After spending a few weeks working on an equatorial platform for my telescope, I finally got all the kinks worked out on it and had a nice, clear night to test it. The platform worked exceptionally! I spent about 15 minutes setting it up, fiddling with the motor speed, and… Continue Reading... "First Galaxy, M101"
I figured I would try something other than M42 for once. With my new Baader UHC filter in hand, I looked around at other parts of the Orion constellation. Knowing approximately where the horsehead nebula should be, I looked around a bit using a 56mm eyepiece and the filter. I… Continue Reading... "Horsehead: 1, Me: 0"
I was just randomly looking around the night sky, and found a little “cluster” of stars that I thought looked cool. I decided to photograph it a bit in case something else came out with it. The result was quite pretty! I did mess with the saturations a bit to… Continue Reading... "Random stars?"
I bought a cheap Chinese “UHC” filter on Amazon that only lets through light around the 500nm band, which is a cyan-ish color. It did work pretty good at making the Orion nebula pop in a big eyepiece. However, it seems to have some kind of reflection problem. Stars would… Continue Reading... "M42 again?"
While on vacation in beautiful Kentucky, I had a chance to try out the scope in some great viewing. With limited time and clouds moving in, I decided to try again at M42, since it is easy to find. The camera was used in “prime focus,” without any eyepiece used.… Continue Reading... "M42 at prime focus"
I watched a video on image processing, and it motivated me to try again with my image of M42. The first step was to mess with the levels in a more careful way. I would start by moving the middle clamp setting closer to the peaks in the histogram. This… Continue Reading... "Trying again with M42"
Also during my first trial run of the veritable “light chariot,” we were able to easily find M42 in the Orion constellation. It very clearly presented itself as we trained the largest eyepiece I had on it. I had never viewed a nebula before on my own, so it was… Continue Reading... "First view of M42"
