Saturday, January 06, 2007

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.

1 comment:

Caz said...

Hey Gimpifoo! Why don't you post a pic of the new telescope?!?!?