Shooting stars

A few nights ago I did a bit of fixed-tripod astrophotography to attempt to capture the conjunction of Venus and the Pleiades. I had to work pretty hard to salvage the conjunction photo but wasn't all that pleased with the results. Since I had a decent clock-drive sitting mostly unused, I decided to mate my camera to that and see what I could get. Not a pioneering venture, to be sure, but I've actually never piggybacked a camera to a telescope before! A quick trip to the local Ace Hardware store produced the stainless steel quarter-inch screw and a pair of rubber automotive washers I'd need to mate the telephoto lens tripod mount to the telescope's dove-tail mounting bar. Shortly after dark on this clear but full Moon-lit night, I toted the Orion SkyView Pro tripod and mount out to the sidewalk. After a rough alignment with Polaris, I attached the camera rig to the mount and did 10 exposures: about five each of Orion's Sword and the Pleiades star cluster -- both in the twilight western sky. I'll definitely need to use the DSLR's advanced feature that allows its view finder mirror to flip up before beginning exposure -- several shots were ruined by vibration. Focus was a bit more of an issue than I expected. Tracking? Well, I expected it to not be perfect but it appeared good enough for exposures of up to 15 seconds. Given all that, I'll share my results here. I know they're not very good but I also know that, using this same camera gear with better mount and alignment, I'll be getting some very nice images of the stars in the not-too-distant future!

Venus joins the Pleiades

A clear evening sky gave me the opportunity tonight to see planet Venus floating right below the beautiful naked-eye star cluster, the Pleiades (M45). The combination was beautiful through my binoculars, just before 8:30 PM EDT. I decided to make a quick try at recording the scene with my camera and 400mm telephoto lens mounted on a tripod. The problem, of course, is that an exposure of any decent length will cause the stars to form curved lines as they appear to move through the sky. Even my brief five-second exposure was no different... it looked great in the camera's built-in LCD preview panel but pretty sad on the big computer screen. So I used a bit of crude Photoshop work to round out the stars. The result won't make the pages of Astronomy or Sky & Telescope magazines but it's not too bad and saved the shot. This, and a very intriguing result from the nearby Orion Nebula (M42), makes me eager to get out on another clear night and spend some time with the camera mated to a tracking mount or piggybacked on a telescope!

The Photoshop work, by the way, was a duplicate layer used with "blending mode" set to "Darken" and then used as an offset filter. The offset filter is nudged around until the best combination of masking and brightness is found. I found the process described in a forum discussion on Cloudynights.com.