Month: October 2015

My first attempts to stack images with Fitswork didn’t work out too well, so I took a bit more time to process another single photo of the moon I took last night:

This time I let it in the original 4:3 full frame of my Olympus E-PL5 camera, which was put into prime focus of my Sky-Watcher 150/750P Newtonian telescope (which means: no lens attached).

This one’s for my brother Willi, who wants to make a 16:9 crop to use it as a background for his computer screen.

Update, one day later: here’s another version of the same image. While the first one was too soft and dull, the second was a bit too bright and contrasty, and also a bit oversharpened. So this is my final compromise – a better moon photo will follow when the sky clears up, and the moon is a bit older and not full anymore:

See also in the German-speaking Astrotreff forum and in the Balkonauten Community. Compared to what these guys & gals show, mine are the first baby steps only…

Thanks for viewing.

Single exposure, nothing stacked yet. Quick & dirty post processing using RawTherapee only:

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I don’t know if the weather will be good for it today, but I’ll try to get a moon picture using my telescope. This is like I took star pictures last time, with the camera riding piggyback on a (much bigger) ‘scope:

And this is an in-between portrait of Tuna the cat. Has nothing to do with the rest of the article:

A telescope has to cool down to the outside temperature before you can actually use it. So I brought it outside at around 4:30pm, and pointed the mount to the North (you can see a mark “N”), and the telescope roughly South-Southwest, where I expect the moon to show up short after the evening news or so:

As you can see, my mount doesn’t have motors yet to “track the stars”. But that won’t matter much for the moon, which is bright enough for really short exposures. And having an equatorial mount still helps, because you can “follow the moon” (or the stars, with counter-acting on Earth rotation) with adjusting just one axis if you get your polar setup accurate enough.

And this time, the camera will “look through” the telescope, or it will be used in the telescope’s “prime focus”, as astronomers and astro-photographers say. Which means that there’s no leans attached to neither the camera nor the ‘scope, the light path is coming in via the two mirrors of a Newtonian telescope, and light will be hitting the sensor directly, with no other glass (except the two mirrors) involved.

This is how it looks when an Olympus E-PL5 Micro Four Thirds camera is attached in prime focus of a telescope like my Sky-Watcher 150/750P:

So you’ll have to focus the scope, not the camera. Having a dual speed focuser would further help with precision, like using a Bahtinov mask (in front of the scope, you’d need it once just for focusing) would. But if today’s moon will actually show up through clouds and/or haze, I’ll try with just enlarging the photo on the camera’s rear screen. That will have to do for now.

The sun will be setting real soon now, so let’s see if I can get a good one (or maybe several ones to stack them later). As you see, sometimes photography demands a bit planning before it actually happens.

Thanks for reading.

P.S.: not the weather, like I thought. Clouds were coming in from the West or Northwest, and fast. I saw the moon around the corner, but it looked very “milky” already. So after the evening news I took the telescope back in. Moon photos will follow on another day. That’s like it goes…

Thanks for viewing.