Galileo's Camera

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I got the entry level subscription to SLOOH. The "Student" level subscription at SLOOH costs you 50 USD per year and allows you to piggyback on 5 separate "missions". You can also choose 5 missions from the SLOOH catalog instead of piggybacking as well. However unlike higher level subscriptions, this does not allow total control over the telescope. Horeshead Nebula, Barnard 33 (in the middle) and NGC 2023 reflection nebula near top left. Stack of 15x5min exposures using SLOOHs Chile Two telescope. The Chile Two telescope is a 17" telescope. Compared to my own NexStar 4SE, this one has more than 16x light gathering power. But even with that much of light, you still need to stack a few images to bring out the details. 5min exposure of Barnard 33 using SLOOH's Chile Two telescope. As you can see above, a single 5min exposure of the Barnard 33 still has some details but lacks contrast and brightness. While you can inc...

Merge of multiple frames - Saturn (L) and Jupiter (R) on 25th December 2020. The angular separation is about 25'. Shot with a Canon 450D on a Nexstar 6SE. Equipment courtesy of Eranga Ganegala, The year of 2020 was not a great year in many ways. But it was not without its own silver lines. Back in July 2020, we saw the brightest comet in 23 years, the Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) and further before in June, some parts of the world were able to witness an annular solar eclipse. On December 14th, people in Chile and Argentina were able to view a total solar eclipse, which would be the last total solar eclipse till 2024. The best of the events however, is probably the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. A conjunction is when two or more astronomical bodies get very close to each other from a visible point of view. Given that the stars are in a fixed position (unless you observe for over a period of say, ten to hundred thousand years), this refers to objects that are moving across ...

Disclaimer: I didn't do anything other than clicking a few buttons to get this photo. But this is the kind of photo you can get by using SLOOH's remote telescopes. M42 - Orion Nebula. 3x5min via SLOOH Chile Two (17") telescope Following through my hunt for telescope-as-a-service offerings, my next evaluation was SLOOH. Originally started back in 2002, SLOOH's telescopes became available to the public in 2004. SLOOH currently operates two sites, Chile and Canary Islands and has a total of 8 telescopes. SLOOH is not just a remote telescope or telescope-as-a-service offering. It also has a community set up where remote operators, astronomers, SLOOH staff can discuss various aspects of astrophotography as well as astronomy. SLOOH does not have a free access like the MicroObservatory. It's minimum plan starts at 50 USD per annum and you basically piggyback on missions that are set up by others and extract the same photos they take. They offer a 100 USD per annum and a 3...

For 2 years now, I've been postponing the decision to buy a telescope. My reluctance was based on two things; the nearly 1500 USD cost that I would be spending on it and the really sketchy weather that we have in Sri Lanka which makes it very difficult to get clear skies. The more I read and researched about how the amazing photos like the following are taken, the more I realised that my casual approach of just grabbing the telescope and going somewhere to do astrophotography isn't going to work. It's going to need some proper preparation. Photos like these require hours of shooting and at least a good one hour of prep work.

Comet NEOWISE became a pretty popular name among stargazers as well as non-stargazers in 2020. One of the main reasons why it was so popular was that it was one of the brightest comets in about 13 years (since the comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) - which was a daylight comet as well).  Unlike for example the 9 comets that turned up in 2019 or the 19 that turned up in 2018 - which clearly not many knew about, NEOWISE was a naked eye comet.

When I covered the 21st June solar eclipse, I took 19 photos over roughly 3 hours to create a montage of Moon's path across the disc of the Sun. There were some private queries on how it was done, so I figured might as well explain it all in a post.