Galileo's Camera

There is one photo that I thought I would never be able to take from Sri Lanka. I was thinking of going to the northern most corners just to see if it would provide a good view for this. Seems like you don't have to try that hard. Polaris and Big Dipper. Polaris is at the dead center of the bottom margin of the photo. Polaris and Big Dipper. Blue skies due to twilight. The elevation you can see Polaris or the pole star is pretty simple. The star appears as an extension of the north-south axis of the earth. So if you are right at the north pole, it is directly overhead, i.e. 90 0 from the horizon. Further you move from the north pole, for each degree in latitude, the elevation of the pole star comes down by one degree. This effectively means that your latitude is the elevation you see Polaris. If you are living in Sri Lanka the southern most tip (at Dondra Point) is at a latitude of 5 0 55' and the nothern most tip (Point Pedro) is at 9 0 49'. My choice fo...

Composite image of Jupiter (16x1/80sec ISO400) and Galilean Moons (1x1/10sec ISO800) The photo is a composite image of a high exposure shot to bring up the Galilean moons and a stacked image of Jupiter. The image of Jupiter might be the best I've done so far. Jupiter 16x1/80 ISO 400 stacked on Registax

Today (03rd November 2013) marks the last eclipse for the year of 2013 and it is a total solar eclipse for some areas in the world. Although Sri Lanka is not in that list, if you want to see how it looks like, there is someone webcasting it as it happens: SLOOH - Total Solar Eclipse or embedded via the SLOOH website The webcast of the eclipse will begin at around 17:15 Sri Lankan time.

Given the current weather in the evenings, I didn't expect to do much of stargazing. But imagine my surprise when I woke up around 3:30 AM to one of the clearest skies I've seen in Colombo. Did a bit of pointing, and decided to shoot Jupiter. One of the things that I shot way back when I was using my Astromaster 114 EQ. Jupiter - two images shot through NexStar4SE and stacked on Registax. Although not too bad, it is not that great either (have a look at http://www.astronomyforum.net/astrophotography-forum/8031-astro-io-jupiter-6-29-08-a.html for a comparison). There seems to be focus issues still and I am not sure where exactly the problem is. Moving to the 4SE has proven a good option. Given that it tracks, I don't have to fiddle with the controllers every two minutes. And even without a barlow, I can take a reasonably sized planetary image where 114EQ was producing very small images. Here's an old photo for comparison: Jupiter - single shot through Astr...