Astronomy - images

As I live in an area of very high light pollution, I needed an object that was easy to find to take some images of, Mainly this was to get to know the Meade DSI camera. I found the ideal object, even I could not miss this one - the Moon !

This presented itself with a few problems, and I must admit that I broke all the rules when pointing the scope at the moon. It was fairly late, about 23:00, and I just opened the back door, stuck the nose of the scope out and pointed it at the moon. I synced the scope onto the moon, without doing any form of alignment at all, so there was horrible drift. However I am very pleased with the results.

I used the LX200 8 inch f10 , The DSI pro camera, Meade IR filter, and a simple 0.5 focal reducer screwed into the filter as well. This gives about twice the FOV with the camera. I took a whole sequence of images covering the entire lunar disk, normally this worked out to be about 250 images per set. About 4Gb of image data was collected. Obviously with the Moon being so bright the exposure time was very short, so lots of images were collected in a very short space of time.

The images were stacked using the Meade DSI imaging program, then converted to JPG and combined into a composite image with Photoimpact. Note that the final image here has had a lot of hand editing done to remove the joints between images.

I then reprocessed the images, this time using Registak and Autostitch. This image is highly processed, but the detail in much sharper.

Note that for both full size images you may find that you get severe patterning due to monitor mask sizes. View at 50% or 100% to reduce the effect.

Moon, total eclipse 3rd March 2007.

Taken with Fuji finepix 6900z + 1.5x teleconcertor, hence the small image size. Image was taken about 10 mins before the full eclipse.

Comet P17/Holmes

Taken 29th Oct 2007 at about 01:00 gmt. This is a stack of approx 30 images. Taken with the DSP pro, (monochrome) with a 0.5 focal reducer.

Comet P/Holmes suddenly brightened from mag 17 to about mag 2 a few days ago. The Weather has been very poor in the UK ever since this comets outburst, and this was the first clear sky since. The clouds cleared at aount 10pm, and it started to cloud over again at about 01:30. For most of the day it had been raining, which did knock some of the dust out of the air.