Galileo's Camera

My subscription with SLOOH is still active and I thought that I will shoot through it while the monsoon season is over in Sri Lanka. My target of choice this time was the Pleiades (M45). The Pleiades, also known as Severn Sisters are an open star cluster. While it is a "cluster" the distance between the stars are massive. If you take two main stars of it, Alcyone and Merope, Alcyone is about  443 lightyears away from earth while Merope is about 380 lightyears away. The actual cluster also contains about 1000 stars in actuality.   Single shot of 5min exposure. Canary Three 11" telescope (SLOOH)   10x5min stack. Canary Three 11" telescope (SLOOH) As I've mentioned earlier on, I don't feel that I am doing anything worthwhile when I am shooting with SLOOH. It's a matter of just scheduling the photo and waiting for it to come out, then stack. I was therefore quite happy when I figured I may have actually caught a meteor across the frame. The photos were taken...

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...

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...

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.