questions is "How do I connect my camera to the telescope?". Well Celestron has an instructional video on how to. The 10min video covers all types of mounting/connecting methods like A-focal (mostly used with point and shoot cams), prime focus (used with DSLRs), web cam astrophotography, ...
Full MoonShot using Canon 550D with a 75-300mm camera. No telescope is used. Lunar cycles must've been one of the earliest cycles that have been identified by humans. In this series, we will be covering its entire change of phases with 27 photographs, one for each day between a full lunar cycle.The photograph shown here is taken using a Canon ...
Since a very young age, I have been interested in astronomy. When I was around 12, I built a telescope made out of a lens of my father's spectacles and an eye piece from a toy binocular. If I recall properly, it had a magnification power of x12 and I managed to see three of the four Galilean Moons of ...
