Round Top was only my second 10k peak summit attempt (my first attempt being the nearby Red Lake peak). At Red Lake we were never able to get GPS over 10k ft for some reason. I think we didn’t find the true summit after searching around for a while,
Winter has returned, and with it, a chance to look back on the progress I made this year. M42 was one of my very first attempts at astrophotography! This week I was able to capture 57 minutes of exposure with the telescope, thats a huge increase over January’s 34
Tonight I decided to try something a little bit different. I show a wider field image with an 85mm lens instead of the telescope. The coloring is very red, but I’m not sure how much is due to Light Pollution or not. There are definitely some dusty structures visible.
I wanted to share some of the different steps of the image taking process I used for M51. There are 4 different types of images taken to generate the single output image * Lights: These are the photos of the galaxy as you would expect * Darks: These are photos with the
I went out again and got another 40 minutes of exposure for M51. This time I was much more diligent about flats and darks. I ended up stacking tonights data and the data from 5-28-16 to give ~80 minutes of integration time. DSS makes doing multi day stacks pretty easy
After seeing what 10 minutes of exposure could do I was really excited to get more. Tonight I decided to go for as long as I could get away with. The top of my goals list were: * Better alignment * More Time * Darks/Flats I was able to get 40 minutes
I finally got fed up with my home made barndoor tracker. It worked most of the time, but it was really sensitive to a lot of factors. One of which was the orientation of the camera. If the camera hung over the hinge the tracking was entirely at the wrong
Orion is finally back out and there was a break in the El Nino clouds, so I finally made an attempt to shoot the Orion Nebula (M42). * Canon 6D * 24-105mm F/4 @ 105mm F/5.6 * 17 2s Exposures @ 3200ISO * No Darks or Flats This was my first attempt at
Miscellaneous
I recently painted a set of floating shelves from Ikea. I was definitely being lazy, but I didn’t want to deal with painting one side at a time while waiting for it to dry. So for a quick hack I built myself a little mounting platform like below. I
Finally got some time and clear skies to test the tracker. The light pollution in my back yard is horrible. I think I need to go travel somewhere with dark skies now.
Stabilizing My first couple usages of the tracker went pretty well, but it was a nightmare to setup the polar alignment. There was a lot of wiggle where the tripod mount screwed to the tracker. I didn’t feel safe with the amount of wiggle, and every time I adjusted
I got some clear skies and tried out the tracker again. I’ve added a finder scope to help align the tracker better and I think it helped. I tried out the Pleiades since they are relatively easy to find, and the Moon was too bright in the other part
I made a barndoor tracker based on the directions here. http://www.garyseronik.com/?q=node/52 I made a lot of mistakes I’m still trying to get the most out of the tracker, but here is the basic layout. The only major change I made was to use
I took another stab at Jupiter after reading some more tutorials on stacking in Photoshop. These were generated at ISO 800 with 1/60sec shutter speeds This time instead of using prime focus methods I used eyepiece projection + a 25mm eyepiece. This gave a bit better zoom but I feel
I took some more shots of the moon last night. This one came out pretty well. I’m getting much better with the focus, but I’m still having some trouble getting the right exposure.