Last night the sky finally cleared after weeks of cloudy weather and rain. With the closest approach of Mars upon us for the next 10 years, I wanted to try and grab some photos while I could. Using an off-the-shelf WebCam with my existing telescope and mount, I captured several short video clips and then used software to select the best frames and combine them into a single image. This is a new process for me so it took awhile to get everything working properly. This image is a composite of the images resulting from each of movies. The polar ice is clearly visible, as well as numerous albedo features. Mars is currently bright red and high in the sky by 10:00 p.m.
This image is a single frame of 30 seconds showing M42, commonly known as Orion Nebula. I snapped this with a DSLR at prime focus before putting everything up for the night. Later this winter I will be taking numerous photos of it so I wanted to get an idea of how well it filled the frame. This is one of the brightest nebulas in the night sky, and appears to hang in the middle of Orion's sword belt where a scabbard would be.
This image is a single frame of 4 1/2 minutes, unguided, showing the Flame Nebula in Orion's belt. Designated NGC 2024, it is much fainter than M42, appears next to Alnitak, the third star in the belt, which shines at magnitude 1.74 and lives 817 light-years away. The smudge in the upper right is a nebula, NGC 2023, surrounding a smaller bright star.
I could not resist snapping at least one image of the first quarter moon!
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
finally a clear night!
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3 comments:
I finally made it over. Awesome stuff. It's a step up from freezing and getting covered with dew while looking at the sky in the dome fields.
I still freeze most of the time but now I have a little room with a heater to warm up in, and I don't have to walk all the way back to the house like we used to!
You keep mentioning unguided. This mean hand-guided? I'm not sure I understand how a 4 1/2 minute exposure could be taken without blur unless some form of tracking was used.
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