Some astrophotography attempts with the new camera...

[Walczak Photo]

Hey Folks,
Since there's not a lot of activity on the forum and since I do seem to be able to link to Photobucket.com, I thought I'd post a couple of astropics I shot the other night...I hope no one minds (if the mod's have a problem, please let me know and I'll edit them). These pics are not my best work by a long shot. I had the new camera out at Findley State Park the other night and was testing a few things...I know I can do better, but these pics prove I can do it at least . The shot's of the moon and Saturn were taken thru the eyepiece of my telescope (a 5" Orion Mak for those interested) and the camera used was my new Canon Rebel XT with a Tamron 28-80mm lens. All three pics were processed in Photoshop.




I'm pretty pleased with this shot of the moon all things considered. I've shot better pics of the moon thru the scope with both my Sony and my former Olympus...but again those were after some degree of experimentation with both cameras. I had to sharpen this pic a tad and I did get a small degree of chromatic abberation (I think the mirror on my scope may be a tad out of adjustment), but the biggest problem was simply the noise...I had been doing something else with the camera and had the ISO bumped all the way up to 1600 and I really only needed it set to 100 or 200. One of those mental notes for next time I guess! LOL!!!



Wednesday night was my first ever attempt at doing star trails. This was actually the last shot of the night...I took this one between 3 and 4 am, about an hour and a half before moon set and it's a 45 minute exposure. By this point, I was freezing my butt off, so I actually had the camera setup on the tripod right next to my minivan with the cord for the remote ran thru the window. I sat in the van with my youngest dog and the heater going while I watched "Monster's Inc" on my laptop! LOL!!!! Boy talk about hard work as a photograher eh? . Again here there's more then a fair amount of noise in the image but when I tried to do NR on it, I started to loose the details of the star trails themselves, so I left it as it.



This is probably the worse and most specactular pic I took that night. Obviously there is a signifigant amount of noise in this pic (ISO 1600), but again this image of Saturn was shot with the camera hand held thru the eye piece of my telescope. Once I get the right T-adapter and a motor drive for my scope, I should at the very least be able to capture some incredible images of the planets (if not a few deep space objects). It's certainly not Cassini quality, but again just a test and it prooved I can do this!

If the weather works in my favor, I'm heading back out in a couple of weeks during the new moon and should, with a little luck, be able to come up with some better shots.


Alrighty, that's it for now. As always comments and critiques are quite welcome!

Bright Blessings & Gentle Breezes,
Jim

[bob_r]

Jim,

I don't know what you did differently, but these posted fine and look great. I don't understand how you did it, but the shot of Saturn is grainy, blurry and still amazing. So are the other shots. How far our of the city did you have to go to get the star trails?

Bob R

[Walczak Photo]

Hey Bob,
How far our of the city did you have to go to get the star trails?

A little ways, but not a terrible distance...Findley State Park is down in Southern Lorain county (we're up here in the City of Lorain in Northern Lorain county) and it's about 22 miles and a 40 minute drive from the house. It's a very nice area...good sized lake for fishing and canoe with a beech area for swimming, decent camping (also a tad pricey if you have 3 dogs), lots of hiking trails and so forth. During the warmer months, my wife and I take the dogs out there as often as we can for picknicks, hiking and of course, star gazing. There's a pretty serious light dome to the north as you can see somewhat from the star trails pick, but most of the sky is pretty dark...except when the moon is out! LOL! It's actually dark enough that around August, we get some pretty nice views of the Milkyway out there. What sucks is there's a great deal of housing developments right near the park now, so we probably won't have that dark sky for too much longer.

As far as the shot of Saturn goes, I'll probably head out into the back yard with the next break in the weather and try a few things...this particular shot was more of an afterthought then anything. Now that I know I can get a shot like this, I have a few idea's to make it better . The reason the image is sooooo grainy and noisy is aside from using ISO 1600 on the camera, it was a -very- small image in the over-all pic...I cropped out over 9/10ths of the pic! LOL!!! I think I used my 25mm eyepiece for that shot...next time I'll try my 15mm eyepiece, which will give a bigger view in the eyepiece (in case you're not familiar with scopes, the smaller the eyepiece, the more magnification). I also may try the 70-300mm lens on the camera with my closeup lens...see if I can get it to focus and that should provide a larger image still. I know I can't push the mag too much because of distortions in the Earth's atsmosphere, but I should be able to get a little more out of this rig now.

The real problem is simply that the Earth keeps moving on me and throws things out in the eyepiece...I have to keep chasing whatever it is I'm focused on! LOL!!!! Both of my telescopes are stickly manual control but if I can get a motor drive, at least one powerful enough to drive my larger scope and mount, then I should be able to capture some dynamite images with my Orion. I'm hoping that will come sometime later this summer.


As far as what I did differently...beats me! LOL!!! The only thing I can think of was that Tiger pic in the other forum was an older pic on PhotoBucket where as these three, I had just uploaded this morning. I"m not sure why that would make a difference, but it's the only thing I can think of. The goose pic(s) I loaded on the other forum are actually hosted on Image Shack's site. I'm still playing with Image Shack and it looks promising...

Okies...thanks for the comments! I'll probably post some more critter pics later today once I've got all the Image Shack stuff figured out...


Bright Blessings,
Jim