Mike's Astro Photos

Here’s an animated gif of comet lulin, a once per million year comet discovered in 2007. There are 9 frames that make up the animation, 30 seconds exposures for each frame.

Comet Lunin Feb 21, 2009

You can tell how fast the comet is moving by looking at the stars in the background (this is a total elapsed time of less than 5 minutes). That thing is bookin.

Sirius is one of the brightest stars in the sky, if not the brightest. It looks like a diamond when you look at it thru the eye piece.

Sirius

I had a great session Friday Febuary 6th 2009. It started out with numerous shots of m42 (my novice obsession). Later in the night I cycled thru several objects in the goto tour. All of the pictures with the exception of M42 are single shots. The lunar and Saturn shot are short exposures < 1 sec with relatively low ISO. The deep space shots are 30 second exposures @ 800 ISO. All shots were taken with a Canon 20Da DSLR camera attached to a CPC1100 fork mounted scope. No guiding is taking place, the 3 star align GOTO tracking is enabled.

Random Star Cluster -- not sure which one.

Ghost of Jupiter

The Moon

M42 Orion Nebula

Saturn

Unknown Aberration

Here’s my first attempt at photographing M42 — Orion’s Nebula. This is a single 30 second exposure, taken with a canon 20da dslr camera and a celestron CPC 1100 fork mounted SCT. I was not eq-aligned during this shot and no guiding was taking place (auto or manual).

First attempt of M42 -- Orion's Nebula

M42 is one of the easiest and most spectacular nebulas to see and photograph. There are a lot of problems with this photo, but I’m happy with it as a first try. Hopefully future versions will get better.