Category Archives: Images

Images, Observation Log, Thoughts & Ramblings

Is this thing still on?

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If you’ve been by here in the last… well since my last post, you may have wondered whether or not I was still updating here. Now you know! 🙂

In my area of Florida most of the summer months are hot, hazy, humid, and um… hot. In addition to it being extremely uncomfortable to be outside fully clothed (mosquitos), I imagine it’s not good for optics to be soaking in the jungle air. Hence my dearth of entries.

What have I been doing?

We’ll I’m in the process of constructing a counter balance system for my telescope which will allow me to couple my (NEW!) Canon 300D Digital Rebel SLR camera to it without stripping the axis locks or straining the clock drive. I took it out one afternoon for some solar observing and my fork mount wouldn’t hold. I’m waiting on one more part then I will start fabricating in earnest. I aim to be ready for Mars in October! More on that when it happens.

I’ve also made plans to construct a Hartmann Mask using a similar technique to the linked example.

I’ve started putting together an image processing tutorial. I’m no expert by any means but I realize that I sometimes take for granted what I DO know (Thanks Tom!). I plan to start with some just some basic image correction techniques moving into the realm of more “subjective image interpretation” … as I’ve just named it.

Last, all the hoopla today regarding the Space Shuttle’s Return to Flight inspired me to dig deep into the archives to find a picture I remember taking back in February of 2001. This image of the vapor trail from the launch of STS-98 was taken from my front yard at approximately 7:40 pm EST… almost an hour and a half after liftoff. The sun had set locally but I could still see sunlight hitting the vapor trail in the upper atmosphere. I’m looking northeast here so that disk that appears to be the hazy sun is actually the over-exposed moon.

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Unfortunately for me, the sky was too hazy to see today’s launch.

Images, Observation Log

Jupiter Revisited

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Since the seeing has been so poor lately and the moon is not rising until after midnight, I thought I’d fool a little with re-processing some of my older images now that I’ve had a bit more experience with it.

Below is an image of Jupiter from my observation run with the Meade LPI on May 6th. I used Lynkeos for the stacking in this instance (see the Software sidebar to the right) averaging about 100 frames. I did some post tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. If you compare this to my earlier image processing attempt (Jupiter Tonight) for this run, you will see I was able to tease out much more contrast and detail here. You will also see I mislabeled the moons in my earlier work as well! DOH!

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Images, Observation Log

Twilight Moon

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I went out this evening at dusk to fool with the ScopeTronix 40mm eyepiece. The Moon was waxing crescent about 4.4 days old. I went out at early dusk because it was due to set at 12:29 AM and was already into the west — about 40° above the horizon. I took some shots in different zoom and Barlow configurations just to see what I could come up with and even threw on the Moon filter towards the end for good measure.

I really like this eyepiece! It has a great FOV with the camera. I think the batteries in scope were dying though, as I could hear the focus motor straining and the slew controls became sluggish and unresponsive (Oh will I ever achieve perfect alignment?). So I don’t think it was tracking properly. I have the power supply so I guess next time I go out I’ll need to run an extension cord.

I should really remember to horizontally flip these BEFORE annotating them… anyway, here they are.











I’m going to call 050512_016 the “money shot” for the evening. 🙂

I combined two of the images above using Photoshop, to create this extra wide view.

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On a different note, I had the good sense tonight to think about what I was going to do BEFORE I went out. So instead of taking out the full kit of everything I own and fumbling in the dark with packaging and whatnot, I had it all prepared in a mini gear kit. I even got the idea to clip the mini Maglite on the visor of my baseball cap! Not only could I see what I was doing, I had both hands free and no mosquitos flying into my mouth.

Images, Observation Log

“There’s a little black spot on the Sun today…”

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A few actually…

Took the scope out this afternoon to try out the new ScopeTronix 40mm Plössl. I was excited to get it as up until now I have been unable to image the entire disk of the Sun or Moon in a single frame. FINALLY! 🙂 Again, a difficult focus but at least with the Olympus I’m shooting through the eyepiece so I can get it reasonably in focus before snapping the camera on.

I was probably out there about 45 minutes. The great thing about the ETX90 is you can just grab it and bring it outside in 2 minutes. It’s really convenient — and I gotta tell you, if it wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use it… I’m lazy. Anyway, here are the results of the session.