These are nice

Just played around with my E-520 DSLR and the 50mm/2 macro lens attached to it. Some books on our table – and if you happen to have a ten-year-old daughter, she might love these:

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Zuleikha has in fact 4 of them…

Thanks for reading.

Of stars, airplanes, light pollution, and the cold…

Yesterday I tried to collimate my telescope but ran into problems. So I asked Mirko Boucsein from the local observatory if he’d like to help me, and he suggested to meet me in Darmstadt.

After successfully collimating the telescope (which is a matter of minutes once you’ll get the right tools and the hang of it) I asked him if I could try some “Live Composites” using my Olympus E-M10 camera. “Live Composite” is a term invented by Olympus which does some stacking in-camera, taking one base image and then only adding lights (plus one dark frame in the end to compensate for noise). Mirko wanted to get some photos himself using the observatory’s biggest telescope, and accepted to have my camera mounted piggyback to the big tube and mount.

First he pointed the scope to Deneb, and the North America Nebula (NGC 7000), and my camera took 14 photos (of 60 seconds each at ISO 200 and f/2) which resulted in one raw file and one jpg:

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After doing that he wanted to get some long exposure shots of NGC 6946, better known as the Fireworks Galaxy. So he programmed that into the mount’s GoTo system, and the big scope went straight up to our zenith (the point right over our heads) to track that one. Here I took 45 exposures of 60 seconds each, which the camera again stacked into just one raw and jpg file:

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You don’t see the nebula and the galaxy in my photos which I took with the Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens. First this is a very wide angle, and those nebulae and galaxies are small (in fact they’re huge of course, but I mean a small angle in my photos here). Plus they are also faint, and since I didn’t use any filter against the light pollution (you clearly see Darmstadt city lights in the second photo), I had no chance to get anything like that. Plus my camera isn’t modified to allow h-alpha and other wavelengths to even reach its sensor.

What you do see in both images were airplanes flying straight through my frame. This you can’t get rid of if you let the camera do all the stacking “live”, while taking the image – you’re much better off with manual stacking if you want to avoid those.

But still – these were my first two astrophotos using a tracking mount which was even guided by a third camera, and PHD on Mirko’s Windows laptop. So it doesn’t matter if your exposure time will be 14 or 45 minutes like in my examples, or even hours (and some 10 hours over several days using different filters is pretty standard procedure in astrophotography) – your stars will be nice and round and pinpoint sharp if you use a Bahtinov mask to focus (which Mirko did, but we didn’t have one the size of my small lens).

You’ll need all of that stuff, plus something more: you’ll need to be able to stand the cold, and the wind. I was really feeling cold when I got home, and that was early in the evening (short before 10pm). Imagine having to stay there for several hours more – who said that stuff would be easy?

Anyway. Now I have my scope laser-collimated, and one more interesting experience as well. Thanks again to Mirko, whom I hope to see again soon.

Thanks for reading.

P.S.: this was also a test inspired by this thread in a German astronomers’ forum, to see if my Olympus camera can do something like an Atik Infinity – and no, not out of the box. Haven’t tried it through a telescope yet, but I surely won’t get any h-alpha colours on it.

Prime focus, and our spring will be pink…

Just had some time before sundown, so I went outside with my telescope again. First I aligned the finder scope with the main ocular at some rooftop maybe 100 meters away. Then I tried a camera instead of an eyepiece again, and after removing some distance ring from my T2 to 1,25″ adapter I got the camera into focus, but it was still borderline (the focuser was into the telescope all the way, and still it could have been sharper). Which means that I should get the 2 inch adapter as well, since it saves another distance which I’ll need to focus to infinity.

