As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I got the entry level subscription to SLOOH. The "Student" level subscription at SLOOH costs you 50 USD per year and allows you to piggyback on 5 separate "missions". You can also choose 5 missions from the SLOOH catalog instead of piggybacking as well. However unlike higher level subscriptions, this does ...
My last attempt at photographing Saturn was posted on an FB group and one of the members quickly pointed out that me shooting at a high ISO shouldn't necessarily give that bad of an image. After experimenting with a few different stackings, I got some interesting results.100 frames In my previous attempt (pictured above), I stacked only 100 frames of ...
My subscription with SLOOH is still active and I thought that I will shoot through it while the monsoon season is over in Sri Lanka. My target of choice this time was the Pleiades (M45). The Pleiades, also known as Severn Sisters are an open star cluster. While it is a "cluster" the distance between the stars are massive. If ...
About a month or so back I realised that there is another problem with the 4SE, it wouldn't power up. Firstly I thought this was due to a battery drain, and that's the first thing I tried.While it worked once, after about half an hour of sky watching it stopped working again. It is quite improbable for a new set ...
The year 2015 kicked off with a new comet incoming. Comet C/2014 Q2 is still on its approach towards the sun and is expected to be closest to the sun on 30th Jan. Right now it is just inside the constellation Eridanus Just below Orion.Cutting the mumbo-jumbo out:The details of the comet can be described well using the standard astronomy ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
I was quite determined that I shouldn't let another year pass from my last post. The trip last week which was a failed Orionids attempt gave me an opportunity capture a well understood, but less known phenomenon relating to the Moon. Given the International Observe the Moon Day already a day behind (28th of Oct), I figured I'll make use ...
