Jupiter, It Moons Us!

Following an unfortunate accident recently involving a falling camera, our latest astrocam candidate, an Ixus 125, arrived in the mail the other day. Great little camera, it shoots full 1080 video making it a hopefully-ideal planetary and moon shooter.

Sadly, no port of CHDK yet, though work seems to be in progress on that. Fingers crossed we'll be able to get RAW out of it soon. A trip to the local hardware store and much experimenting with the camera and an eyepiece in store ("Can I help you find something?" " No, I don't know what I'm looking for") resulted in the acquiring of an odd looking piece of plumbing hardware. A quick hacksaw and much sanding and filing later, and I had an adaptor that takes a GSO 1.25" eyepiece on one end, and slips fairly tightly over the Ixus on the other. Et voila, the birth of astrocam 3 (or is it 4? what are we up to valHallen?).

The bush fires in Aussie were casting a pall across the sky last night, so seeing wasn't the best. Unfortunately it also clouded up around the horizon denying us what would have been a spectacular sunset, if the brief glimpses of a blood-red sun an hour before it hit the horizon were anything to go by. I pointed valHallen's scope at the Moon and then Jupiter once the sun was sufficiently in hiding, and was quite stunned at the details on the camera screen. I shot a few movies and fed one of them to Registax, and below is the resulting shot of Jupiter with (L to R) Ganymede, Europa and Io in tow through the 15mm GSO 1.25". Registax is quite daunting to the newcomer, so I'm sure we can do better with some practice, better focus, and better seeing! Very happy with the result though. Click the link below for Flickr, as usual.

Jupiter and Moons

2013, A New Committment and an Early Tragedy

Hey Folks, anyone heard from Bill?  Last I saw him he was making a tinfoil hat and muttering about twin satellites ... he also wants me to call him "Fox" for some disturbing reason.

Seriously tho, welcome to the new orbit, the 43rd since I arrived here :D

To try and improve my photography, and maybe to get something awesome going later on, I am starting to ramp up on the photography again ... to whit, I will be posting a picture a day this year - not necessarily taking a picture per day, but posting one.  So here's the first nine, it's a Flickr link, sorry.

From here I will be posting from Flickr as I upload.

And now the tragedy ... Just before Xmas I bought a new compact camera for my telescope shots, just after Xmas I dropped it :(  It's knocked the focus/lens assembly out of true, so if anyone knows how to get the lenses out of a Canon IXUS 120, please let me know :(

Eclipse, Nov 2012.

Well, the weather smiled on Snells Beach this morning for the best eclipse we're going to see here for a long, long time. Huge sighs of relief from myself and ValHallen, our gear performed just great, resulting in some excellent shots. 

Montage to come, too much work to do today to put that together!

Full Photo on Flickr

[Val]

Totally agree with Bill up there - a shaky start, just enough clouds to kill the idea of a timelapse, but a glorious day was forthcoming after that with maximum coverage (about 10:24) shining out clear and bright.  The home-made Baader film filters worked a treat, along with Bill's new T2 mount :)  So all in all an awesome result!

I have post-processed some of the shots, with about 6 up on Flickr so far, this is one of my personal favorites, showing the mountains of the moon outlined against the sun!

Slacker Val is Slack

I should post bit of a journey post today, since I have added a couple of tools to the process recently, and a technique or two as well, but it's early, I'm at work and I left my links at home, so here's some pictures instead.

KTHXBAI

Astro Safari!

Ok, finally got a chance to review my shots from our Leigh night safari last week. This is my best shot so far... ok, probably my best shot full stop. Over 80 shots, 3 hours, 1 good one. Ain't that the way sometimes? A great night anyway, gorgeous stars, amazing view with Auckland on the horizon to the south, and Whangarei to the north.


Hires on Flicker

The Stars, Kiwiana and gfkBill strikes a pose

What an awesome night last night.  Leigh/Pakiri was DARK! Not to mention Auckland on the horizon, and all-round awesome views!  1200mm team was out in force .. IE Bill and I went a-shooting.  And without further ado, here's what we got :)

In the first one, Bill strikes a pose as the Milky Way revolves behind him, and in the second the LMC hovers over Rangitoto and the rest of the landscape.

 

Then there's the Southern Cross over the Punga trees - I mean what could be more Kiwi?!? And finally, my fav shot of the night, I love the combination of the man made and the Milky Way.  There were of course some more, which you will see as soon as I do some more post on them.  Speaking of Post .. 3200ISO shots are very nice, but getting the noise out of them isn't.

