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Andy's Dodgy Astrophotography Page 2

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5th March 2009:

OK, here is the moon again, using the f/3.3 focal reducer, and I have definitely got rid of the coma problems, but I am still totally confused by the software, so this is a single frame. I wanted to get a 50 frame stack, but stacks always seems to look worse than just one frame... I don't know why... very annoying... obviously I am missing something. Interesting how obvious the mountains (or crater rims) are on the horizon.

Here is another.

25th March 2009:

Now, getting into taking pictures of planets... here is one of Saturn, with the ring system more or less edge on at the moment, and what should be five or six of its moons, but the moons are impossible to see, drowned out by the planet, and the magnification is too low, depite using a x2 lens in the circuit. So I have just ordered a x5 lens, which should help.

21st April 2009:

Saturn again, with the new x5 lens, poor conditions and very fuzzy, but a bigger image. Can I just about see cloud bands on the planet...?

25th September 2009:

Jupiter... as usual things looked much better by eye than through the camera, because I still cannot get to grips with the photo processing, which is less user friendly than a cornered rat. There are two of its moons, Io (innermost) and Europa to the right, though Callisto and Ganymede were also easily visible further out. This picture does them no justice at all really.

This is a bit better, the Great Star Cluster in Hercules, M13. Again, it's better by eye, and is a very nice object to see, and one day I'll get some colour shots of it.

29th September 2009:

The Moon and Jupiter in the same part of the sky... taken with my trusty old Kodak digital camera at 10x zoom.

29th January 2010:

At last, a clear sky. This is a composite, of the full moon of course, well, about 8 hours short of full. It is made up of about 12 separate images. To get the largest possible field of view, I was using the f/3.5 focal reducer, but with the electric microfocuser which proved to be a mistake as the camera chip was too far back and I got some coma, which you can see in various places round the edge. But luckily I had enough images to stitch something together, and although you can see the joins it's not too bad for a first attempt. If you want the full size JPEG it is here and a large bitmap (10MB) is here. Those ray craters look impressive in direct sunlight.

31st January 2010:

Mars. You can see the polar ice cap (solid CO₂) and a few vague markings on the surface, but I don't think that my camera is particularly good for planets... I can't quite work out why it shouldn't be, so at the moment I am still assuming that the problem may be a faulty user. It seems to be better for the moon and nebulae and bigger stuff. Planets are too small and maybe I just cannot get a wide enough range of magnification with the fixed CCD chip. I also ended up with a fair amount of condensation on the corrector plate, which I didn't notice until too late, and that couldn't have helped.

For comparison, Colin's photo from the night before...

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