Today I spent some time running errands and getting over a cold, or virus bug. I was recovering from a bug or folding had for a few days. I also was hanging out running errands with my sister. I felt pretty bad last Thursday night, and even worse Friday. Saturday I felt a bit better but still stayed inside much and didn't go out much. Today I feel better, but not to well when chilled in the cold and then heading back indoors. I might stil be recovering a bit from the cold/virus/whatever.
I was also up burning my candle at both ends a few nights last week doing patent searches. Had a "new telescope" idea that I thought might be unique and new and wanted to check that out. More about that later. Spent about 8 to 10 hours doing patent searches last week, that didn't help much.
Faac member called me to see if HJRO was going ti be open.
I had a member call me to see if I the observatory was open. I wasn't ble to find anyone in the core group who could come out and help support opening the observatory. My ears had been aching as well and its really cold out. Had some fun chatting with various members of the club. Walking outside the moon is close to Jupiter, both nice targets for observing and there's Venus.
I decided to stay away from the observatory and leave it closed tonight. I decided to stay in warm locations and get a late night dinner. Was able to network and have some members meet others at other observing locations. I decided against joining them however because I don't want to pass on any germs or possible virus illnesses I'm getting over. I hope to feel better and possibly open up tomorrow night Monday as the sky is supposed to be clear.
I even thought a bit about doing a bit of solar observing today, but it was still cold out and I was actually feeling a little bit worse than I'm feeling now. So I figured why push my luck, the stars will be out other nights.
It's can be tough to observe in the cold weather. There is a solution, but that involves the design and use of a different type of observatory. More about that in a future post.
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Sunday, February 26, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
M42 some photos of the Orion Nebula.
I started out preparing for this blog entry wanting a good example of M42 from photos Iʼve taken at HJRO. I often take photos with my Canon EOS T1i which is a unmodified DSLR. Unmodified is a phrase we use to say the camera still has the original filters inside that block out IR light wavelengths or hydrogen alpha spectrum wavelengths. There are limits to what a stock DSLR can do.
The CCD sensor of the average camera can detect IR light. If the manufacturers didnʼt filter out that light weʼd have reddish colored pictures that picked up more IR light than we see as humans. Because we donʼt want false color in our normal photos manufacturer's design cameras to filter out this extra reddish light, with an IR filter. These filters are so strong they mask out IR (hydrogen alpha) wavelengths that we might be able to pick up from astronomy objects. Specialized astronomy cameras come from a variety of manufacturers. Astrophotography cameras come from the manufacturers like: Orion, Meade, Stellacam, SBIG, Starlight Express, etc. The specialized cameras donʼt have IR filters to remove the hydrogen alpha IR light from the image. So they will show more red glowing emissions of gas clouds from hydrogen gas as itʼs glowing in space. You'll see more dark lanes of dust in front of these glowing lights as well, because you capture more light with a dedicated Astrophotography camera. The gas is giving off a glow that humans can't see, because we donʼt see hydrogen alpha emissions with our eyes.
Typical astronomy photographs may be taken by these specialized cameras which are used for astronomy. There are three or four major types of cameras. The stock CCD DSLR (usually with IR filters intact, but some may be removed), webcams, astronomy cameras and video cameras. Some astronomy cameras use chips from video cameras and these often provide low light video and live video and also may have only video output which requires digitization into a video card unless you're showing the video image live. This can introduce more artifacts, so these are used for live applications. We are only showing examples from Astronomy still cameras and my unmodified DSLR (IR light being blocked.) There are other specialized cameras as well. But the four in this list covers the basic cameras most amateur astronomers use.
A one shot color camera typically has a color filter matrix in front of a monochrome sensor. This matrix will actually allow a color photo by filtering out the colors and allowing only red, green or blue colors to trigger a sensor. Itʼs a little more complicated than this, but the end result is a one shot color image. The image on some cameras can actually be transferred as a RAW signal to the computer and the raw information can contain a monochrome image and color data separately. Then computer software can be used to manipulate that RAW format image and finally the colors are added through a process of merging the color data with the monochrome data and a full color picture is possible. Cameras like the Canon EOS T1i can merge that data ahead of time and merge it into JPEG formatted photos. This is a separate topic. Suffice it to say we can have one shot color cameras and also monochrome cameras, typically astronomy monochrome cameras that require filters and multiple exposures for each primary color to create a color photo. A one shot color camera will lose sensitivity to the dark object and be less sensitive. Monochrome cameras are 8 to 16 times more sensitive to low light. The “color filter matrix” diminishes the faintness a one shot color camera can see, so the one shot camera needs longer exposures.
There are many more things to say, but Iʼll try to keep the post short. Astronomy cameras basically can take much better low light photos with less noise.