HUGE thanks to gfkBill for the night.  Check his Flickr stream for his pics as they come up!

The light of 100 Billion Stars twinkling off broken glass ...

Now my heart-rate has calmed somewhat I can tell the story

Toinght was a perfect night - still, quiet, a fair time before the moon rose and washed everything out so off to the darkest part of Snells I could think of I go.

Venus was just setting ...

and the Milky Way was out in force ...

with an occasional meteor ...

and I dropped the camera.

Smash, tinkly noises and the sound of my heart stopping.  I rushed back to the car, thinking "oh crap" and sped home to get torch and Jeremy.  We found the remains of something .. and upon getting home discovered it was my UV filter ...

I lucked out

Lens and camera seem fine as rain - Canon build em tough!

Bright Lights, Small Town

Valhallen isn't the only astro-photography nut around here, although that's scarcely a coincidence. Until the Beast is up and on it's 3 feet, I'll have to content myself with long exposure fun with the 300D we rescued. Hmm, bit of a theme here, fixing up broken and neglected optics! Speaking of which, have a 350D on the way which will be a major mission to fix, but I digress.

Last night featured a gorgeous moon halo, and a very bright Venus, so without further rambling, some pics...

22Don300D

Venus Tree

A little noisy, but i like them. Now to figure out how to insert pictures; just getting the links in right was a mission :)

Vanilla Skies

I been shooting! See?

Scorpions

About to go out and try to get some long exposures of Scorpio.  Results as they come to hand :D

Eclipse

Almost missed it!  That will teach me to go thinking if was Northern Hemisphere only .. so rushed out to grab shots of it (thanks Pip and Rust) and found my IXUS was dirty and scratched and yeah - not happy .. got some, but they suck.

Today is clean camera day and wait for 6mm to turn up :D

Clear Skies tonight

Have recharged the camera battery 2x so far, and have trusty Ixus on car doing timelapse of milky way as we speak.  Lenses keep fogging up - I think it's lack of dew shield on camera.

But so clear, so beautiful.  Milky way is very visible, Coal Sack stands out well, now if I could only get everything working right .. grrrrrrrr

Will post anything good I get.

AAaaaaaand it's a bust on the long exposures :(  Lenses fog up fast and my mount is just too wobbly - re-engineer tomorrow methinks, for stability, especially around the screw mounting.  Never give up :)

Timelapse is still going, so won't know how that looks for a little while .. hope it's good.

Here's the best of the shots.

82 seconds at f 4.0, 75mm lens. When I am using the 75mm (18mm fogged up FAST) I have to turn the mounting 17 degrees every 3.5 seconds, so yeah .. I'm not too unhappy with this one, some wobbling and trailing ...

Ok, timelapse came out pretty naff ... I have to learn that the tiny CCD in the IXUS is not going to do the biz for high-iso stuffs ... *sigh* oh well, bed, then more ideas tomorrow ...

Just for the comparison ....

Here's another shot of the moon, this time taken with the 20D using Bill's long lens (300mm Zoom) it's for comparison to the other moon shots I posted this morning.

So that makes it 1/4 the focal length of the telescope .. even though that is kinda generous, because I use the IXUS 3x optical for the scope, and don't have the knowledge of optics to work out what that does to the focal length.

This hiatus has really shown me that I need some things to take this hobby further ... Scotch Mount for a start, then motor, then the rest ... there's even a very nice new point and shoot out from Canon that looks like to be perfect for the afocal stuff.

So the equation goes like this.  I love the stars. I want to take pics of them and all manner of other celestial things. For this I need Gear. For Gear I need Money. For Money I need a Job.  For Job I need a Showreel.  For Showreel I need time.

*sigh*

Stars Over Snells Beach

Stars Over Snells Beach
Originally uploaded by chickinthepark1

Went out to test the 20D tonight, was an awesomely clear night but I had power problems with the camera, which kinda sucked. The laptop worked fine, but I only got 25 shots in before the camera died. So this is the best of those.

