Mike's Astro Photos

Here’s a time lapse video of the moon setting from June 28, 2009. This was about 1 hour and 20 minutes of shooting 30 second exposures at iso 800. There was a 20 second pause in between each shot. I imported aprox 180 still pictures into imovie, adjusted the play time on each one to 00:00:05 and then exported the movie. About 1/2 thru the movie I messed with the tripod which shifted the frame. I won’t do that next time. This was my first experience with time lapse and it think it turned out pretty cool. Its a lot easier than shooting with the scope ;0

Milkway with Vega

Here’s a picture of the Milkway with Vega. This picture is a stacked composite of 12, 2 minute exposures at ISO800. The camera was mounted ontop of the scope piggyback style. I got my first successful attempts at the milkway last night and this is the results of my second night. The scope and camera were pointed at the zenith (straight up) which helped out a lot with the image / light pollution.

Full Moon June 6, 2009

The kids were acting so crazy during the day on Saturday I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if there’s a full moon tonight.’ Go figure, when I went outside to hit up the scope this moon lit up the night sky. Any hopes of capturing DSO’s were gone when I saw this sucker, so I decided to make the best of it and stay in the solar system for the night. I took about 100 pictures and settled on this one. I used the f/6.3 focal reducer so I could get the whole thing in frame and I just barely did it. The camera ISO was set to 200 and the exposure time was 1/125. To get the nice grey moon color, I brought the picture into photoshop, did the initial auto-fix, then did auto-levels and auto-contrast. Also threw in an unsharpen mask and auto sharpen. Turned out pretty good for a rookie like me.

Jupiter May 25th

Here is a pretty bad picture of Jupiter. It was the first time I’ve ever photographed Jupiter, the first time I’ve ever seen Jupiter through a telescope. The night was a lot more interesting than this picture. I was at a neighbors house for a poker game. I got out of the game early and headed home and told the guys I would be on the scope to come over when the game was done. They ended up coming over to my house at 3:00 am to play pool. At 4:00 am they we’re leaving and we decided to check the scope before they headed home. That’s when I saw Jupiter for the first time and of course I had to try and take a picture. My setup was off that night to begin with (bad alignment) and I was really tired and a little drunk. Alchohal and astro photography don’t go well together. Next time will be better.

New Moon May 2nd, 2009

I shot this a month ago today but just got around to posting it now. I used a f/6 focal reducer when I took this picture. The focal reducer didn’t work very well on other DSO’s as it left a nasty vignetting problem on the pictures. Its an ok accessory for when you want to have a wider field of view, but I don’t think its very good for imaging. It did work out pretty well for the moon though, without it I can’t get the full moon into the frame due to the high powered zoom. The adapter basically reduces the zoom by 40%.

Bode's Galaxy May 31, 2009

It may not look like much but this image is the result of about 3 weeks of work and about 1.25 hours of exposure time. The 3 weeks that led up to this image mostly centered around drift alignment and proper / perfect polar alignment. We had plenty of technical snaffus during the period, including shooting for a week at ISO200, bad balance and tracking problems. When all was said and done, I learned a whole lot and finally got a good shot of bode’s galaxy (good for me at least).