Herring Gull and Starling through a telescope

Here's a few pics I took from the back garden, of birds on nearby house roofs. It was interesting watching a herring Gull close up. It was about 50m away, and had no idea I was watching it, so it was behaving naturally. From a distance they look like they're just sat there, being bored, but through the telescope it was clear that they were always on the lookout for something interesting, craning their necks to get a better view:

Here's one on another chimney, also about 50m away:

From the look of the feathers, this one's only just become an adult - there's still some traces of the brown juvenile feathers around the head:

This one was doing some preening as well as looking around:

I got a few pics of a Starling too:

I'm not sure what it was finding in the chimney pot:

This one was also preening:

and then having a good shake afterwards to get the feathers straight

Finally, I took a photo to give you an impression of the level of magnification being used. Here's some trees, and I've not cropped the picture at all. From looking at a map, I think they are about 600m away:

Mike

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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:

I did a couple in black & white as well:

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:

A couple of Jupiter, using different settings in Registax:

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:

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:

Mike

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Telescope SLR pictures

A short while ago I posted some pictures of birds taken using a telescope. Well, that was the small telescope, which is 90mm diameter, but has a focal length of 1250mm. This means it acts like an f14 1250mm lens, so with the SLR connected that's about 25x zoom, and that's just too much for the diameter, so the pictures come out dim. So I'd been using our compact camera with that telescope, and got some reasonable pictures.

Today however, I finally got my big telescope out of the loft for the first time since we moved, set it up, corrected the collimation, and took it out in the back garden see how it was with the SLR. Bear in mind this was at 3:50pm, so the light was fading fast, but I managed to get a few pics of starlings in a tree about 50-60m away:

That one's cropped, but here's a full frame, so you can see what's possible:

It works better as it's 200mm diameter, with a focal length of 1000mm, so it gives about 20x zoom and acts like an f5 lens. It's also easier to use the SLR with, as it has a port to connect it directly.

We've also been at the wood, clearing up some last remaining jobs, like this large edge Sycamore:

There's a few awkward Sycamore that we left last year, but now we have a decent winch, we're going to tackle them in the next few days. There's also a couple of Sycamore to come down that we're going to get a friend to fell, as they're bigger than I've trained for. We'll then process them on the ground.

Mike

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The Orion Nebula

Just a quick post, to show you a photo I took through my telescope last night of the Orion Nebula:
It's actually made from 19 photos, taken at ISO1600 and 5" exposures, through my Skywatcher Explorer 200 telescope. The photos have been stacked using a neat piece of software called Registax. What I need to do some time is take me smaller telescope up the woods and connect a camera to it - should get some great long-distance photos of birds then, if they stay still long enough...

Mike

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A brazier and the stars

On Friday our neighbour Andrew collected some logs to burn on his upcoming caravan trip, and last night he gave his brazier a test run. He has to use this because caravan sites are sometimes a bit precious about their turf apparently... Anyway, it works really nicely:
This was just a little test though - I think he's going to build a much bigger fire in it when he's away!

As it went dark I got my telescope out to look at the stars. Andy and Rachel (my brother and his wife) recently gave me an adaptor to connect my SLR camera directly to the telescope, so I did a little test run with it:
There wasn't anything particularly exciting, so it's just some random stars. I'm going to need a bit of practice with it, but it was good to be able to get some decent photos first time.

Mike

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