Amateur astrophotography

Charlie in Dayton

Rabid radioactive stargazer and JREF kid
C
Joined
Aug 3, 2001
Messages
1,086
The field is open to those of the backyard stargazer/astronomer/astrophotographer persuasion.
SCOPES: If you can pick it up and move it all (even if it takes a couple of trips), you're in. Pier-mounts and the like go in Pro class.
Be it scope or just good lenses on the camera, let's see what ya got.

I'll go first.

Pentax K1000
100 speed Walgreen's film
300mm f/5.6 with 2x teleconverter giving 600mm at f/11
exposures at around 1/125 and 1/250 (gotta check on that part)
1 hour Walgreen's machine film processing

Moon09092003a.jpg

Moon09092003nr2.jpg


Once I get the camera mount sorted out on the big scope at the museum, I may very well start a new thread for Pro class instruments.

Okay, y'all...whatcha got?
 
It's not the moon, it's Uranis. hahahahahahahhahahahahha

hahahahhahahha

haha


hmmmmmm.


I'd like to apologize to everyone who read my last two posts.
 
ManfredVonRichthoffen said:
It's not the moon, it's Uranis. hahahahahahahhahahahahha

hahahahhahahha

haha


hmmmmmm.


I'd like to apologize to everyone who read my last two posts.
Click to expand...

Don't apologise man...you crack me up!

P.
 
Here's an image that I took and posted in an old thread about Jupiter:

attachment.php


Don't remember the exact details or the specs of my telescope. 900mm maybe? 6" or so reflector, with a Philips Toucam stuck in the eyepiece socket. The video frames were stacked with Registax and sharpened in Photoshop.

These were taken with a Fuji S602Z, which has a 6x zoom:

Orion (a stack of two 15sec exposures - I love the colours):
orion.jpg

The Pleiades:
pleiades.jpg

The Hyades:
hyades.jpg


This was taken with the same camera via the eyepiece of a 14" or so Meade (handheld so it's not perfect):

saturn.jpg


I've got a much better shot of the Pleiades at home which I'll post tonight.

David
 
If I only had better lens, I can get somewhat of a good magnification and capture the stars. Nevertheless, nice pictures we have here. :)
 
What I'd like to know is how that guy took a picture of Mars using a webcam...How? How?
 
Same way I took my picture of Jupiter. You put the webcam where the eyepiece normally goes (an old 35mm film tube container is useful, it's the right size and you can glue it to the webcam), then you can focus the image coming through the telescope direcly on to the CCD in the webcam.

Then you record like a normal video. When you have a lot of frames, you can use one of many freeware programs to align these individual images and stack them together. Most of the programs also have sophisticated sharpening thingies too, so you can recover a lot of detail.

Helps if you have a hi-power telescope too.

David
 
Not mine, but fellow Danish skeptic Mogens Winther and his students':

orionth-2.jpg

Orion Nebula

NGC1499d-s.jpg

California Nebula

fullmoon-2000-s.jpg

Full Moon

rgbcomet-s.jpg

Comet Hyakutake

Check out the gallery...
 
Charlie, I'm gonna have to apologize for putting up that picture, while it is a product of my work (and my two lab partners), and we were amateurs at the time, were weren't using amateur equipment. I guess I'm just really proud of it and wanted to show off.

If you're still interested in how I took it, we used the 40 inch reflector run by the University of Virginia. We took three filtered images (I, R, and V if I remember correctly) and combined them to make a the false color image I posted.

It's about the best thing I've done in the optical, and probably the last, since my interests have moved to things like this .
 
The guy who was my lab partner in EE school took this photo. I had to cut it down and increase the JPEG compression to get it under the 25KB maximum:
 
zer0vector said:

we used the 40 inch reflector run by the University of Virginia
Click to expand...

Hey, I got my Masters with that 'scope! Way back in in 1990, when the CCD on it was new. I doubt they still have the same camera on it. I spent many an August/September night in 1989 getting images of NGC 6826 and a few others. Kewl.

Are you at UVa? Say hi to the faculty for me.
 
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