Galileo's Camera

It seems like my last post was more than 11 months ago. Due to my job change and severe weather in Sri Lanka (more specifically Colombo), I have not been able to get in to astrophotography much. I had dropped my expectations a bit when we started getting freak showers last week (again) but then I noticed that towards the early mornings, the sky is extremely clear. So here we are: Venus - Nexstar 4SE and Canon 550D Jupiter and Galilean Moons  (from top to bottom: Callisto, Ganymede, Io and at the bottom, Europa) - Single shot off of Nexstar4SE and Canon 550D Jupiter - Stack of 50 frames (Nexstar4SE and Canon 450D) Jupter and Io (probably) - Stack of 250 frames (Nexstar4SE and Canon450D) I think I need to play around with more stacking options and perhaps it might be possible to see the rest of the moons too.

The year 2015 kicked off with a new comet incoming. Comet C/2014 Q2 is still on its approach towards the sun and is expected to be closest to the sun on 30th Jan. Right now it is just inside the constellation Eridanus Just below Orion. Cutting the mumbo-jumbo out: The details of the comet can be described well using the standard astronomy related terminology, but that may not mean much to non-astronomers. I thought I might as well put down a basic Q&A in as least technical words as possible :) 1. Is it visible yet? Is it visible in Sri Lanka Yes it is. But... It is just below the constellation Orion. Orion is one of the most recognised constellations in the sky but in case you are not too sure about it, here's how it looks.   The comet is below the constellation Orion, but it is very faint right now. According to what we know right now, if the sky is very clear and if you are looking at it from a place where absolutely no light pollution, you could see it with naked...

About a month or so back I realised that there is another problem with the 4SE, it wouldn't power up. Firstly I thought this was due to a battery drain, and that's the first thing I tried. While it worked once, after about half an hour of sky watching it stopped working again. It is quite improbable for a new set of batteries to drain that fast. After hooking up with a 12V 2A power supply, it still did not power up. This could mean two things: the power doesn't get to the circuitry or the circuitry it self is busted. After playing around a bit with a multimeter, the fault turns out to be... again on the switch . I think it is fair to assume that the part that has most physical/mechanical movement will be the first to fail. It is true that the electronics could fail, but I guess it is better to start from the switches. For the moment, I have bypassed the switch, and all is well (well except for the weather...)

Sunspot group AR2209

A giant sunspot group, AR2192, has formed on the sun again, and the group is now larger than the largest sunspot group we saw last year, making this the biggest sunspot group in the decade. AR2192 - 500mm Samyang Mirror Lens, Baader Solar Filter If you would like to know how big this really is, have a look at this image done by Paul Floyd at nightskyonline.info Copyright - Paul Floyd / nightskyonline.info The images below show my own images comparing the previous holder of the largest sunspot group of the decade that erupted last year: The group has caused several flares already, but there hasn't been any coronal mass ejections. A coronal mass ejection would pretty much guarantee that there would be massive auroral activity.

I have not been able to do any decent astrophotogaphy sessions recently. The rains are here and here comes the lightening shots. I'm fascinated of how it always strikes over the sea. All photos were taken with a 30s exposure F8.0 and F5.6 on a tripod. That actually makes it easier to capture lightening. You don't really have to do anything. The downside is that if there is some sort of ambient lighting, then your photo is likely to get washed out. You can step around this problem by having smaller exposure times.

Few days back, when I was trying to do some random stellar observations, I realised that the 4SE wasn't aligning properly and the goto function was off a little more than you'd expect. Given that weather wasn't on my side, I decided to let it go for the moment. I finally made a one star alignment and was trying to get the Sync function to work (the Sync function, when activated, would track the current position it is pointed to by auto adjusting to compensate for the stellar movement). The first worrying point when the controller returned an error that said "Offset too large, Sync failed". Yesterday, while I was trying the same, I was trying to align the telescope using the Two Star Alignment mode. After trying to align using two reasonably nearby stars (Alpha Centuri and Hadar and repeating with Alpha Centuri and Acrux), the controller was returning an error that said "Align failed". This was even more worrying. It is only slightly later that I rea...