first Moon photo

A full moon can be so bright !

Last night i went out to try to take a picture of the full moon using the prime focus method. I quickly realized that the full moon does not fit into the viewfield so i had to take two pictures which i then had to doctor together in photoshop. I wanted to try the "photomerge" feature but ever since i upgraded to Snow Leopoard, Photoshop crashes alot and the photomerge feature is not working at all anymore......

So here is my first picture of the moon:

The image was altered in photoshop using unsharpen mask as well as brightness and contrast correction.

It was a cloudy night and i think a little cloud can be seen at the very top of the image. I probably took 10 to 15 pictures but could only use two or three in the end due to clouds that only showed up in the final images and where not visible on the cameras LCD screen.

first astrophoto !

A light polluted harbour town

I decided to take the telescope with us on our vacation to the south of france - to a place called "Grau du Roi" in the vicinity of Montpellier. I was hoping for dark skies and alot of free time to spend taking photos.

I did get the following gear in order to be able to take pictures through the scope:

- Eyepiece and prime focus projection adapter from CNCSupply Inc. This set can be used to take photos by directly attaching the camera to the telescope or by placing an eyepiece between the camera and the telescope. Here's a picture of the setup for eyepiece projection:

From right to left: 1.25" adapter, Projection Body, T-Ring and T42 to micro 4/3rds adapter (purchased separately on ebay for 40USD) that is necessary to attach my Panasonic G1 camera. So basically all these pieces get screwed together and the left part goes into the telescope and the right part screws onto the digital camera.

Unfortunately, although our apartment was situated right at the beachfront, the light pollution from cities close by was quite bad. Especially the nearby harbour seemed to have huge lights pointing up at the sky.

Man, focusing can be hard !

But i gave it a try anyway and took a couple of shots of Jupiter with the moons Callisto, Europa and (i think) Ganymede. I had a really hard time getting a good focus. My Panasonic G1 has an option where you can zoom into the image to check the focusing but this mode only works for a couple of seconds and it was really hard to manually focus using the focus knob on the telescope. Here's the original photo set after aligning and stacking:

I was quite disappointed that Jupiters moons where not visible at all in the images after they stood out so well when looking through the telescope. Maybe i will have to try longer exposure times next time around...

And here's the same image after adjusting the brightness and contrast settings in photoshop:

I took 6 images and stacked them using "Keiths image stacker" and then increased the contrast using Photoshop CS4. I did not try the prime focus method and was unable to use my other 40mm eyepiece since it was to wide to fit into the projection body.

So far i like the projection adapter but what i would really like is a way to somehow use the lense of my digital camera in order to zoom into an image. So far i've not found any adapters that would allow me to do this.