Astrophotos, anyone?

[Daniel Browning]

Looks great, Jon. Nice shots! I haven't tried anything outside our solar system yet, except at ultra wide angles.

[Jon Ruyle]

Thanks, Daniel.


You can see the stars in the dumbell shot are not perfectly round. I was autoguiding at 400mm, probably should have barlowed it. I'm still a little clumsy at finding guidestars, however, so I find the shorter focal length easier. I wasn't polar alligned very well, don't know how much that matters. Rather than one 43 minute exposure, three 15 minute exposures might have worked better, even when guiding (though it was my first autoguided shot, so I wanted to see what was possible).


And I need to get to a dark site []


Hope to get better results as time goes on.


BTW, why not post some of your solar system shots, Daniel? I'd like to see them.

[wusstigphoto]

okay... I'll bite


Not sure why i want to embarrass myself but here goes...


Several years back, Grandma bought the kids a Meade ETX-125. At the time, my only good camera was a Sony F707 so these were taken with that. Heck, I don't even remember how I took them but I have been meaning to get the Canon set up on this tele to see what it can do... whenever I get around to ordering what I need, I'll try and post similar pics to compare.


Moonscape...





Jupiter...

[Jon Ruyle]

I wouldn't worry about embarrassing yourself... we're not trying to rival Hubble, are we? []


Both the moon and jupiter are bright objects, so maybe you just aimed the camera at the eyepiece and took the picutre. I did a little of that with my canon G2 and 12 1/2" f/5 reflector.


Assuming "the canon" is a dslr, you could try prime focus photography with it, though if I remember correctly, the ETX only has a 1 1/4" focuser so you probably wouldn't be able to illuminate the whole ccd. But who cares?


There is a fair amount of detail visible in your picture of Jupiter. Did you try a little sharpening and turning up the saturation?


The ETX-125 is a nice scope... my kids aren't getting one that nice

[btaylor]

Not quite as close up as some of the others here but this is one I got on Friday night.


Not the greatest in terms of how many stars are in the sky as there was a 3/4 moon. Mostly took this one to try out stacking in CS4.


Setup was: Canon 40D, Canon 10-22mm @ 11mm and f/3.5, Exposure: 10sec, ISO 250


This was a total of 426 (that's not a typo) images stacked together and the foreground image (some light painting with a flashlight) put over the top. Took a VERY long time for CS4 to process by the way. I think there was about 6 hours in post for this one, probably more a function of me learning to use photoshop than anything else.


[img]/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.00.28.34/3776952633_5F00_284e5f3ca0_5F00_b.jpg[/img]

[Oren]

Very cool btaylor, "wow" is what came to my mind the moment I saw it.

[alex]

So I've always been interested in astrophotography, and ever since I've had the 450D, I've wanted to try it out. Is getting star trails as easy as putting the camera on a sturdy tripod and using BULB to get an exposure upwards of say 30 min?