The Moon From Essex

The Moon From Chelmsford (May, Through Double Glazing... AGAIN!)

Timelapse

Here is a very short timelapse I have done of the stars moving. Taken with a Canon 350D, 30 second exposures, 10 seconds apart. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3UXBsb6uVI and here is one of our base camp, with the stars running off behind it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxKJDmDEbso . (this one was taken with a wide angle lens).

Deep Field

This deep field image was taken with a Canon 350D and a stock 17-30mm lens on a 30 second exposure from the side of lake Thirlmere.

First Proper Pictures

I went to the lake district and set up my telescope. I was in a bit of a hurry and did a very rushed job of the tracking, and a proper botched job of the focusing, but I did manage to get a shot that I am incredibly pleased with. This cannot be anything other than the Orion Nebula!!! And if this is only my first shot then it can only get better from here. This is a single RAW image that I have processed in Adobe Lightroom. I couldn't layer any of the shots I took because they were all different focuses and exposures, but a good start I think.

The next one is a picture of the M44 cluster. Now there is a lot of visual distortion in this shot. The stars in the middle are (nearly) in focus, but the ones around the edge are suffering from some fairly heavy optical distortion. In order to take these shots I plugged my camera and it's lens into my telescope. I imagine that there is an idea focal length for everything and it will take a long time to calibrate, and I will have to get over the excitement of imaging before I will get it right!

No prizes for guessing who this little fella is!!! But I have to admit to cheating. I pushed my camera down the eye piece of the telescope, and this does not count as astro-imaging, but I am very please that I have managed to take a cool looking shot of Saturn like this :D

Jupiter and Moons

Slightly out of focus Jupiter, and 3 moons. Europa, Io and Ganymede. 3.2MP Camera, x2 Barlow Lens. 2" Exposure, no tracking motor, and through double glazing.

Moon

Managed to get a photo of the moon tonight. Still through double glazing and the boiling air. Using the S5000 (3.2MP) and no barlow lens. Image was cleaned up in Adobe Lightroom. The final image is made from 25 individual photos stitched together using AutoPano.

Colour

So I thought when I do finally get some decent photos I might want some colour in them, so I have done a trial with false colour images. I have some colour filters for my camera, and took 4 photos of Beetham Tower in Manchester (Our only skyscraper). These images were then converted to black and white (to ensure i didn't accidentally pick up any other colour (the blue was letting a lot of red through too), then colourising them (which is what you see above). Then I aligned the images and mixed them (picking the levels by hand) the image above can be seen as the result (the trees are a bit crappy as they had moved in the wind between replacing the filters. As you can see the result look quite good. I was actually surprised, because I was expecting it not to look real. I imagined that false colour images of space weren't a true representation of colour, but as this test has show, it looks pretty good. (All I need now is to try the same thing with a hyrdogen alpha filter, I don't think the results will somehow be the same) :)

 Incidentally, I tried swapping some of the colours around. This image is using red on the blue image, blue on the green, green on the yellow and yellow on the red.