M42 - Is a favorite target of astronomers
I asked Ford Amateur Astronomers if they could supply me with some good photos of M42 that show nebulosity, that is the gas detail of M42. I wanted to show what a typical photo by an astronomer could look like and compare it to the fast exposures and budget processing that Iʼm doing with a very basic image processing program, actually a $4 ipad App. My photos are shorter exposures and through my DSLR camera, so they canʼt look as good as these other photos, because they are capturing less detail to begin with. They are also being processed with a program that likely is using less bit depth and surely using less power than Photoshop which is a $700 program.
First up we have a photo that has a minor flaw, but it shows what a good astronomy camera can do.
James Lathom of the Ford Amateur Astronomy club took the above picture of M42 fairly quickly using an alt/azumuth mount.
He included the following comment: Shot this over the weekend as I was playing with the camera. Single star alignment Alt-az IOptron Mini Pro, so rotation was not good, and it was a 90sec single shot with an SBIG 8300C.
The next photo is from FAAC member, Tony Licata. Tony mentioned that this is one of many photos he has taken of M42. He said this is one that was layered. In other words, many exposures taken at different brightness levels were combined to create a composite image. The bright parts of the image were likely taken from a lower exposed photo and the fainter parts were from a higher exposure photo. The photo was merged and likely this was done inside Photoshop or some other expensive program marketed toward astronomers. Photoshop costs about $700, and there are a lot of plug-ins toward specific problems that can fix photos that astronomers are working on. Also there are other very expensive image processing programs as well that do other things to these photos, for example provide a better color balance.
There is a lot to love about the photo above. The amount of glowing gas and dust is amazing in this photo and the “running man” figure is clearly seen. The Pac Man figure is seen close to the trapezium. Iʼd really like to get more dust and glowing like these photos, but I wonʼt with short exposures with my Canon T1i. And I wonʼt get really nice processing detail using Filterstorm on the iPad. Filterstorm is fun to play with, portable and immediate. Itʼs power is far below Photoshop, but itʼs a $4 app.
I could talk on and on about Tonyʼs photo above. And I could talk a little bit about all the exotic steps that astronomers take, for example dark frame exposures, white frames and noise reduction. The use of color “curve” settings, which is one thing that Filterstorm has. There are exotic filters and plug ins as well which can be used in Photoshop to make an image more spectacular.
Letʼs get down to some really low budget and quick photos that the Canon T1i took and I toyed with in Filterstorm on the iPad.
The first one below is an image of the core of M42. You can see part of the Nebula and the pac man as well. This is a closer image and not wide field. The photo shows over saturation and noise. It also shows color shifts. Some of these due to experimentation I was pushing this trying to show more glowing gas and dust. Pushing it perhaps beyond the detail in the capture, creating noise.
There is more detail in some areas of this image, due to the high magnification, but overall there are more problems with this image. I actually did two kinds of radical manipulations of the original image and merged those two versions into this image. So this was a layer, but it wasnʼt a layer of two different original exposures. It could not show an increased dynamic range from multiple exposures, as I started with and only used one source photo. There is a lot of grain and noise in this photo as well, this due to my fast processing methods, the cheap app and limited light of that single 30 second exposure.
These are the two intermediate layers I used. Both fairly radical in their color shifting and offsets. I used curves and negative curve adjustments in some cases, meaning the RGB curves were pulled up and down at times. Imagers will often say donʼt use negative curves. Iʼve used negative curves to try to reduce sky glow or enhance the dramatic highlights and darken up parts of the image.
Next we have a pretty quick process I did using filterstorm on a wide field photos that is kind of like a 30 second exposure at 3200 iso. Rather than being a 30 second exposure itʼs a 330 second exposure at 200 iso. This means it was a long exposure but the sensitivity of the camera was set to a lower setting and that is still nearly the same basic kind of source photo as the earlier 3200 iso 30 second exposure I showed.
As you can see this photo is much darker than the earlier photos by other FAAC members. Itʼs a wide field photo, taken through the Meade F6 80mm refractor telescope at HJRO. There are problems of course with this, the gradient levels of colors are more severe, there is more vignetting, the brightness of details and dust wonʼt show up because there wasnʼt much detail captured to begin with. The image is over saturated as well.
You can barely see the “running man” in the photo below. FIlterstorm is fun app with instant gratification. Itʼs fun to play with and very portable as it runs on an iPad. It has limitations and the Canon EOS stock camera has limitations as well.
Now you can see why I'd like to get a dedicated astronomy camera like an SBIG.
Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
The CCD sensor of the average camera can detect IR light. If the manufacturers didnʼt filter out that light weʼd have reddish colored pictures that picked up more IR light than we see as humans. Because we donʼt want false color in our normal photos manufacturer's design cameras to filter out this extra reddish light, with an IR filter. These filters are so strong they mask out IR (hydrogen alpha) wavelengths that we might be able to pick up from astronomy objects. Specialized astronomy cameras come from a variety of manufacturers. Astrophotography cameras come from the manufacturers like: Orion, Meade, Stellacam, SBIG, Starlight Express, etc. The specialized cameras donʼt have IR filters to remove the hydrogen alpha IR light from the image. So they will show more red glowing emissions of gas clouds from hydrogen gas as itʼs glowing in space. You'll see more dark lanes of dust in front of these glowing lights as well, because you capture more light with a dedicated Astrophotography camera. The gas is giving off a glow that humans can't see, because we donʼt see hydrogen alpha emissions with our eyes.
Typical astronomy photographs may be taken by these specialized cameras which are used for astronomy. There are three or four major types of cameras. The stock CCD DSLR (usually with IR filters intact, but some may be removed), webcams, astronomy cameras and video cameras. Some astronomy cameras use chips from video cameras and these often provide low light video and live video and also may have only video output which requires digitization into a video card unless you're showing the video image live. This can introduce more artifacts, so these are used for live applications. We are only showing examples from Astronomy still cameras and my unmodified DSLR (IR light being blocked.) There are other specialized cameras as well. But the four in this list covers the basic cameras most amateur astronomers use.
A one shot color camera typically has a color filter matrix in front of a monochrome sensor. This matrix will actually allow a color photo by filtering out the colors and allowing only red, green or blue colors to trigger a sensor. Itʼs a little more complicated than this, but the end result is a one shot color image. The image on some cameras can actually be transferred as a RAW signal to the computer and the raw information can contain a monochrome image and color data separately. Then computer software can be used to manipulate that RAW format image and finally the colors are added through a process of merging the color data with the monochrome data and a full color picture is possible. Cameras like the Canon EOS T1i can merge that data ahead of time and merge it into JPEG formatted photos. This is a separate topic. Suffice it to say we can have one shot color cameras and also monochrome cameras, typically astronomy monochrome cameras that require filters and multiple exposures for each primary color to create a color photo. A one shot color camera will lose sensitivity to the dark object and be less sensitive. Monochrome cameras are 8 to 16 times more sensitive to low light. The “color filter matrix” diminishes the faintness a one shot color camera can see, so the one shot camera needs longer exposures.
There are many more things to say, but Iʼll try to keep the post short. Astronomy cameras basically can take much better low light photos with less noise.
M42 - Is a favorite target of astronomers
I asked Ford Amateur Astronomers if they could supply me with some good photos of M42 that show nebulosity, that is the gas detail of M42. I wanted to show what a typical photo by an astronomer could look like and compare it to the fast exposures and budget processing that Iʼm doing with a very basic image processing program, actually a $4 ipad App. My photos are shorter exposures and through my DSLR camera, so they canʼt look as good as these other photos, because they are capturing less detail to begin with. They are also being processed with a program that likely is using less bit depth and surely using less power than Photoshop which is a $700 program.
First up we have a photo that has a minor flaw, but it shows what a good astronomy camera can do.
James Lathom of the Ford Amateur Astronomy club took the above picture of M42 fairly quickly using an alt/azumuth mount.
He included the following comment: Shot this over the weekend as I was playing with the camera. Single star alignment Alt-az IOptron Mini Pro, so rotation was not good, and it was a 90sec single shot with an SBIG 8300C.
The next photo is from FAAC member, Tony Licata. Tony mentioned that this is one of many photos he has taken of M42. He said this is one that was layered. In other words, many exposures taken at different brightness levels were combined to create a composite image. The bright parts of the image were likely taken from a lower exposed photo and the fainter parts were from a higher exposure photo. The photo was merged and likely this was done inside Photoshop or some other expensive program marketed toward astronomers. Photoshop costs about $700, and there are a lot of plug-ins toward specific problems that can fix photos that astronomers are working on. Also there are other very expensive image processing programs as well that do other things to these photos, for example provide a better color balance.
There is a lot to love about the photo above. The amount of glowing gas and dust is amazing in this photo and the “running man” figure is clearly seen. The Pac Man figure is seen close to the trapezium. Iʼd really like to get more dust and glowing like these photos, but I wonʼt with short exposures with my Canon T1i. And I wonʼt get really nice processing detail using Filterstorm on the iPad. Filterstorm is fun to play with, portable and immediate. Itʼs power is far below Photoshop, but itʼs a $4 app.
I could talk on and on about Tonyʼs photo above. And I could talk a little bit about all the exotic steps that astronomers take, for example dark frame exposures, white frames and noise reduction. The use of color “curve” settings, which is one thing that Filterstorm has. There are exotic filters and plug ins as well which can be used in Photoshop to make an image more spectacular.
