Expert Astrophotography Tips & Discussions | Share Your Photos!

[MadScientist 1000]

Saturn is up right now, Jupiter is not (until early morning). Start with your largest eyepiece (I'd guess they gave you a 15mm or so), then put a barlow lens on it after you get the planet centered.

What if you just have 1 and half of an eye? Any suggestions there?

 

[bigzul]

Saturn is up right now, Jupiter is not (until early morning). Start with your largest eyepiece (I'd guess they gave you a 15mm or so), then put a barlow lens on it after you get the planet centered.

hey i didnt gt a barlow with mine but how much magnification is required to see Jupiter like in ur pics a 900mm focal divided my a 10mm eye peiece shoudl give me 100* mag

 

[bigzul]

Here is one of my shots of the Lunar eclipse. I posted it in the general discussion forums but obviously it belongs here aswell.

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/2113/lunareclipse030307hb7.jpg

hey what telescope did you use

 

[Kurdt]

I didn't use a telescope. I used a 300mm lens on my camera.

 

[sas3]

There are some pictures of lightning that I took the other night.
In my Blog
They are not astro photos but I figured you would like to see them anyway.

 

[Digz]

Hello

Hi Guys, I am new here and there appears to be some really great stuff going on.

Ive been into astronomy for a few years and I am recently beginning to take it more seriously. I've got a Celestron 675 Telescope and I am looking to upgrade it soon.

Im also an amateur photographer and want to extend my skills into the world of astrophotography and this looks like a great place to start.

So to start I thought I would attach a couple of photos. One from the recent lunar ecplise and one from my second attempt at astrophotography. The first is a series of 4 images of the various stages of the eclipse. The second is a 27 image stack looking towards Orion.

 

[russ_watters]

Very nice. I like the wide-angle shots, but don't have the equipment for that right now.

 

[russ_watters]

I've made a lot of recent updates to my website. Here's something that took me forever to take. It is 8.5 hours of exposure (at f 7.5), taken over about two weeks. I think, Astronuc, that you are right about my skies being a severe limiting factor. At 8.5 hours, even at f7.5, I should have a whole lot better s/n ratio. Still, not too bad...

 

[russ_watters]

This one's better. It doesn't have the dim outer arms of a spiral galaxy, so it doesn't need quite so much s/n ratio.

 

[Burnsys]

I took this one with a borrowed Galileo Reflector, D:114 F:7.9 , 20mm eyepiece
I just placed a Sony DSC H5 on the eyepiece.

I am going to an astronomy club and i am considering to build a 150mm reflector to use for astrophotography.
I was also looking for an ecuatorial mount, the EQ4, i eard it can be motorized, i can get one for $300 without motors, what do you recomend??

 

[neutrino]

Here's some beginner astrophotography: Crux and Alpha and Beta Centauri. This is the first time I have actually "processed" an image (followed a set of cookbook instructions to remove LP, online). Didn't bother to remove the noise. I think the unprocessed one shows more stars.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1098/525227250_27cdce84c2_b.jpg

 

[Brinx]

I've made a lot of recent updates to my website. Here's something that took me forever to take. It is 8.5 hours of exposure (at f 7.5), taken over about two weeks. I think, Astronuc, that you are right about my skies being a severe limiting factor. At 8.5 hours, even at f7.5, I should have a whole lot better s/n ratio. Still, not too bad...

It's still a nice pic, indeed. I have one question regarding combining the separate exposures: did you have to re-align them, or were they all in the correct orientation already (requiring just a translation to match up)? I'm asking this in relation to fixing relative rotations between the different exposures: rotating them to mach orientations would inevitably mean that you lose some detail.

 

[lanman]

I have a Celestron C4.5 reflector telescope, and a Minolta XR-5 (I think) camera. I got the parts to connect the two, but found that I couldn't get it to focus. To make the connection, first the lens assembly must be removed from the camera. How can it be focused once it's on the telescope?

 

[russ_watters]

Some Newtonians don't have enough in-focus travel to focus some cameras. You can try modifying the focuser assembly (ie, getting a shorter one) or using a focal reducer or barlow to alter the focal length.

 

[sas3]

Has anyone here tried the new version of Google Earth with Google Sky, just wondering what you though of it.
One very interesting thing about it is you can create and share your own imagery.

 

[Chronos]

A camera adapter should solve the problem, lanman - e.g.,
http://www.telescope.com/shopping/p...=PRODUCT&iMainCat=3&iSubCat=240&iProductID=73

 

[Telmerk]

Need help about digital cameras

Dear Astrophotographer-Forumers!

A would like to get some help from You! I need a digital camera for my work that has the following capabilities:

- Minimum 1fps image capturing rate
- ...at 2MP size at least.
- and all these thing WITHOUT any external control (I mean PC-conrtol, or something else. Just the camera on its own.)
- and this should work for at least 2 hours.

Do you know any type of camera that can match these things?
I hope you can help!

Thank so much in advance!

Kind regards,

T. the M.

 

[russ_watters]

I'm not sure such a thing is possible - the problem is memory. Shooting 1sec, 2mp exposures for 2 hours will require 30 gigs of it. You may be able to do it with a hard drive equipped digital video camera, but I'm not sure if they are that programmable.

