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

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.

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%.

Here’s the first astro photo (video) I’ve ever taken.

The motion of the moon thru the picture is actually coming from the Earth’s rotation and not scope movement. I had just gotten the scope setup for the first time when I took this and didn’t have any tracking on. I used the celestron Next Image CCD / Webcam to take this movie on a Celestron CPC 1100 telescope.