Letʼs get down to some really low budget and quick photos that the Canon T1i took and I toyed with in Filterstorm on the iPad.
The first one below is an image of the core of M42. You can see part of the Nebula and the pac man as well. This is a closer image and not wide field. The photo shows over saturation and noise. It also shows color shifts. Some of these due to experimentation I was pushing this trying to show more glowing gas and dust. Pushing it perhaps beyond the detail in the capture, creating noise.
There is more detail in some areas of this image, due to the high magnification, but overall there are more problems with this image. I actually did two kinds of radical manipulations of the original image and merged those two versions into this image. So this was a layer, but it wasnʼt a layer of two different original exposures. It could not show an increased dynamic range from multiple exposures, as I started with and only used one source photo. There is a lot of grain and noise in this photo as well, this due to my fast processing methods, the cheap app and limited light of that single 30 second exposure.
These are the two intermediate layers I used. Both fairly radical in their color shifting and offsets. I used curves and negative curve adjustments in some cases, meaning the RGB curves were pulled up and down at times. Imagers will often say donʼt use negative curves. Iʼve used negative curves to try to reduce sky glow or enhance the dramatic highlights and darken up parts of the image.
Next we have a pretty quick process I did using filterstorm on a wide field photos that is kind of like a 30 second exposure at 3200 iso. Rather than being a 30 second exposure itʼs a 330 second exposure at 200 iso. This means it was a long exposure but the sensitivity of the camera was set to a lower setting and that is still nearly the same basic kind of source photo as the earlier 3200 iso 30 second exposure I showed.
As you can see this photo is much darker than the earlier photos by other FAAC members. Itʼs a wide field photo, taken through the Meade F6 80mm refractor telescope at HJRO. There are problems of course with this, the gradient levels of colors are more severe, there is more vignetting, the brightness of details and dust wonʼt show up because there wasnʼt much detail captured to begin with. The image is over saturated as well.
You can barely see the “running man” in the photo below. FIlterstorm is fun app with instant gratification. Itʼs fun to play with and very portable as it runs on an iPad. It has limitations and the Canon EOS stock camera has limitations as well.
Now you can see why I'd like to get a dedicated astronomy camera like an SBIG.
Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Last Wednesday saw the bad astronomer
Phil plait appeared and gave his talk Death From The Skies. It dealt with meteor strikes and that possibility and threat from near earth asteroids.
He also poked fun at some popular scifi movies that had a theme of asteroids or comets hitting the earth.
Here is a picture from The emu lecture.
There was actually a full house. My friend Art from the Faac club was ripped off by the automatic parking machine, meter at the emu parking lot. It was malfunctioning and he ended up getting charged $8 instead of the $3 he was supposed to be paying. By the time I got to the metered gate a guard had come up and noticed the problem and allowed many cars to leave for free.
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He also poked fun at some popular scifi movies that had a theme of asteroids or comets hitting the earth.
Here is a picture from The emu lecture.
There was actually a full house. My friend Art from the Faac club was ripped off by the automatic parking machine, meter at the emu parking lot. It was malfunctioning and he ended up getting charged $8 instead of the $3 he was supposed to be paying. By the time I got to the metered gate a guard had come up and noticed the problem and allowed many cars to leave for free.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
A couple more photos
This isn't the best set of photos, but I decided to share them. One is an image of the moon from the handheld session. It's not on focus and I can do much better. It just shows how bad the handheld focusing result was.
Moon f8 with Barlow, out of focus. A big advantage of. Tripod or decent mount of course is spending the time to actually focus the telescope properly.
The other is the telescope and camera sitting on a chair before I took it out.
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Moon f8 with Barlow, out of focus. A big advantage of. Tripod or decent mount of course is spending the time to actually focus the telescope properly.
The other is the telescope and camera sitting on a chair before I took it out.
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Sunday night I was out of town until late.
I went out to visit a friend who lives at a dark sky site. I drove out and hoped to get a quick glance of the sky, but wanted to stay out of the cold for the most part. I left my telescopes at home and only had a pair of 10 by 50 binoculars in the car. I was going to eat pizza near my friends dark sky site. I couldn't get ahold of him over his phone, so I ended up eating pizza and driving back toward home.
On the way back Art Parent called. Art is in the club and frequently shows up and helps out at HJRO. He can run the telescope and close up and at times opened up and ran observing nights when I was out of town.
Art recently traded a camera for a Canon T1i and was trying to take some photographs at another private observatory. He called me to ask me some questions about the Canon camera's live view features. I offered to drive by and show him some button features of his new camera, since I own a t1 I and often use it at HJRO. He took some photos of a galaxy, I forgot the exact object as I write this. He also started taking pictures of the moon.
