I tried taking a 3d picture of the moon tonight. This was late tonight through my Bt-80 binocular telescope. The moon didn't turn out very good through 3d stereo. I may be able to improve my moon photo 3d technique over time.
I was hoping to give people a sense of how cool it is to look at the moon through a binocular telescope, but you really have to look through a telescope that has the binocular feature to get the real impact of stereo viewing. The BT-80 seems to show the moon really well at 36 power, which is quite a bit more than most average binoculars. It sometimes looks really nice at higher power as well. I have to work a little on alignment of the binocular telescope at the higher 48 power using 15mm eyepieces. There is a little optical alignment issues with it. The view is so much better live.
Binocular telescopes can give some really interesting views of the moon, under less than ideal conditions. I know this may sound funny, but slight amounts of moving clouds with thin cloud cover moving over the moon can be stunning with binocular telescopes. The added effect of stereo viewing can often cause a more wonderful effect. Even viewing through thin tree branches when the moon is low can be interesting. It may sound funny to say that sometimes the view is more entertaining through these marginal conditions, but it seems true.
Last month during the rise of the full moon, with the shore ion event, the wide field of the binocular telescope with the low moon combined very nicely with some objects in the foreground flying past or or near the moon's vantage point. I saw a couple of jets and some birds fly past the moon or near it, This gave some added excitement to my viewing. Almost like bird watching and moon watching at the same time. Geese were flying down the river.
BEGINNERS NIGHT at Island Lake Recreational State Park
We have a beginners night tomorrow night at island lake recreational park, at the spring mills pond. This will be from 7pm until 12pm. Island lake is located near Kensington metro park. It's on the other side of the freeway. It's a state park and requires a different sticker, than the metro parks. If you can find Kensington metro park you can find Island lake.
The spring mill pond is about 3 miles away from the main entrance gate at Island Lake.
This event will have a few instructional demonstrations, one being how to collimate at Newtonian reflector. Another will be a sky tour. These are free but you have to pay or have a sticker to get into the park. If you have a telescope and are wondering how to use it you may be able to get help as well with that. If you call ahead the Ford Amateur Astronomy club they may be able to insure someone there will have experience with your kind or brand of telescope, but we often can deal with a wide variety of telescopes and there is usually someone there that can assist you.
Members like to chat with those who are new to astronomy, so don't be shy if you arrive, we understand everyone is new at some point. We really aren't bothered with most questions and actually love to chat and talk with anyone about astronomy,
Hopefully the weather will be clear tomorrow. It's clear tonight, but supposedly the transparency is kind of poor. And it could change. . . I saw some clouds threatening earlier. It seems warm enough to observe and have some fun, but I've had a long stressful day. I have not had anyone from the club call to ask me if I'm observing, so I'm going to skip observing tonight. I had a little bit of fun late at around 12:30pm playing with the binocular telescope at my house. I also was out at the observatory earlier today, and checked it out a bit, but didn't observe anything at that time as it was cloudy and I wanted to just do a few things inside the observatory.
Here's a photo from my 3d camera. This was a quick shot at the end of a FAAC board meeting that is attended by some of the members and officers of the Ford Amateur Astronomy Club. This photo was split up into the left and right photos that the camera takes and then I used a software program to create Red/blue anaglyph photo for this post. This requires red/blue glasses to see the 3d effect. The red and blue tint may not perfectly match you particular set of glasses as the minor adjustments of the software may not exactly match all red blue shades. The red blue 3d glasses often vary in quality so this doesn't look nearly as good as it would with a better dedicated 3d player.
Here you can see some members chatting at A Coney Island. I surprised them a bit, with this quick photo. This really looks nice on the back of the Fujix w3 3d camera that I have. It has a special display on the back of the camera that will show you the true 3d image and the camera doesn't require red/blue glasses like the image posted below.
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Location:Stereo photo experiment red/blue glasses FAAC member 3d image shown
The distance between the lenses is a few inches? Let's say it's half a foot. The stereo effect would be about 80 microarc seconds. I'm pretty sure that the HST doesn't have resolution this good. Now if the eyepieces went to a stereo scope who's mirrors are about 2 miles apart, you might start seeing a stereo effect.
ReplyDeleteBut, who knows what you'll see. Many astronomers thought that long exposures would be a waste of time on the HST. They expected that intergalactic dust, and so on, would obscure the view. Yet the deep field projects have gone well beyond these predictions. Maybe there's some effect that's cool to get, even if the math says "no".