The Moon and The OU

Although the course doesn't start until the first week in May, I got my Open University text book the other day!

I thought it was going to just be your bog standard here's-what-Mars-looks-like type thing, but it has formulas, big numbers and will, apparently, require a scientific calculator! Oh dear...

Last night was pretty cloudless which meant I could not only see the Moon, but I could try out my camera mount thingy I got a while ago:

Which resulted in some nice Moon photos. Here's one:

I'm getting the hang of remembering to flip the image horizontally and vertically to take into account of the telescope mirrors.  :)

Camera mount and more lunacy.

Bought a cheap camera mount to see if it'll improve my photography any. Doubt it, but you never know. The eyepiece goes through it and into the usual slot, only problem is that the ring of the camera mount stops the eyepiece from going all the way in, so can't focus properly. Many minutes of filing later, it works. The camera screws into a sliding piece on a rod, and that rod slides up and down the rod that connects near the eyepiece. It's impossible to use for any pin-point precision as you can't mount the camera then easily look into the eyepiece. The camera screen becomes the eyepiece. Good for the moon/sun/Jupiter, but useless for star clusters.

Anyway, put it to the test last night with the (near full) moon:

The photo above was taken with a 25mm eyepiece (with moon filter) and 12MP camera on the camera mount. It was then processed in GIMP to remove the green moon filter tint to give it a nice blue tint. Came out quite well methinks.

On the camera phone front, I've had to buy a new phone. It seems that it's near impossible to find a Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY camera module, so I'll be selling that on eBay shortly. Instead, I now have a shiny new LG Optimus 2X with 8MP camera.