When I finally made it back home, it was past midnight and the moon was out and the sky was clear. I decided to try to take a quick picture of the moon using a super fast setup which would be my old home build f4 four inch Newtonian and the canon Eos t1i. I have the Newtonian mirror mounted forward for astrophotography right now. I wasn't even going to use a mount, this would be pure handheld, meaning I would try to take a picture while holding the telescope and camera without even a basic telescope mount. I even attempted using a Barlow. As I started walking out of the house, I decided to grab a bag of trash and throw it out in the trash can. I actually carried my telescope and camera under one arm and took out the garbage with another. I figured that with a fast exposure and a little quick manipulation and focusing with live view, I would get a pretty decent low power photo of the moon.
I was able to focus the camera and telescope pretty well, for brief moments, but it was difficult to focus and hold the telescope tube steady with the camera on the telescope. My finder is old and the camera wanted to rotate and spin in the finders tube and also the finder didn't want to stay fixed at a single position because it's designed to be smooth for small eyepieces and will not stay fixed very well with a heavy camera mounted on it. When I went to trip the shutter, moving the camera and putting my added weight of the grip on the camera likely shifted the focus slightly as well.
I took a few stills and took some at f8 with a 2 power Barlow, and others at f4. None of them look very good, because the focus was off. It was a fun attempt and I actually kneeled on the ground and braced the telescope against one knee when taking the f8 focal length shots. Because the pictures were not really sharp and in focus I'll spare readers of the blog of those photos. I had hoped to get one in focus, but didn't spend a lot of time out outside, maybe five minutes.
Hoping to get some good photos I took a shot of the rig as I was standing on a landing. Had I spent time to take a tripod out I would have had some decent moon photos, but that would have taken another 3 minutes. I wanted to try a photo of the moon with a fully handheld rig.
The setup below, totally handheld.
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On the way back Art Parent called. Art is in the club and frequently shows up and helps out at HJRO. He can run the telescope and close up and at times opened up and ran observing nights when I was out of town.
Art recently traded a camera for a Canon T1i and was trying to take some photographs at another private observatory. He called me to ask me some questions about the Canon camera's live view features. I offered to drive by and show him some button features of his new camera, since I own a t1 I and often use it at HJRO. He took some photos of a galaxy, I forgot the exact object as I write this. He also started taking pictures of the moon.
When I finally made it back home, it was past midnight and the moon was out and the sky was clear. I decided to try to take a quick picture of the moon using a super fast setup which would be my old home build f4 four inch Newtonian and the canon Eos t1i. I have the Newtonian mirror mounted forward for astrophotography right now. I wasn't even going to use a mount, this would be pure handheld, meaning I would try to take a picture while holding the telescope and camera without even a basic telescope mount. I even attempted using a Barlow. As I started walking out of the house, I decided to grab a bag of trash and throw it out in the trash can. I actually carried my telescope and camera under one arm and took out the garbage with another. I figured that with a fast exposure and a little quick manipulation and focusing with live view, I would get a pretty decent low power photo of the moon.
I was able to focus the camera and telescope pretty well, for brief moments, but it was difficult to focus and hold the telescope tube steady with the camera on the telescope. My finder is old and the camera wanted to rotate and spin in the finders tube and also the finder didn't want to stay fixed at a single position because it's designed to be smooth for small eyepieces and will not stay fixed very well with a heavy camera mounted on it. When I went to trip the shutter, moving the camera and putting my added weight of the grip on the camera likely shifted the focus slightly as well.
I took a few stills and took some at f8 with a 2 power Barlow, and others at f4. None of them look very good, because the focus was off. It was a fun attempt and I actually kneeled on the ground and braced the telescope against one knee when taking the f8 focal length shots. Because the pictures were not really sharp and in focus I'll spare readers of the blog of those photos. I had hoped to get one in focus, but didn't spend a lot of time out outside, maybe five minutes.
Hoping to get some good photos I took a shot of the rig as I was standing on a landing. Had I spent time to take a tripod out I would have had some decent moon photos, but that would have taken another 3 minutes. I wanted to try a photo of the moon with a fully handheld rig.
The setup below, totally handheld.
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
It's been a fun week. Observed at HJRO three nights, but not tonight
Tonight it's snowing. . . looks like a blizzard out right now.
