Orion!

So last night I was out at the cinema and when I got back I realised that the sky had cleared up and Orion was well above the houses across the road. I hadn't had a chance to look at Orion through my telescope yet so I broke it out and set it up in the front garden. Unfortunately it was a full moon, so that probably made the sky brighter. Anyway, I tried to take a photo of the Orion Nebula (M42) through my telescope and this is the result:



Not that great, but you CAN make the nebula out. As always it wasn't a particularly long exposure, because of my lack of a tracking mount.

I also had a look at Mars, but even with my smallest eyepiece it was a tiny wee disc. It was noticeably red, but also had a strong white tinge to it, I'm not sure if that means I need to use a filter or something on it...

More comets! And introducing: The Moon!

The skies cleared up quite well today so I rushed home and set up the telescope in my brothers room to get a few shots of the moon through it. Unfortunately I just could NOT focus it. Later on I headed out round the side of the house where there's no security light and set up my telescope there. It's the one bit of our garden where there's no light, but it's got a really limited view of the sky. Anyway, I managed to get the above shot and a few others. I just attached the camera directly to the telescope, no eyepiece projection or anything. (I don't think my eyepieces are really up to use for projection.)



I managed to get a photo of 17p Holmes, but it took me ages to find it as it was really dim. The last time I looked, which was only a couple of weeks ago, it was really bright and obvious through the telescope. Part of it may have been that the moon's out and not too far away, but I suspect it's getting dimmer anyway, as the dust cloud disperses.

I also got a look at Mars, but the atmosphere wasn't playing along and it was just a rather large blob that wobbled about. It was really low in the sky which is, I think, the worst place for looking at stuff. I had the same problem when I was trying to see Venus earlier in the year.

Comets and Galaxies and Frostbite, oh my!

So today the sky was nice and clear so I headed up to Glen Fruin to see if I could find a decent spot there. I found a gate to a field with plenty of space and planted myself there and then proceeded to freeze to the ground. The wind was so cold! The wind was also incredibly strong, so most of my photos are a wee bit odd looking due to the camera moving.

Anyway, I managed to find the comet 17p Holmes and got a shot of it.



I also pointed my camera at Andromeda (M31) but since it's so faint and I don't have an equatorial mount for my camera, the exposure time's quite short and you can't make Andromeda out too well.



See it up there, the biggest blur?

After I decided my hands were too frozen to stay there any longer I headed down to Duck Bay Marina and took some photos down there. Mostly just of the lights I could see across the loch, but I got a nice one of Ursa Major.

Fireworks!

Not really astro pish, I know, but what the hell, it looks similar. ;)










1/4 of a second exposure time with my 200mm lens at f:4.

And we're off!

About eight this evening the clouds parted and the stars appeared. I figured this was as good a time as any so I grabbed my telescope and camera and my brother and headed up to the new MoD road over to Faslane.

This was my first real attempt at taking photos of stars, aside from some none-too-hot star trails from my back garden, so I wasn't really expecting to do too well. It didn't help that once we got up there we discovered that the entire southern side of the sky was covered in cloud, and there were occasional bit floating around the rest. I was planning on photographing the Pleiades, Andromeda (M31) and, if I could find it, 17p Holmes, the comet. Unfortunately Andromeda was too high in the sky for me to point my telescope at it (the AZ-3 mount can't stop the telescope from falling back past a certain point), and I couldn't find it visually through the camera so I gave up on that. I just could NOT find the comet. So that left the Pleiades, which are EASY to spot, so they got most of the attention.

I decided to try a series of 5 second exposures, as anything above that results in quite bad trails through my 200mm lens. I took 10 photos and stacked them (once I got home) with Deep Sky Stacker, which made the picture look a lot cleaner, took out the orange glow anyway.



I could also just about make out the Milky Way so I pointed my camera at that and took a few long exposures. None of them really came out that well, partly because I used my autofocus lens and it's virtually impossible to get it to focus at infinity. If you're lucky you can point it at a star and it'll focus on it, but unlike the manual lens you can't just turn the focus ring all the way to the end and expect it to work. Anyway, you can make out the milky way in the resulting photos, I think, but it's faint and only really visible at smaller sizes.



See that blueish smudge from top to bottom? I think that's it. I could be wrong, though, my knowledge of the sky leaves a lot to be desired.

Douglas took a bunch of photos too, but I've no idea how they came out.