30second exposure, Apeture f/3.5, ISO 400

Rising Stars

Good evening all .. and of course, Happy Holidays

I got an awesome script running for CHDK tonight .. my first timelapse.  CHDK is allowing me to make basically 8 megapixel movies of the stars moving around, using photographic settings :)

I has a happy! Here's why:  http://www.vimeo.com/8367629

The video is shot here in Te Awamutu facing roughly south-wards .. you can see the Southern Cross (Crux Australis) rising across the top left hand corner - real Kiwi Icon :)  I'm obviously needing things like better ISO settings and exposure control, but for a first time, I'm pretty happy with this.  My goal in this is to get a really good looking timelapse ... including the milky way if possible ...

As we draw near the end of the International Year of Astronomy, and the first 2 months of my astro-blog I'm thinking that this photography thing is way more complicated than I originally thought of.  Also, am looking forward to the next 5 years or so - New Horizons gets to Pluto in July 2015 - now that's going to be cool!   NASA has the Kepler project well underway .. looking for Earth-like planets around other stars and there's lot and lots of beautiful things to look at.

As for the blog, I have tried to keep it focussed on the sky, and my attempts to photograph it.  Hope you've enjoyed it so far.

Hope your holidays go well and you have a good time now and in the new year!!

Oh the sweet sweet taste of success!

Well the new camera is an unqualified success .. especially with the hack.  I got back from Welly and finally got a clear sky and all the right conditions to shoot for the moon .. so I did, and the ability to adjust things is awesome - also the ability to shoot in 3 bracketed shots is awesome, oh and well ... CHDK is just awesome :)

These are, without a doubt, my best yet.  Some notes on stuff for all that are interested - I manually fixed the chromatic aberration in Photoshop (moved the red and blue channels around), then applied a noise reduction and unsharp mask to the images.  I have not yet done any colour work on them, apart from colour noise removal, so they're fairly raw.

I most definitely has a happy!

Also, I have shifted from Flickr - as they want to start hiding my shots and I'm too cheap to pay for a pro account, so I went a hunting and found I can have up to a gig of photos here! So ... enough yak, on with the sexy shots!!

Phew!

OK .. here's the skinny.  Been offline for a few days, as y'all can probably tell.  But here's what's happened:

Fridays results were, quite frankly, shit.  Due to the CCD being around 2.5mm on a side, the object of the shot (in this case, was Jupiter) stayed on the fov for about 3 seconds, so I had issues even focussing the scope, let alone shooting anything good.  Also, due to my wee bucket needing collumation I was getting focal and exposure issues from the sides of the image to the center.  So not a good night Friday all in all.

However .. some other things have happened .. first off, my good friend Eddie has long-loaned me a Dell laptop - Eddie! I love you man, in that bromance way :)  Then on Monday my new camera arrived and it's a lovely little beast - have to give thanks to Fab and Sarsha for buying my Lumix so I could afford the Canon.  So the other night I got the CHDK kit loaded and had to go have a wee lie down.

Granted the 80IS is not an SLR .. but it now has most of the functionality of one - seriously, with the hack you can use the damn thing as an e-book reader if that's what you want to do.  It gives you control over everything!  And I mean everything - focus, aperture, exposure, timelapse, RAW format saving (both average and sum), remote firing and a whole lot of other things besides!  So I'm now learning how to use the hack basically and am pretty sure that my astro shots will improve somewhat :)

So then today, my 2x Barlow lens arrives! :) So now my focal length is effectively 2400mm :)

Now all I need is for the skies to clear - seriously, we've had one good night in the last 3 weeks!  First clear one I get, the cam+hack is getting a workout!

Real Life Intrudes

Hey all, having to actually start doing some work now :)  I promised myself I would holiday until my birthday and of course now I'm 39 I have to be sensible (snort).  But the reality is that I am starting show reel work with a vengeance now and also picking up more frequent freelance work as well ... this is in a way good, in the same way that paying rent and eating is good.  But it is going to cut into my gazing time somewhat.  This is not to say that this blog or the gazing, snapping and general swearing at gear will stop, but the posts may become a little more infrequent.  I hope this isn't the case, but just warning.

Now that's over with, I will be starting the engineering work on AstroCam2 either today or tomorrow, and of course there will be pictures and a story for support :)  Looking like things are moving forward on replacing the Lumix with a Canon too - more on that as it happens.

Te Awamutu Results and ...

There are none .. it rained, then did the maybe cloudy sometimes thing.  However, I spent some time checking out the new candidates for Astrocam 2 and it's looking like the Logitech cam for notebooks is going to be pretty darn good.

Also missed the auction for the Canon I was going for on Trademe :(  Will keep looking tho.

Also, I'm 39 today :)