Constellations

It was very windy last night, so I didn't try any telescope shots. There was a lot of broken cloud about and it kept obscuring different parts of the sky. However with the camera on a tripod hooked up to the laptop I thought it worth a few shots. With it fully wired up, once you are focused and aligned you can just leave it to get on with 25 shots of 25 seconds and go into the warm.

I started with the plough, as it is nicely aligned and easy to see. Had a go at Saturn in Leo, but clouds and aircraft conspired to wreck that.

Cassiopeia looked reasonable so I took quite a few of that and stacked them. I need to get better at post processing though.

How things stack up

I had attempted to stack a number of the orion images together - but ran into some lack of knowledge with my attempts to drive DeepSkyStacker. It was doing unspeakable things to my images and they looked far worse than when I started out the process.
After some discussions with the author I learnt a little more about using the program, and after some trial and error got something that was better than what I started out with.


Hurrah!

Wide sky pictures

I've been looking around for a while for a way to attach the camera on top of the telescope, and so allow photographs to be taken through the camera lens. This allows some wider field photography, where you can capture constellations and stuff. There were a couple of places that sell these sort of attachment for my telescope in the U.S., and some places in the UK but all out of stock. Also they seem reasonably expensive at about £80 or so.

So - when in a DIY shop yesterday, I spotted some velcro attachment straps. These are long enough to wrap about the main body of the telescope, and strap a small bendy tabletop tripod that came free with the camera onto the main tube. It looks like this:


So - I tried a little constellation photography.

This shows the effect of light pollution quite well! After a little cleaning up


I doubt it will win awards, but its a start!