Galileo's Camera

Jupiter and Galilean Moons - From top to bottom: Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede I am not some one who is very sentimental, but I can't stop going back to the times that I was about 13-14 years old when I look at this picture. Back in around 1994-95 I constructed a telescope using nothing more than a lens of dad's old spectacles, an eye piece from a toy binocular and PVC tubes. It was a very crude construction but worked pretty well. If I could remember it had a magnification factor of about 20x. The first celestial object I pointed it at was the Moon and I was pretty overwhelmed to see the craters of the moon. That was the first time I saw them "for real". I am pretty sure I would've pointed it at a few other objects, probably at the Orion Nebula as well, but what I can distinctly remember is seeing the moons of Jupiter. For the past month or two, Jupiter has been high in the sky during the evenings and being quite a bright object, have been a goo...

While trying to find a possible location to spot the comet PANSTARRS (C/2011 L4), an interesting question came up. Would we actually get a better (and by better I mean practically better) chance of viewing if we were on a rooftop? Given that the comet is between 5-10 degrees above the Sun, there is only a small viewing window. How much better would this get if you were on a rooftop? The question actually converted into something else, how far can you see and how much better does it get if you climb up high? The calculation is pretty simple if you assume the Earth to be a perfect sphere. Although it is an ellipsoid, let's just assume it to be a sphere for the sake of calculation. In the diagram above, r is the radius of the earth h is the height of the observer (or height to eye level) d is the direct distance from eye of the observer to the horizon and  D is the actual distance (i.e. on the surface of earth) Since the line with the distance d is a tangent to the spher...

I'm pretty sure quite a lot of us have seen moving stars. No these are not shooting stars, these are much slower and are reasonably bright. These are man-made satellites. Thanks to a tip-off from my dad (he's an avid reader of a local science magazine), I knew for a while that the International Space Station (ISS) is visible to naked eye just like a satellite. Only thing you need to know is where and when. Guess what? NASA has a whole service dedicated to spotting the station at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html . You can go to http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ to subscribe for an email alert service or use Station Sightings link (direct link at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html ) to get a list of dates and times when the ISS flyby will be visible above your city. After a bit of a wait, managed to capture it on my camera. Come to think of it, I think its been about 6-9 months since I first ...

So yeah, managed to mend it DIY way, it does not look so great but well it still works. So here's what happened: I was trying to shoot Sirius around mid night and was dead tired. Was scrambling around half a sleep and toppled the telescope over. Had this been on grass, this would've been fine but it fell over and hit a tiled ledge on the balcony. Saw a piece coming off and my immediate thought was that its the bracket that went off. It wasn't the bracket, it was the mount. The only option I could think of was to write to Celestron  and see if I could purchase a replacement part. Unfortunately they didn't have any. They did confirm however that if I were to speak to one of their retailers, I might have a very small chance of finding one. Few emails later I figured that this is also not a possibility and the options I have are to purchase a new tripod-mount (i.e. the entire set), a new telescope or try to somehow mend it my self. With the PANSTARRS ...

Like my last post says, I went through an unfortunate incident of breaking the mount of my Celestron 114EQ. Thankfully I had the Samyang Mirror Lens to play with. Here is a photo of Jupiter made with the mirror lens: Jupiter - Stack of 10 images 1/80 shutter at 800ISO. Taken by Samyang 500mm f8.0 with a 2x converter. The photo is not so bad compared to the shot I took via the 114 EQ (link: http://galileoscamera.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-shot-of-jupiter.html ): Jupiter - Non-stacked 1/20 shutter at 100ISO.  The obvious differences are in the image size (which I still cannot figure out why - possibly I shot at a different resolution) and the shutter speed/ISO settings. The 114EQ gives the less grainy/noisy and therefore the better quality image. Well I guess I need to try a bit more in darker and clearer skies.