Saturn 6/28/12

Shot with Canon XS DSLR prime focus
EOS Movie Record 5x

Larger ones resized 150 and 170%
And the Moon from night before, best Moon shot so far!

Moon and Saturn with Eyepiece Projection Experiment

Used the DSLR with Eyepiece Projection last night. 15mm EP, Tring Tadapter to camera. Recorded in EOS Movie Record at 5x, which is supposed to give 1-1 pixels. Seemed to work on the Moon but Saturn was very dim and soft. I think it was to much image scale for the scope/camera/seeing adn my lack of expierence at higher focal lengths.
According to Starzonia's webpage calculation this gives a focal length of 6667 and F27, a bit much! So I backed off and used Prime focus and EOS Mov Rec normal and at 5x for the Moon and Saturn, these came out much nicer than any of my previous attempts with the digital camera.
 I am looking forward to trying a 20mm EP tonight, which should yield around F18 adn 4375 FL.

Moon Saturn and Mars with New Camera

Picked up a Canon EOS Rebel XS (1000D) 10.1 MP DSLR camera body for 125 bucks.
 1st light shows this will be a fine performer for Moon and Planets as well. I forgot to take the focal reducer off fro Saturn and Mars, and the wind was blowing the whole time, seeing was absolutely horrid. Can only get better from here, I'm stoked!

Venus Trasit Movie

This is a compilation of the 5x Magnifications Videos I took during the transit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48QlCHg7ECA

Not the greatest but I kept having to jack up the exposure to see through the clouds.

Venus Transit...of course

Some clouds but we were able to view most of the transit until sunset, about 2 hours. I also got the black drop effect and one vid with a plane crossing the sun. I setup the laptop and a 19" LCD to live view the transit through EOS Movie Record with a a Canon XS, that way we could all see it and I could record video and stack it later. The clouds came and went over and over, so I was having to change exposure and ISO constantly to see the Sun through the clouds. Some of the videos were over exposed as a result, but hey, whatchagonnado?
This is what it looked like 30 minutes before the transit started:

My Gear, notice there are no shadows....stupid clouds...

But I did end up with over 40 vids to process and some single frame shots. It has taken me all day jsut to stack 20 of them in Registax. The 2 below are single frames from videos that would not stack due to the clouds.

The famous "Black Drop" effect below.