Chris Curtis Web Site

Saturday 31 October 2009

DSLR Astrophotograph of the moon

Filed under: Photography and Art,Science — Chris Curtis @ 17:49

Another first – this time using my Canon 50D attached to the telescope to capture the moon. Much simpler processing – all in Photoshop after combining about 20 images taken one after another with Registax.

The Moon

The Moon

Jupiter

Filed under: Photography and Art,Science,Software and Web — Chris Curtis @ 17:39

My first try at webcam astrophotography.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7924794@N06/4053057961

Jupiter, Io and Europa

Jupiter, Io and Europa

To make this image there is quite a long sequence of steps!

  1. Obtain a webcam with a CCD sensor – I happened to have a Philips SPC900
  2. Obtain an adaptor so you can remove the webcam lens and fit the webcam into the telescope in place of an eyepiece – the telescope effectively becomes the webcam lens. I bought the adapter from telescope house
  3. Use some software so you can see what the camera is seeing – I used wxastrocapture (which is free) on my “easy peasy” linux netbook.
  4. Aim and focus the telescope and make sure it is tracking so that Jupiter appears to stay still.
  5. Use the capture software to collect about 150 frames as an AVI video file – camera settings are trial and error so I varied them (e.g. gain, shutter speed) and did this several times.
  6. Use “stacking” software which aligns all the frames then “averages” them to pull as much detail as possible out of the images and make one image from the video. I used Registax which is also free. I ran this on my windows laptop which is much more powerful than the netbook.
  7. I took the best image of Jupiter into Photoshop and adjusted brightness then used “Topaz Detail” a great photoshop plug-in I have.
  8. There was one image that showed Jupiter particularly well and another where Jupiter was over-exposed but the moons showed well. I used Photoshop layers and a little erasing to assemble one image from the two. Then re-sized the whole thing.

Not quite at Hubble standards yet but worth doing, I think. Much more to learn, but the basic idea worked.

Telescope

Filed under: Personal,Science — Chris Curtis @ 17:16

I now own a telescope – a rather attractive Celestron 4SE computerised one. I am delighted with its performance – though the weather has been tricky here with too much cloud to use it for more than a few hours in total so far (I have had it over a week). As well as amazing views of the moon and Jupiter, I have been able to find and observe lots of deep sky objects including the Andromeda Galaxy, the Ring Nebula, the Hercules Globular Cluster and many more.

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