Saturn - I need better equipment

I must be doing something wrong. Naah. I blame the equipment. I thought I was messing up the focus, so I spent a lot of time practicing. In the end, I think the Canon is to blame. I suspect it's the shutter causes everything to vibrate. Can I be sure? Only one way to find out.... a decent CCD camera.... Sigh.... that costs money. Compared to what you see with the naked eye - this picture is up to sh#t.



Caz keeps on asking for a photo of the telescope, so here goes. ;)

Amateur Astronomy in Pretoria

So - as luck would have it - there was no rain! And very few clouds. I got word that the Amateur Astronomy Society of Pretoria would be setting up at CBC.

I got to see the comet a second time. Photo below taken at ISO 100, f9, 10 second exposure. Using CANON EOS 300D.



Too a photo of people standing around their telescopes. ISO 800, f2.8, 30 second exposure. Sony DSC-V1. Wasn't planning it that way - but you can see the Southern Cross rising.

Long exposre - v.s. Layering

So it's not as simple, as just layering a bunch of pictures on top of each other....

On the left - one single long exposure. On the right, a bunch of images layered on top of each other.

Maybe I should ask someone smart if there's a better way?

Astrophotography - layering

So this weekend, I started getting a feel for my 8" without the moon interfering, and a few kilometers away from the worst city lights.

Equipment again: 8" Newtonian & Canon 300D (you can see from the Tarantula photo - that the Canon introduces a lot of garbage... will have to see what we can do about that)

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m42
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I started of with good old Orion again. 10 second exposure at ISO1600. No star trails! Amazing - considering that polar alignment consisted of me guessing the general direction of South!

I've gotten rid of the shakes - Canon has some nice software for taking photos via USB - so you don't have to touch the shutter.

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ngc2070
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Went on to something much cooler - the Tarantula Nebula (ngc2070) - which was cool, because as a bonus I got a globular star cluster in as well! (ngc2100)

For Tarantula, I tried out taking multiple exposures, and overlaying them. What you see - are 5 exposures, 4 seconds each, at ISO 1600. I couldn't take longer than that - because my polar alignment was too bad.

A problem with XSL transformations in Java 1.5

If you are like me, you probably tried to use javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource as your XSLT source, and your XML source.

If you are like me - you spent hours and hours, trying to figure out why your XML wasn't being transformed.

I don't know why. But you HAVE to use javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource.

Making the code:
// get the files
File xsdFile = new File("xsd/xml.xml");
File xslFile = new File("xsd/xsl.xsl");
// turn them into stream sources
StreamSource xsltSource = new StreamSource(xslFile);
StreamSource xsdSource = new StreamSource(xsdFile);
// get transformation stuff
TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer(xsltSource);
// set up for sending the output to screen
StreamResult scrResult = new StreamResult(System.out);
// transform
transformer.transform(xsdSource, scrResult);

My first deep space foto

This is my very first (and I mean that literally) photo of a deep space object (something not in our solar system) taken through a telescope.

It's the Orion Nebula (M42/NGC1976). Seeing as my scope isn't aligned at the least - I'm pretty impressed. Just as luck would have it - there's a meteor streaking by as well!

Equipment: Canon 300D, 8 Inch Newtonian
Exposure: 30 seconds, ISO 1600

The picture was actually horribly overexposed (there's a full moon out) so I had to touch it up a bit.

I also finally have a semi decent photo of the moon!