Adventures in Astrophotography

I woke up this morning to a beautiful crescent moon. It was just climbing above the mountains to the east of my home. I decided I needed to snag a shot of this. Once outside, the amount of Earthshine became apparent. This was actually going to be a nice shot. I quickly put the Canon Rebel XTi onto an old beater of a tripod and quickly attached my 75-300mm zoom lens. To better frame the scene, I pulled back to 130mm providing the following view. Not too shabby, huh? Checkout this higher powered view taken via eyepiece projection to 48x through my Astrophysics Starfire 160 Refractor
(more…)

Solar activity has been on the rise lately… with a slew of prominences showing up. I missed a huge one yesterday because of the weather. Fortunately, clear skies came before things fully subsided. As you can see… solar imaging is a whole new endeavor for me. I’m currently shooting with the Coronado mounted on a camera tripod. This puts some limits on what I can do. I’ve also got to work out some focusing details when I use eyepiece projection to capture the image. Anyway… it was nice to get out for a quick break this afternoon.
(more…)

I got my first ever images of IC434, the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion. The Horse Head is the faintest object that I’ve ever attempted to image at mag 10 or so. I’d taken about 20 images or so that on Monday night (12/3/07). Unfortunately, due to a number of mishaps, only about 12 were actually usable.

These 12 images were stacked using RegiStax to give me a good starting point. FYI, each original/raw image barely showed the horsehead. You could kind of see where the nebula was. This was brought out quite a bit after the stacking. However, it wasn’t until I brought the image into The GIMP that things really came into view. Its amazing how much data was ‘hidden’ originally. Almost like pealing the layers off an onion, the nebula slowly revealed itself with each processing option.
(more…)

I caught a sweet shot of The Moon and the red planet, Mars last night just before the clouds rolled in. The pair were separated by around 1 or so. This pairing is often referred to as a conjunction or alignment.

This was a more interesting image to process as the two are so far apart in brightness. The image I chose was a bright one (so that Mars would be visible). As such, the moon was a way washed out. To better deal with this, I created a duplicate layer in GIMP. This allowed me to process the two separately and then re-combine them later. For the moon, I used a number of Curves to dramatically reduce the overall brightness. This revealed details on the lunar surface. For Mars, I used the Curves function to dramatically brighten the image. Not sure if this is cheating, but I took a copy of a black section and covered over the moon on this one. Otherwise, it was going to get brighter still. Finally, I selected just Mars and did an additional Curves and Levels function on just this object. This made Mars stand out significantly. Finally, I merged the two layers to create one nicely integrated image.
(more…)

I took this picture almost as an after thought. I’d gone out to image Comet Holmes as it cruised by Mirfak (α Per). While doing so, I decided to image the moon to see if the two really were the same size (the actually are). I pulled the Canon Rebel off of the scope and popped in the 31mm Nagler eyepiece with a variable polarizer to reduce the brightness somewhat. Skies were actually much steadier than I’d expected, revealing some amazing details. I decided to make use of the TeleVue 2x Barlow to capture some of the added details.

I chose this view centered on the Lunar Apennine Mountains because this is one of the most dramatic features on the lunar surface. There were also a couple of distinctive craters running right along the lunar terminator that were brought into stark contrast. The lunar terminator is the line where light meets dark on the lunar surface. It is along this line that many oft missed details are revealed to lunar observers..
(more…)

I got a handful of images of M35 the other night. This is a beautiful open star cluster in the constellation Gemini (The Twins). This object is beautiful in even the most modest of telescopes. More aperture reveals a never ending number of fainter stars throughout the entire cluster. Smaller telescopes and binoculars however, may miss the nearby but much fainter NGC 2158 pictured to the left of the main cluster. At mag 8.6, the doesn’t just jump right out at you. My 6″ shows this in a subtle way, whereas my 25″ makes even this faint cluster look pretty impressive. If you find yourself under clear skies, be sure to look for the two bright stars of Castor and Pollux. The twin stars of gemini are at the head, whereas M35 is down near the leading foot. Checkout this star chart of Gemini for help in finding the cluster.
(more…)