We had 100 to 200 visitors Tuesday. A lot of people seemed to enjoy touring HJRO and also chatting with different FAAC astronomers. It was really cold out with ten mile per hour winds whipping up a really nice wind chill. The clouds prevented much viewing. Tim Dey mentioned we'd be opening up the next night, Wednesday as it would be clear. I was able to open up Wednesday and we had nine visitors show up on Wednesday. Some called the observatory line to see if we were out at the observatory. It was supposed to be clear out Thursday as well so we decided to open up a third evening. I also hoped to get a photo of Venus and Uranus in the same field of view. They were so close the 9th of February (Thursday) being .3 degrees apart a telescope could show them with a low to medium powered eyepiece. We were able to see them both with the F7 Celestron C14 configuration and a 25mm Plossl eyepiece. The C14 is F7 with a field reducer on, which means it's wider field. I hoped to get a photo of both with the C14 and the Canon T1i T mounted on Thursday. We also saw both planets briefly on Wednesday, but it was only a brief appearance as I didn't look for them early enough in the evening and clouds had moved in.
Could I see them with the C14 and the field reducer and take a photo. The Field reducer doesn't allow the light cone to reach out far enough for the Canon T1i camera to operate, with the diagonal. I don't know if there is a better setup and some way to use the field reducer with the T1i with another adapter. If there is, we don't have that adapter at HJRO. So I decided to try to get a shot of both planets through the wider field F6 refractor. The Meade 80mm refractor easily provided a wide field of view with the Canon t1i, so wide that the planets looked really small and not as close as we could see them with a barlow. I decided to try a barlow as well. The barlow allowed me to get an image of them closer. Thinking about this now as I write this, it doesn't make sense that I took a good picture with the barlow and the F6 and didn't get a picture with F11 in the C14. It may have been that I missed a chance to get a picture with the C14 because I didn't even try it without the field reducer.
The immage looks pretty good. I'm going to post a copy of that image, but Venus is blown out in the exposure and you will not see the crescent shadowing of that planet. With one exposure, you can either expose the photo dark enough to pick up Uranus or set it for the brighter Venus and not see Uranus at all. Of course most of the time I choose to set the camera to take a picture showing both.
I tried to take some fainter exposure photos to later blend the two photos together. But it seems on viewing the images now, that I didn't set the exposure fast enough or dark enough (through ISO settings) to get a nice exposure of Venus to show the crescent features and shadow. I'm still pretty happy with the photos I was able to take.
I also tried using the Meade camera, but had problems getting it to communicate with the observatory computer. It might have been the cable which is very long and goes to the computer through a conduit under the floor. I didn't have a second cable handy and didn't spend the time trying to control the Meade camera with my laptop.
I spent more time with others looking visually at a few objects and didn't spend as much time with the photographic equipment as I might have, had it been warmer out and I was perhaps more alone without others present at HJRO. HJRO is primarily a visual site when visitors are present. We don't spend a lot of time playing with photography when people come out and want to look through the telescope. We are there to show the students and public the skies and that primarily means letting them look visually. If you ever get a chance to tour and observatory and you find it's being used for photography and you can't look through the big telescope, you may be disappointed as a visitor. We don't want to just have people stand around and look at a camera on a telescope when the sky is clear, we want them to be able to experience getting some light from the stars thrown on their eyeballs.
I found that when I was touring the Perkins observatory although it was clear, they didn't have good conditions, the sky was too poor to look through their biggest 32 inch reflector. That is understandable with poor seeing, larger scopes may give bad views and your better off with a smaller telescope when the seeing is poor. But it seemed like a big disappointment to me at that time. I went to the tour and saw the big telescope under the dome. Being a star gazer and liking telescopes, I wanted to look through the big telescope, even if the view was bad, just to have that experience. That tour taught me a lesson. If a person is visiting HJRO and I'm there to give them a tour, if they have any chance at all to look through the biggest scope present, I'm going to make an effort to make sure they are able to look through it.
Normally on a slow night or when we have time, we may have more telescopes setup outside. I like the idea of having some small scopes outside and perhaps have visitors look through those first and then work their way up to looking through the larger C14 inside the observatory. That will give a nice build up in the observing part of the tour and it's a goal I have most nights for those who visit. This is just a few comments on how I approach showing off the observatory. We can't always go through all the information and tell everyone the entire history of the observatory and older clubs. The least we can do is hope to give them a few views through different telescopes and hopefully answer a few questions and share a few facts about star gazing and astronomy.
Greg.
Picture of Venus and Uranus to follow in the next post.
