Tuesday, 11 January 2011

Astrophotography - the Moon and Jupiter

For the first time in months I got the big telescope out in the back garden and took some pictures, of the Moon and Jupiter. Here's a colour one of the moon:

moon 09Jan2011 iso400 COL

I did a couple in black & white as well:
moon 09Jan2011 iso100 BW

moon 09Jan2011 iso200 BW

They were all taken by connecting the SLR camera directly to the telescope, with no lens in between. The telescope is a Skywatcher newtonian reflector, 200mm diameter and 1000mm focal length. That means it's like connecting a 1000mm F5 lens to the SLR! I actually took about 10 photos and stacked them using Registax to get a sharper image.

I took some more pictures by recording video using my Panasonic FZ8 compact - this is used with an eyepiece in the telescope, allowing you to try different magnifications, but it's a lot harder to focus. The video is again processed using Registax. Here's a close-up of some craters on the moon:
moon 09Jan2011 craters

A couple of Jupiter, using different settings in Registax:
Jupiter 09Jan2011a

Jupiter 09Jan2011b

and another of Jupiter at a higher magnification, but a bit blurry - the "seeing" wasn't that great, the view was shimmering a lot due to turbulence in the atmosphere:
Jupiter 09Jan2011c

Anyway, very pleased to get these pics of Jupiter, they're my first. Hope to get some more another time. Finally, here's the SLR camera next to the telescope tube, just for scale:
P1080384

Mike

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