Galileo's Camera

Since any celestial photography is out due to the rains, I thought I might as well capture that. All photos were taken with a Canon 18-55mm (at 18mm) and a Canon 550D. The first photo has an exposure time of 15s and all others are with an exposure time of 30s. The photos have been post-processed for contrast and exposure.

Jupiter About a week and a half back, I was trying to capture the Geminids. Given the awful location I live, it was a complete no-joy. However, just scanning the skies, figured that Jupiter was actually visible and decided to have a shot at it. Photo above is a single shot of Jupiter with Canon 550D, prime-focus on a Celestron 114EQ with an exposure time of 1/20sec and ISO 100. Quite obviously, it is very far from what it should be. But its a start. I also have a series of 20 shots which could've been used for stacking, but unfortunately all of them seem to have gone out of focus. So yes, only this one shot is all I've got. I think it still might be a good one to end the year ;) P:S: Oh and btw, the stripes are real :)

Lovers Under the Starlit Nights - Captured at Dutch Fort, Galle, Sri Lanka. The background is the Milkyway across Scorpius and Sagittarius.

About two weeks ago I finally got my hands on the motor drive for my Astromaster 114EQ. I was debating whether I really need it or not and finally decided to just go for it. And over the weekend I had it installed and tested. To start off with, the motor drive arrived with minimal instructions. But that wasn't really a problem. The product was quite well made that I was quite intrigued by the whole design. Granted, it wasn't very intuitive, but the instruction sheet was quite to the point, that it was quite impossible to screw it up. It even had an Allen key and a screwdriver that fits the relevant bolts. But this doesn't mean that everything was going smooth. Once I fitted the mounting bracket, I figured that the coupler between the motor and the scope wouldn't fit on to the RA shaft (Celestron refers to this as the flexible coupler). The inner diameter of the coupler is almost exactly the same size as the shaft. I was about to file it off when I figured that I had...

As usual my sense of timing seems to be impeccable, I decided experiment with image stacking for deep space imagery when the monsoons are about to start. Ever since I made the decision, it's either been raining or completely overcast. I even had some difficulty in trying to do solar photography. Luck turned my side when I went on a trip to one of the national parks in SL, Wilpattu. The bungalow we stayed in was right in the middle of the jungle with absolutely no light pollution. My brother was the first to spot that the Milky Way was clearly visible overhead. He was trying to experiment with a set of long exposure shots while I was trying to get a series of comparatively shorter exposure shots for stacking. Milky Way across Cygnus (20 frames of 10sec exposure) The image above (Milky Way across Cygnus) was stacked on Deep Sky Stacker using 20 images each with 10sec exposure. The stacking was done with 10 dark frames and 10 bias. The image below captures Milky Way across Sco...

For about a month's time, I wasn't able to do anything interesting on astrophotography  owing to the bad weather. I started some experimentation on solar photography and well that is not going that well either. However, last week I managed to snap some decent pics of the moon. For the longest time I thought that lunar photos do not need stacking or wavelet enhancements. I mean moon is the second brightest object you can find in the sky. For the sake of experimenting, I tried stacking them and doing some wavelet processing on registax. The result is as follows: Moon - 10 frames stacked and processed with wavelets. I was quite surprised to see that this actually did made a difference. Compared to the usual blurred photos I get, these seem to do way better. For the sake of comparison, see the photos below: Non-stacked (prime focus) Stacked with wavelet processing (prime focus) So yeah it does seem to make a difference. I also wanted to see if this was something to do ...

In the last post, I wrote about what is collimation and what sort of an effect a non-collimated telescope has on imaging. Taking it from there, let's see what are the equipment we can use in collimating a telescope. No-Tools: Firstly let's ask the question whether we can collimate a telescope without almost any tool. It is possible for someone with real good patience and a reasonable eye-sight could collimate a telescope that is not seriously misaligned just by star-light (point at a star, keep adjusting up until the slightly out of focus image stops being an ellipse and becomes a disc). However using a collimation cap makes the job much more easier. It is not necessary to collimate the telescope during the night when using this method. It is possible to perform daytime collimation by center-spotting your primary mirror. What is center-spotting? It simply means marking the exact center of the primary mirror. Some of the telescopes come with the center marked from the factor...