We had 100 to 200 visitors Tuesday. A lot of people seemed to enjoy touring HJRO and also chatting with different FAAC astronomers. It was really cold out with ten mile per hour winds whipping up a really nice wind chill. The clouds prevented much viewing. Tim Dey mentioned we'd be opening up the next night, Wednesday as it would be clear. I was able to open up Wednesday and we had nine visitors show up on Wednesday. Some called the observatory line to see if we were out at the observatory. It was supposed to be clear out Thursday as well so we decided to open up a third evening. I also hoped to get a photo of Venus and Uranus in the same field of view. They were so close the 9th of February (Thursday) being .3 degrees apart a telescope could show them with a low to medium powered eyepiece. We were able to see them both with the F7 Celestron C14 configuration and a 25mm Plossl eyepiece. The C14 is F7 with a field reducer on, which means it's wider field. I hoped to get a photo of both with the C14 and the Canon T1i T mounted on Thursday. We also saw both planets briefly on Wednesday, but it was only a brief appearance as I didn't look for them early enough in the evening and clouds had moved in.
Could I see them with the C14 and the field reducer and take a photo. The Field reducer doesn't allow the light cone to reach out far enough for the Canon T1i camera to operate, with the diagonal. I don't know if there is a better setup and some way to use the field reducer with the T1i with another adapter. If there is, we don't have that adapter at HJRO. So I decided to try to get a shot of both planets through the wider field F6 refractor. The Meade 80mm refractor easily provided a wide field of view with the Canon t1i, so wide that the planets looked really small and not as close as we could see them with a barlow. I decided to try a barlow as well. The barlow allowed me to get an image of them closer. Thinking about this now as I write this, it doesn't make sense that I took a good picture with the barlow and the F6 and didn't get a picture with F11 in the C14. It may have been that I missed a chance to get a picture with the C14 because I didn't even try it without the field reducer.
The immage looks pretty good. I'm going to post a copy of that image, but Venus is blown out in the exposure and you will not see the crescent shadowing of that planet. With one exposure, you can either expose the photo dark enough to pick up Uranus or set it for the brighter Venus and not see Uranus at all. Of course most of the time I choose to set the camera to take a picture showing both.
I tried to take some fainter exposure photos to later blend the two photos together. But it seems on viewing the images now, that I didn't set the exposure fast enough or dark enough (through ISO settings) to get a nice exposure of Venus to show the crescent features and shadow. I'm still pretty happy with the photos I was able to take.
I also tried using the Meade camera, but had problems getting it to communicate with the observatory computer. It might have been the cable which is very long and goes to the computer through a conduit under the floor. I didn't have a second cable handy and didn't spend the time trying to control the Meade camera with my laptop.
I spent more time with others looking visually at a few objects and didn't spend as much time with the photographic equipment as I might have, had it been warmer out and I was perhaps more alone without others present at HJRO. HJRO is primarily a visual site when visitors are present. We don't spend a lot of time playing with photography when people come out and want to look through the telescope. We are there to show the students and public the skies and that primarily means letting them look visually. If you ever get a chance to tour and observatory and you find it's being used for photography and you can't look through the big telescope, you may be disappointed as a visitor. We don't want to just have people stand around and look at a camera on a telescope when the sky is clear, we want them to be able to experience getting some light from the stars thrown on their eyeballs.
I found that when I was touring the Perkins observatory although it was clear, they didn't have good conditions, the sky was too poor to look through their biggest 32 inch reflector. That is understandable with poor seeing, larger scopes may give bad views and your better off with a smaller telescope when the seeing is poor. But it seemed like a big disappointment to me at that time. I went to the tour and saw the big telescope under the dome. Being a star gazer and liking telescopes, I wanted to look through the big telescope, even if the view was bad, just to have that experience. That tour taught me a lesson. If a person is visiting HJRO and I'm there to give them a tour, if they have any chance at all to look through the biggest scope present, I'm going to make an effort to make sure they are able to look through it.
Normally on a slow night or when we have time, we may have more telescopes setup outside. I like the idea of having some small scopes outside and perhaps have visitors look through those first and then work their way up to looking through the larger C14 inside the observatory. That will give a nice build up in the observing part of the tour and it's a goal I have most nights for those who visit. This is just a few comments on how I approach showing off the observatory. We can't always go through all the information and tell everyone the entire history of the observatory and older clubs. The least we can do is hope to give them a few views through different telescopes and hopefully answer a few questions and share a few facts about star gazing and astronomy.
Greg.
Picture of Venus and Uranus to follow in the next post.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
HJRO will be open at 7pm tonight
I'm heading over to open up the observatory.
Getting a shake at white castle before opening up.
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Getting a shake at white castle before opening up.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Some Faac members at fort street brewery after Tonights observatory tour
Having dinner after a fun night showing off the observatory and telescopes.
We had over 100 visitors a great mix of people.
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We had over 100 visitors a great mix of people.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Today we will have a tour of the observatory for middle school science fair attendees
There is a science fair at the middle school. We will be having. Groups of people able to tour the observatory and hopefully look through telescopes today from 6:30 to 7:30pm. Faac astronomers will be present with telescopes outside of the observatory.
