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.

The Sun, The Moon, you name it!

Caught a quick glimpse of the Sun this afternoon and grabbed a photo of it:

Couple of big sun spots today. Again, according to maps of the Sun, the entire earth could easily fit into that spot on the left of the Sun. Wow!

Even the Moon made an appearance this evening. At about 8pm it was near Jupiter in the West:

Even though there wasn't much of the Moon showing, I still had to test out my 9mm and 15mm eyepieces on it and try to take a photo of it:

Oh, and I managed to see Saturn the other night! Got up at 5am for a leak (I'll spare you the details) and remembered that Saturn is about at that time (in the West) and sure enough, there it was! Not much detail to see, but I could see a small planet with those infamous rings around it. Amazing!

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.  :)

Since the weathers been crap...

... and I've not been able to see anything decent in days now, I decided to do some astro-drawing. In my spare time I do art commissions and what-not, so I decided to do a drawing of the Copernicus crater which is, of course, on the moon:

Copernicus (Moon) - Charcoal and Pastel on Blue Paper (A4)

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!

The Sun and the Moon

First I tried some sun projections which went OK, but couldn't get decent photos of them as I'm holding a piece of paper in one hand, camera phone in the other. Due to not being a contortionist I didn't get any decent photos of the projection, but I did (in the process) manage to partially screw up my phone's camera. I held the phone over the eye piece (on camera) to see where the sun was on screen, rather than blind myself. Doing this I think I've damaged the camera sensor in my phone. *sigh*  :(

In other (better) news: I noticed a clear sky this afternoon and took advantage of it to snap some new photos of the moon with my digital camera:

I think, with the digital camera, you need to use a larger eyepiece (25mm in my case) then tinker with the camera zoom to get a focus.

Either way, I think my scope needs collimating (calibrated) *dramatic music* as the slightest movement of the eye/camera and your left seeing shadows. Oh, and I also need to clean my eyepieces.

An astronomers lot is never a happy lot...  :D

New photo's of the moon and webcam musings

Last night was the first decent night in several days so I took advantage of it to take a couple of new photos of the moon:

Again, they were taken with my Xperia PLAY mobile phone (5MP camera) held to the eyepiece. I did try the modified Xbox webcam, but it kept whiting-out all the time, even when it was pointed at Jupiter. Most disappointed. I need to try and get some decent wxAstroCapture settings as even with all the sliders down to single digits it's too bright.

Also trying to botch a way to hold my mobile phone more steady at the eye piece. It involves a small Pringles tube, scissors, pliers and lots of prayers. Will keep you informed...

Moon, Webcam and Laptop, oh my!

I've been reading alot in the Stargazers Lounge forum (http://stargazerslounge.com/) about using some software to stack images (or frames from videos) to get more detailed pictures, so I'm going to give that a go. Only (good) thing is: I don't use Windows. I'm a Kubuntu Linux kinda guy. So I'm going to have to find some Linux astronomy software. Shouldn't be too difficult. Worst comes to the worst I can get Registax 6 running in Linux via Wine.

Full Moooooooonnn!

I only managed to get one photo of my new friend, the Moon. I really need to start looking at other things too...

There's a full moon a-comin'!

Should be a full moon within a couple of days. Hope there'll be a good clear sky for it.

In the mean time, another couple of mobile phone not-quite-full Moon photos:

More Moon Photos!

These came out quite good too.*

* disclaimer: I admit to having corrected these and the previous photos as it wasn't until later that I realised that when looking through the 'scope you're seeing things upside down. I did wonder if man-kind was on the way out when I noticed the South Pole of the Moon at the North...

Astro-Photography!

Having looked at the moon (obviously) I decided to give astrophotography a go.

Not as easy as it seems.

First I tried my 12MP digital camera as that would probably get me the highest resolution pictures. No dice. The camera has a wide field of view, so all I see in the viewfinder is a very blurry moon which is a small white fuzzy blob surrounded by a black circle which is the inside of the eyepiece/lens. Bah!

Mobile phone to the rescue! These photos were taken by holding my phone (Sony Xperia PLAY) to the eyepiece and trying not to breathe for fear of moving it. Either way. I'm damn proud of my first attempts!