It is not much of an image, but it was done with my trusty TV-85 and my Atlas EQ-G tracking mount, instead of that dobsonian I’ve been stuck using.

I managed to get those two items back into my possession recently.   Unfortunately, the Atlas mount needed lots of work just to get it barely running again.  There is a burnt out motor on one of the drive axis.   It was the RA motor, so I swapped it with the DEC motor to just get the tracking going.   During testing I was able to take a one minute video with decent tracking, which yielded just over 290 frames with the planetary cam I used.

I ordered some stepper motors for cheap from Amazon to replace the originals, which are both shot.  I’ll also have to get some new bearings for the mount and it needs a new power switch.   I might just get a hypertune kit with the ceramic bearings and possibly a belt-drive upgrade.   It definitely needs some TLC before it will be able to do any serious imaging.  🙁

The Supermoon of November 2016 was set to be the biggest of the year.  I tried to get a good mosaic of it, but the seeing was poor on this morning, so it is not quite as sharp as I would have liked.  The mosaic took about 30 panels to construct and lots of time and effort to put together.

I took this on the morning of the 14th, so there was a chance the seeing was better in the evening when the moon still looked full, but I was too tired to go another round by that time.   So, I worked through several iterations of the data I already had and came up with what I think is a reasonably good image.

I also created an enhanced image that is basically just sharpened more.    A couple of seams are more obvious in this version, but I figure not bad enough to spend too much time on trying to correct:

I’ve always loved this particular feature on the moon.   I want to have a night of great seeing and image this with the most powerful stuff I have.  The six inch shows it well enough, but my 8 inch scope at f/20 or 4000mm f.l. would really be what’s needed.

This area of the moon includes Mare Imbrium and the three main craters Plato, at the top right, Archimedes, in the lower center and Copernicus on the left below center .  Also visible, coming out of the shadows from the right, is a section of the Apennines Mountains.  Near the end of the Apennines is Eratosthenes, a crater about half the size of Copernicus that has a prominent central peak.

Another moon mosaic for the month of October.  Since the weather was so clear on this early October morning, I decided to do some more planetary-style imaging with my new planetary/guider cam.   Decent seeing and as already mentioned, very transparent skies.   It was a little chilly, but not too bad when wearing two coats.    🙂

I stitched this together with a little over two dozen, 1280×960 pixel images taken with my eyepiece planetary/guider cam and a 6″ dobsonian.  Reasonably good seeing this night.   When I saw that the stars were barely twinkling, I figured I better get some images while the getting was good.

I let the camera take an image every two seconds while I moved the scope from bottom to top of the target and let it drift across the field of view.  In all, I got about 334 images in RAW FIT format files, which I converted in IRIS.   I had to debayer them to get color and they came out really red, since I don’t have that specific camera in IRIS.   A Nikon seemed to be the closest match as far as conversion from RAW to RGB color.  IRIS  was able to apply the same color correction settings to each image in a batch mode and then I selected and manually exported select images into PSD format for PS.

It is not the best stitch-up job, since the moon rotated somewhat in the field of view between the first images and the last.  But, I think it is reasonably good for a few days worth of work.  I had to patch a few goofs and bad spots after the original posting.  One major one I didn’t catch until a few days after posting was the original image was backwards!    It seems the camera outputs mirror images in RAW format or it was possibly the FIT file format was encoded backwards.  I’m not sure.   I still have the RAW data, so I can put together another mosaic if I get bored one day.   🙂

A new camera was used to take these new images of the moon.   A six inch Newtonian on a Dobsonian mount was used, so there was no tracking.   The camera used was an Aptina-based, AR0130 1.2Mp sensor eyepiece cam.   It has good low-light capability and a wide exposure range.

I hope to use it as a guide camera on a tracking mount and do double duty as a planetary/moon camera when hooked to one of my bigger scopes.  I can also use it to take some deep sky images with various other lenses or smaller scopes.  With the right scope, these types of cameras work great for small objects like planetary nebulae and small galaxies.

I took this shot on the morning of September 25, 2016.  I was trying out my new Smartphone Digiscoping Adapter, which is a mount for most kinds of camera phones to a telescope.

The adapter was hooked to a 6″ F/8 Dobsonian with a 25mm Plossl eyepiece.  This device just clamps onto the barrel of any eyepiece and gets the lens of the camera phone centered right over the Continue reading Crescent Moon, Sep 25, 2016 →

This is an afocal eyepiece projection image using a 25mm Plossl eyepiece, a 6 inch F/8 Newtonian and a HTC 3.2 megapixel camera phone.   The first image was sharpened in IRIS, then exported into PS and sharpened/enhanced some more.  The second image is maxed out sharpening, slightly overdone, perhaps.  lol