Here’s a picture, first with the normal 25mm lens on my E-M10 camera:

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And then the same rooftop with the E-PL5 (same sensor as above) straight through the telescope, without any lens:

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So it does work, though being able to focus from maybe 15 up to 100 meters is a tight “envelope”. Plus, as you can clearly see, the second photo is sharper on the right than on the left (or in the middle of the frame), which means that I’ll also have to “collimate” that ‘scope – which means I’ll have to align its two mirrors, which is a pretty standard procedure for Newtonian telescopes. With these you’ll have to align its smaller front mirror at least once, but the main and much bigger one fairly regularly. That’s what those screws on its back are for…

Another topic: Mitchie and Zuleikha like flowers and gardening. And when they saw this at Aldi’s today, they just had to get it:

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These have to get in now, before the first frost. And then our spring will be pink…

Thanks for reading.

P.S.: silly me. Just realized that I can screw off the whole 1,25″ eyepiece holder. The 2″ part which remains has a T2 thread, in which the ยต43rds-T2-adapter fits. So if I attach this, the camera can be mounted right on top of it, and it should be able to focus to infinity just fine. I’ll try that tomorrow, because now there’s clouds only. Telescopes are pretty modular, which is cool.

A portrait, and “first light”

We’ve had the annual Customer Service Week at my employers, and so on Thursday we didn’t work. Instead of that, we were gathering with our colleagues from other places whom we normally don’t meet, like some from Munich and Vienna. I took pictures of the whole day event which I cannot show here due to some non-written but still valid non disclosure agreement.

Yesterday however, Belen accepted to have her portrait taken:

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Zuleikha was off with her class for three days, and is back as well. And when she went to bed, I looked at the sky which was more or less clear for the first time this week, so I decided to take out my telescope to have a look. This is what astronomers call “first light”, if it’s the first time you point a new telescope to the sky and the stars.

If you do that, first you will see – nothing much at all. You’ll see a faint and fuzzy shimmer of the stars, but the telescope has to cool down if you don’t permanently store it outside – expect something like 5 minutes per inch of opening, so in my case it was about half an hour.

And then you’ll go “Wow!”. You’ll see a lot more than you can see with the naked eye. More like this, which was taken with my wide angle lens (14mm, equivalent to 28mm on film) at ISO 3200:

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What you see on the upper border is the balcony above our veranda, lit by a small 5 Watt LED reading light from our living room. The tree tops on the lower part are lit by the same light plus some of the neighbours above. In pretty much the middle of the image, you see a blueish (and slightly overexposed) dot, which is Vega. This you can see with the naked eye as well, because it’s very bright (in fact much brighter than the sun, just further away). What you do not – or hardly – see with the naked eye is the double star above it, in Lyra. Even in this wide angle shot it pretty much looks like one, but when looking through a telescope you’ll clearly see two stars, even if you use only some 30x magnification like I did with using my 25mm eyepiece (focal length of telescope divided by focal length of eyepiece equals magnification).

I tried “prime focus” with the camera, which failed. “Prime focus” means that you won’t use a lens at all, but bring the camera’s sensor into the focal point of the telescope which I couldn’t – have to get another T2 to 2″ adapter for that. Plus I also have to try during daytime when you see a lot more. The minimal focus distance of such a telescope is around 15 meters (my guess, depends on the length of your eyepiece holder/focuser), so I’ll have to try with some things like buildings which are further away than that.

What went very well was to “follow the stars” (which in fact means to counteract the movement of our planet) with using just the right ascension axis, even with my sloppy setup to roughly North (we cannot see Polaris from our place – the building is in the way). The stones on our veranda are more or less exactly aligned to the West, which greatly helps. And the 50ยฐ line (North of the equator) runs straight through our small town, which also helps in setting up the correct declination.

So here’s another photo of the tube, again in our living room, and in its “home position” (pointing to the celestial North):

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I also have to get some short Vixen GP dovetail bar with a 1/4″ camera screw, so that I can use the NEQ3 equatorial mount with the camera instead of the telescope. Interesting that you can “follow the stars” with only one knob ( and only slight corrections from time to time on the other one). Once I’ll get the hang of this and it all becomes pretty much natural, I’ll care for a motor (or motors) to do that job.

Thanks for reading.