 

[Telmerk]

Dear Russ_Waters,

Yes, I considered this problem, but I can imagine, that it is possible to change the memory card (SD, for example) when it is needed. The camera signs with a beep, or something. . .

Of course I can make a compromise, if there is something that can do it at a lower fps.

Many thanks,

Telmerk

 

[chemisttree]

Perhaps you should look at stand alone, high resolution, wireless, security cameras. googled it here.

 

[russ_watters]

Well, if swapping out the card is an option, you can use a DSLR.

 

[Yannick]

I don't have to much experience in astrophotography, but here are two pictures i would like to show you:

1. Comet 17P Holmes (1. Nov., 23:00 GMT), stack of 60 Photos with 30 seconds exposure, f=200mm SLR objective mounted on a FLI Maxcam CM7 CCD camera. The "spiral" was probably caused by a hot pixel or dark current. 30 dark frames combined and subtracted from the image. I would have wished to be able to take photos with the telescope, but the guiding turned out to be too inaccurate...

2. Moon mosaic. Same ccd camera as for the comet. Telescope: 5" Mak-Cass
(! Filesize !) http://www.astrospectroscopy.com/unterseiten/bilder/mondmosaik.jpg"

I hope you can understand my poor English

Yannick

 

[russ_watters]

Great moon mosaic.

 

[turbo]

Yannick, I agree with Russ (at least on this non-political issue) That is a wonderful image! Here is a site that is inhabited by some of the best amateur astrophotographers in the world (not an overstatement!), and you should start posting your stuff there.
http://forum.ourdarkskies.com/

One of our members (Noel Carboni of Florida) is a post-processing genius and he and his astophotographer partner Greg (in England) have produced some of the most amazing images you've ever seen. They have a book in the works that will be a best-seller amongst astronomers (and not necessarily just amateurs). Once you are a member of ODS, Noel will give you (FREE, yes, really FREE) a set of his actions for Photoshop that will help you get the most out of your images. The web-master, Vincent, is a good guy and fun to deal with, too. Come on over. Neutrino (a member here) invited me to go there a year or two ago, and I appreciate that heads-up!

 

[IsotropicSpinManifol]

I took a picture of Jupiter's moons without a telescope. This is from my 300 mm zoom lens on my Canon Digital Rebel:
http://orbitsimulator.com/orbiter/jupiter.jpg

thats cool. It would be an awesome party trick.

 

[baywax]

Possible ancestors of the Milky Way: Hubble

Hi.

I thought this might be of interest to those of you who haven't seen this article.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/babyversionsofmilkywayspotted

Great photos everyone! Very enjoyable and educationable... eh?!

 

[NerfMonkey]

Second attempt at photographing the moon (holding a digicam to the eyepiece):

http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/5214/telescoping11208006tc2.jpg

The shadowed part was actually also visible but when I turned up the brightness on the camera enough to see it the cratered side became white and blinding and I lost all the detail.

 

[russ_watters]

It's been a crappy winter so far, so this is my first deep-sky image since the fall. It is my first HaRGB image and the first time I combined multiple different exposure lengths in one luminance image (to avoid blowing-out the core). It is M-42, taken with my DSI II Pro and ED80 and a .63 focal reducer. Obviously, coma is a problem with the focal reducer. I need to either go easier on the reduction or find one that works with an APO (instead of one that's designed for a CAT).

The image is 30x5sec, 20x30sec Ha; 20x10s R; 20x15s G,B. I also took some 45 sec Ha that I didn't use in the final image.

I also took two panes of the Flame/Horshead nebulas in Ha. Hopefully I can do the color later this week (I only get about 4 hours before Orion goes behind my house).

 

[yiuscott]

Hi

I am a beginner in astronomy and so my pictures are no way as impressive as the other member's...

I took this just before christmas. It was a full moon. I took it using a Orion skyview pro 6" I think the scope was slightly out of collimation that day...

 

[russ_watters]

That's a darn good start. What kind of camera did you use?

 

[yiuscott]

Its a three year old digital camera, Lumix fx-8.
I took it using the scenary setting...

 

[turbo]

For those with telescopes who don't want to deal with prime-focus photography just yet, you can still get some pretty nice shots of the heavens using piggy-back photography. Before I had the proper equipment to do prime-focus photography, I used to piggyback my Bronica on my JSO telescope and do long exposures of fairly wide areas of the sky. Unless you have a short focal-length telescope, or want to produce mosaics, it would be difficult to get images like this. This is the North America nebula and surrounding area. I scanned the print (which has faded and browned a bit over the years) and photoshopped it to bring the colors back into balance.

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x318/turbo-1/NAneb.jpg

 

[twinsen]

Yer piggybacking a camera lens is a great way to start off in astrophotography. Heres one of the orion nebula taken with a 300mm f4 canon lens.

Alex

 

[turbo]

Very nice!

 

[yiuscott]

I took this photo of Jupiter using a Nikon D60 by prime focus through a Orion Skyview Pro 6.