It’s been fairly eventful the last couple of weeks. With the Christmas holidays there was of course little time for observing with anything more sophisticated than Ye Olde Mk. 1 Eyeballs. After Christmas I took advantage of a warm night and set my mount up for a little testing after installing my Warps Drive upgrade …
While it can be demonstrated that any mount with the proper equipment and gobs of patience is capable of long exposure astrophotography it can be difficult and extremely challenging. For your pleasure is the following comedy of errors. This image of M27 was taken on my first outing to a dark sky site. We dodged clouds until midnight, I took forever to get my alignment done, I forgot my focus masks and I forgot to reset the ISO on the camera before beginning my test exposures leading to a 10 minute exposure for a single frame. It was then that all my batteries decided they’d had enough.
M42 taken December 2008 from Dallas, TX. While the local skies aren’t the worst I’ve seen in a city they’re still far from perfect. The large population of high pressure sodium and mercury lamps from city streets and local shops floods out most of the stars. M42 is only visible with the naked eye on …
M13 is a favorite subject for many observers, myself included. I’ve looked at it from the backyard with my own eyeball. I’ve seen it through my 8×50 binoculars. I’ve looked at it in a Dobsonian with a photomultiplier. This globular cluster contains over 100,000 stars that are all held in this fuzzy ball by the …
My mission is to get people in urban areas to think about what’s in the sky above them. Just because you’re in the city doesn’t mean the stars don’t exist or that you can’t see or understand really cool celestial events.