Lucky Picture

[preprius]

I do have another activity hobby with telescopes. The other night Mars was going behind the moon.  I was viewing it through my telescope. I decided to try to use my smart phones camera by hand holding it above the eyepiece.  I don't have the astrophotography equipment. I prefer eye ball viewing. 

So I grabbed 2 lucky pics...

Mars is a little spec near the moon bottom right.

 

This 2nd pic Mars is just barely in view.  You need to zoom way in to see it .

Hope you enjoy these lucky pics..

 

Me. Mark Eason

[savethebeer]

lovely clear pictures. I love using the Night Sky app on my phone to locate the different planets in the night sky and just admiring the whole idea of Space.

[Scrappile]

I envy you having a telescope.  Something I always wanted, but it kept getting our prioritized. Does yours hook up to your computer?

[OCtoolguy]

So many hobbies, so little time!

[preprius]

1 hour ago, Scrappile said:

I envy you having a telescope.  Something I always wanted, but it kept getting our prioritized. Does yours hook up to your computer?

I have 2 telescopes.

The scope that these pics came from is not tracking the sky.   So I need to re center the object often.

The other one does have a tracking capability.  It does not need computer.   It has a handcontroller that knows where stuff in the sky is.  It is called a goto scope.

I look at computers all day.   I want to see the ancient photons.  So I do not use the computer.  

Getting into astrophotography takes lots of computer learning mostly on how to process very dim camera pictures. Throw out the smeared ones and stack the good ones.  I think there is about 8 programs that sends picture data to the next software.  Takes multi-nights for one sky object. Stacks of 1000s of pictures.  While taking 50 pics per second you can't use the telescope for viewing. 

I just want to have nice relaxing views of the night sky.  And I dont have to learn all the stars names and positions.

 

Here is a pic of  my 2 scopes...

Left is a CPC1100 goto.  11 inches diameter.  2007 vintage.  weighs 95lbs.

Right is a EON 80mm Orion brand.  (3.1 inch diameter).  New I just got it last Saturday.  weights about 20lbs.

weight includes tripods.

 

[wombatie]

Oh wow, that's awesome.

Marg

[OCtoolguy]

On 12/9/2022 at 11:54 AM, preprius said:

I have 2 telescopes.

The scope that these pics came from is not tracking the sky.   So I need to re center the object often.

The other one does have a tracking capability.  It does not need computer.   It has a handcontroller that knows where stuff in the sky is.  It is called a goto scope.

I look at computers all day.   I want to see the ancient photons.  So I do not use the computer.  

Getting into astrophotography takes lots of computer learning mostly on how to process very dim camera pictures. Throw out the smeared ones and stack the good ones.  I think there is about 8 programs that sends picture data to the next software.  Takes multi-nights for one sky object. Stacks of 1000s of pictures.  While taking 50 pics per second you can't use the telescope for viewing. 

I just want to have nice relaxing views of the night sky.  And I dont have to learn all the stars names and positions.

 

Here is a pic of  my 2 scopes...

Left is a CPC1100 goto.  11 inches diameter.  2007 vintage.  weighs 95lbs.

Right is a EON 80mm Orion brand.  (3.1 inch diameter).  New I just got it last Saturday.  weights about 20lbs.

weight includes tripods.

 

 

We used to live in the mountains of Colorado at 8500 feet. It was amazing how many stars we could see every night. I always said that I would buy a telescope some day. Then we moved back to So Cal and the night sky is riddled with nothing but police helicopters and the incoming passenger planes that are coming into Long Beach and LAX.