05-05-10 – Squares

I’ve tried a couple freeware stackers and frankly, they suck. However, my scope does track, so for nebulas and such, it’s less important on the longer exposures. The planets are pretty much too small to capture without a lot of blurring (called seeing)–relative to their size, at least.

I did get a cord to let me take shots of more than 30 seconds with my camera (without holding down the shutter in ‘bulb’, that is–this also produces too much shake when viewed through a telescope. I’ll be trying that out next monday or tuesday night, I hope. Or maybe tonight; might bring the camera to work and use my breaks to try to capture a nice meteor fireball–long odds against that, but worth a shot perhaps.

I was thinking that, too LeicaLens! You should see it through the scope itself. The problem with astrophotography, even short-ish exposures, is there’s always some blurring of the atmosphere–it’s kind of like looking into a pool of water to spot a coin–and the water is hardly ever perfectly still. It’s a condition called ‘seeing’, and usually limits earth-bound photos to a resolution of about 1/2 arc second.

The arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, and the moon is 30 arc-minutes across, so you’d think that level of detail wouldn’t be important–and it’s not, in a view of the moon (which due to it’s brightness can be shot with quite short exposures, 1/100th to 1/1000th depending on phase your telescope and such) But a planet like Saturn is only 42 arc seconds across the rings, and less than 1/2 that in the body of the planet. So it’s kind of like saying that you can get a decent shot if your shot is 80 pixels wide. As such, my picture is fantastically clear. At 1/30th second exposure, it’s not as bright as I’d like, but longer would mean more camera blur as that magnification is not the prime-focus photography used in my panoramic shot earlier in the contest.

When you look directly through the telescope, however, there are brief, unpredictable moments of clarity; you can see the thin shadow of the rings on the planet right now, for example, or that shadows of Jupiter’s moons on the planet (when they cross, of course.) I can’t capture that on film. Yet. I’ve got my new cord timer, and I’ll try to get a better shot; with the new 16gig card I should be able to capture a frame every 1/3 second for about 25 frames, then wait for the camera to catch up, and do it all again. So eventually, I’ll get one of those iotic moments of atmospheric clarity and have something special, without stacking. (I’ll probably shoot for a 1/15th second exposure for color, though.)

Wow, I actually thought I had some competitive pictures this week. So very wrong. Ouch.

Ditto! I really thought the one of my grandson at the Museum of Science and Industry directing the colors would be way up there and he’s my third place waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down there! Go figure!