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- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Saturday, February 4, 2012
If I open up HJRO tonight it will be very late after midnight
There is a small chance I'll open up HJRO observatory.
Earlier in the evening I'll be observing at a different location with a few Faac members.
Skies will be better late at night but I may be to tired to open up by then and it's cold out.
Check the next post for more details.
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Earlier in the evening I'll be observing at a different location with a few Faac members.
Skies will be better late at night but I may be to tired to open up by then and it's cold out.
Check the next post for more details.
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Friday, February 3, 2012
Fun night observing
We all seemed to have a fun time observing last night.
We could really feel the cold and Art and Brian went out and picked up hot chocolates for many of us who were staying late and in need of a warm up.
Below is a photo of many of the visitors at the observatory. I missed getting a picture of Jennifer and her son who were visiting earlier in the evening. We had ten visitors in all. More details will be out possibly in a newsletter clip in the Faac newsletter later.
We didn't see comet Garradd and m92. It was too low while many were there and when it finally rose up high enough at nearly 2am, Art and I were the only members left to try to view the comet and star cluster. A cloud bank and haze obscured the comet and cluster and we could not see through the cloud bank and make out either one of them by that time.
Most visitors saw the moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, m42, m45, and the andromeda galaxy. We looked through the C14, Meade refractor, the vixen bt80 binocular telescope, and Big Bertha a ten inch Schmidt Newtonian reflector. At times I had to aim big Bertha fairly unconventionally because I'd didn't have the wrench to move the tube and rotate it for comfortable viewing.
We didn't stay up late enough to see Saturn. I doubt the comet would be visible by 4am because of more clouds moving in.
I think we felt more of the effects of the cold because we were outside on the cement and our feet would get colder. We turned on the IR heater and had a heating pad on one chair. That helped a little, but we still grew cold, many could have dressed warmer and perhaps with warmer boots. The IR heater didn't seem to affect viewing badly at all and we didn't notice problems with viewing from the IR heater. The shutter of the dome was often not over the chair and heating pad so that caused no thermal viewing issues. Not a bad night, considering the cold. Conditions were not horrible but it was frigid out. Later heavy frost started to coat the instruments we had outside the observatory.
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We could really feel the cold and Art and Brian went out and picked up hot chocolates for many of us who were staying late and in need of a warm up.
Below is a photo of many of the visitors at the observatory. I missed getting a picture of Jennifer and her son who were visiting earlier in the evening. We had ten visitors in all. More details will be out possibly in a newsletter clip in the Faac newsletter later.
We didn't see comet Garradd and m92. It was too low while many were there and when it finally rose up high enough at nearly 2am, Art and I were the only members left to try to view the comet and star cluster. A cloud bank and haze obscured the comet and cluster and we could not see through the cloud bank and make out either one of them by that time.
Most visitors saw the moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, m42, m45, and the andromeda galaxy. We looked through the C14, Meade refractor, the vixen bt80 binocular telescope, and Big Bertha a ten inch Schmidt Newtonian reflector. At times I had to aim big Bertha fairly unconventionally because I'd didn't have the wrench to move the tube and rotate it for comfortable viewing.
We didn't stay up late enough to see Saturn. I doubt the comet would be visible by 4am because of more clouds moving in.
I think we felt more of the effects of the cold because we were outside on the cement and our feet would get colder. We turned on the IR heater and had a heating pad on one chair. That helped a little, but we still grew cold, many could have dressed warmer and perhaps with warmer boots. The IR heater didn't seem to affect viewing badly at all and we didn't notice problems with viewing from the IR heater. The shutter of the dome was often not over the chair and heating pad so that caused no thermal viewing issues. Not a bad night, considering the cold. Conditions were not horrible but it was frigid out. Later heavy frost started to coat the instruments we had outside the observatory.
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Thursday, February 2, 2012
Tonight there may be limited viewing opportunities at HJRO
We have Hfcc astronomy club members arriving at about 8pm for viewing.
I also invited the Faac club out so we might have sone additional telescopes and astronomers on site.
We will probably have room for occasional visitors to show up and take a look. We hope to see comet Garradd p2009 at about 9pm. We may take sone photos of it as well as it will be close to m92 tonight.
The moon will be up until late tonight and may hinder sone of the viewing. But of course we can look at the noon as well.
Visitors are welcome but you should dress warmly in layers.
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I also invited the Faac club out so we might have sone additional telescopes and astronomers on site.
We will probably have room for occasional visitors to show up and take a look. We hope to see comet Garradd p2009 at about 9pm. We may take sone photos of it as well as it will be close to m92 tonight.
The moon will be up until late tonight and may hinder sone of the viewing. But of course we can look at the noon as well.
Visitors are welcome but you should dress warmly in layers.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
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