7/17 Cygnus Widefield

Pulling the Milky Way out of the muck is no easy task. Quite a bit of light pollution makes for headaches trying to show deep sky with a regular camera lens.
9 exposures at 4:00 each, 4 darks, ISO 400, F6.3
22-55mm lens at 25mm
Canon XS DSLR camera
Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, processed in Fitswork and Paint.net

Meteor 7/13.12

22-55mm lens at 55mm, F5.6 iso 1600 30 seconds
Facing Zenith, focus was bad, I really need to mark infinity on the lens.

Saturn 7/6/12

Gettin a little better

Andromeda Reprocessed

Took 37 30 second exposures of this August last year. I tried reprocessing it. I had to crop it quite a bit due to bad flats.
Canon EOS XS, 10" SCT with .63 focal reducer
 20 flats, 20 darks, DSS and Fitswork

Saturn 4th of July - DSLR

Between the fireworks and smoke and the clouds clearing after being rained on, I went for Satun again.
This time moving the 2x barlow as close to the camera as possible trying to get a smaller image scale.
Both were shot at iso 1600 and I played with the color balance a little, so one came out really blue. They are a little brighter, but noisier, although the atmosphere was very turbulent, so I wasn't gonna catch a great pic anyway.

M27 Dumbbell Nebula from last year

Taken 8/3/2011, 31 subs at 30 seconds. Reprocessed. Focus was a bit off, this was back when I used to setup and polar align in the front yard. Hopefeully I will get another shot at this one this year.

Saturn 6/29 My 1st decent result with DSLR

Shot with Canon XS DSLR prime focus
EOS Movie Record 5x
 But this time I used the Steadypix camera adapter and put a barlow in front of the sensor.
 1st one is ISO 800 and 1/2 second exposure
 2nd is iso 1600 and like 1/4 second

 I have no way to measure the distance between the barlow and camera sensor, so it's a guess what the F ratio really is. I could shorten that distance, giving a slightly smaller image scale, but hopefully sharper detail.
 Not sure why the pixelated apperance is so prevalent, maybe it was just the heat. It wasd 105 here toay, all time record.

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.

Milky Way From Foothills Parkway

7 30 second exposures with 7 MP digital camera and tripod. My 1st Milky Way shot. Sagittarius area.
There is a bunch of deep space stuff in this photo, surprising what you can capture with a cheap digitatal camera. Click link to see all the stuff mapped out- http://www.astrobin.com/12077/

Sun on lunch 5/25/12

Sunspot 1486 is the big one up top.
Taken with a borrowed Canon XS DSLR using "EOS Movie Record" to record an AVI and stack in Registax, best 700 frames....I gotta get one of these cameras....

Sombrero Galaxy

I think the DIY Lightbox will work. Sombrero from last night,
83 30 second exposures unguided.
Canon xs

DIY Light Box

Flats are "flat field" frames taken with the camera to get rid of dust and uneven illumination, my flats have always been terrible. You are supposed to take a short exposure of a perfectly illuminated white flat surface, but you can't take the camera off the scope to do it. So... I googled how to make one and this is what I came up with.
8 sheets of 20" x 30" Foam Core from wallyworld @ 2 bucks ea.
35 W 12V car light from wallyworld @ 12 bucks
Wife donated drafting paper
Duck tape, glue, compass, razor knife.

Cut all the Sheets in half

Then take 4 of those and cut them into 15" squares, so you end up with 5" strips, cut the strips into 1" sections

You now have 4 15x20" sheets for the box and 4 15x15" sheets for the baffles.
The small 1" strips are glued to the outer box sections for support of the baffles...like so.

 The 2 baffles in the middle will have 11" holes in the middle, the top will have will have a hole big enough for the light and the bottom will have a hole just big enough to fit over the tube of the telescope. Tape drafting paper on the tops of the baffles to cover the holes (except the bottom one, it goes over the scope) and tape the whole thing up. I did end up having to cut the width of a sheet of foam coar off the all the baffles so the last section of box would fit flat. I plan to try it out tonight when I borrow the DSLR camera. I left the box taped together with masking tape so I can take it apart and add more drafting paper if needed, or maybe another baffle. When I'm happy I will tape all the seams with white duct tape and it will look great.

M13 from last year - reprocessed

After some tutorials on the net I went back and reproecessed my M13 the Hercules Globular Cluster

Saturn from 5/15/2012

Still haven't tried the new technique on Saturn but was able to capture a few vids, tried different processing to get a larger scale but Cassini division is still elusive.

1476...Day 4

Still going strong after 4 days

Sunspot 1476...Day 3

Still there! That thing is a monster!

Sunspot 1476, Day 2

The big one is still there, clouds cleared (sort of) for just a few minutes, long enough for a 1:00 closeup and 30 second disk.

Sunspot 1476

Shot at 5:00pm est, this is the biggest one I have seen so far.

No Observing Tonight!

Sun 5.2.12

Lunch break Sun

The Sun on lunch break

And a much better process of the close up, only used best 500 frames to stack.