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.

OMG! Some decent weather!

Since the sun was peeking out from some sparse clouds I decided to construct my solar filter. Every care should be made when making a solar filter. Great skill and passion went into making this technical feat of homemade ingenuity...

OK, so, it might have a rough edge here or there, but it works! Doesn't help that the sun is, at the moment, coming into view behind a whopping great tree then setting behind some houses, so there's not much space for taking photos, but I'll get some.

Even while the sun was setting good ol' Jupiter and Venus were showing. I managed to get some OK shots of Jupiter afcoally with my digital camera:

I doubt (Sir) Patrick Moore would wet himself over my photos, but I'm pretty chuffed with them.  :)

Gotcha!

Got my eyepiece kit (two eyepieces and three filters) and Astronomy For Dummies book today (as mentioned below). The collimation tool came yesterday.

Haven't tried the eyepieces/filters as yet, but I did tinker with the alignment of the scope a bit. Didn't mess with the primary mirror only the secondary mirror which was a bit of a bugger. I was trying to turn the center screw on it. Turns out that's NOT what you turn, it's the three allum key screws to tilt the secondary mirror then tweak the stalk bolt to move the mirror in/out of the scope (as you look through the eyepiece of the collimation tool). I think I've got it right. Did a quick check by looking at Jupiter and nothing was out of the ordinary, so I reckon, while I haven't tweaked much, I certainly haven't done it any bad. Yaayy!!


Hopefully the moon will make an appearance tonight so that I can test the moon filter and the new 9mm eyepiece. With any luck, there'll be new photos!