A long lens

Joking – this will be used for observing, at least in the beginning:

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Sky-Watcher 150P (150/750mm Newtonian telescope) on NEQ-3 (equatorial mount)

But sooner or later I will use the mount for photography – instead of the telescope I will first use only one of the cameras with normal lenses on it, once I have motors which can perform some automatic counter-action to the movement of our planet. The result, when using and aligning the whole rig properly, should be pin-point stars at exposure times greater than only a few seconds. When using a normal tripod which stands still, there’s the “rule of 400”, meaning that you can divide 400 by the (“full frame”-equivalent) length of your lens to get the maximum exposure time before stars become star trails. So even with my wide angle 14mm lens (28mm-e), that would mean less than 15 seconds. When using this NEQ-3 and at least one motor for the right ascension axis, I should be able to expose longer. Then the stars will stand still, and the earth will move (like it does in reality) ๐Ÿ˜‰

Of course I’ll take some pictures of the moon through this telescope next time we have a clear sky. This isn’t really a setup for flat field deep sky objects, where you’ll need really long exposure times (of hours). For doing that, you’d also need a coma corrector (since all “fast” Newtonian telescopes show some coma at the frame borders), and you’d also have to help the motorized tracking with “guiding”. Which means that you’d need a second camera just for that purpose. Plus this mount isn’t really made for it, you’d need a much bigger and stronger one, which alone would cost three times as much as this complete rig you see here.

So – I’m really looking forward to this. But since I’ve bought a 6 inch telescope, I’m responsible for the next six weeks of rain and clouds, as they say in the astronomy forums…

If you want to see more and better pictures of the thing, and read a test of it, look at Arkadiusz Olech’s site.

Thanks for reading.

“Blood moon”

Monday morning, short before the total lunar eclipse:

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Straight out of camera, cropped into a 16:9 format, and resized for screen use. Here’s another one from short before, without any trace of an eclipse:

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Both taken with my 40-150mm lens on an Olympus E-M10 camera.

Thanks for viewing.

Dream bike

Zuleikha outgrew her 20″ bicycle since quite a while – so we had to get her a new one. Here’s the headlight of her new Falter FX407 Pro (and since it’s for girls, the colour isn’t white & green but white & apple ๐Ÿ˜‰ ):

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Taken with the Zuiko Digital 50mm/2 Macro lens on my E-M10 camera.

Thanks for viewing.

Dream car

I’ve taken lots of pictures of the night sky lately, and I’m far from done with it. But to produce what I have in my mind, I need some additional gear first, like a German equatorial mount with at least one motor which compensates the rotation of our planet. One of the most clever designs I saw for this, if you just want to mount your camera onto it, would be the Skywatcher Star Adventurer, best as a complete photo or astro bundle. It will carry a DSLR and something like a 135mm lens just fine, but if you want to add a real telescope later, you’d probably need something bigger. Be prepared to spend over 1200โ‚ฌ for a good starter combination… (the mount alone is about 1kโ‚ฌ in the stores around here).

So during the last weeks I was busy reading and learning about how to take photos of the stars. And nebulaes. And galaxies. And believe me or not, but you can forget about everything you thought you knew about photography. This is as much science as it is art, and sadly, it’s a numbers game – you’ll need precision, and that always costs real money.

Today I was out for a short walk again, with a camera or two (those Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses don’t weigh that much, so you can carry more than one if you like). It was a nice walk, and the funniest thing I saw was this:

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Rusty, yes, but who says you can’t love rust? And like the sticker in the driver’s window says, at least this one is not sponsored by Mom & Dad… ๐Ÿ˜‰

In it’s back window was another funny one, but this would probably best be understood by Germans (hint: Flensburg can take your driver’s license if you behave too badly):

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Loved that car. Even the mostly matte black paint job is really nice. And the rust. If you want a car like that, or plan to pimp your own one like this, ask Holger.

Ok. Sunday afternoon. Cake time. So I’ll make coffee.

Thanks for reading.