Archive for the ‘Astrophotography’ Category

NexImage tips & tricks

Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Sep 05 2009

After last night’s plantary imaging failure, I decided to look for some tips & tricks for NexImage and came across Quick Guide to Capturing Images with the Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager by Mike Swanson.

After reading it, this is my plan of action for the next clear night when I attempt to capture anything other than the moon:

  • Change the frame rate to 5fps
  • Set white balance to auto
  • Set gain to minimum
  • Set gamma to minimum
  • Set brightness and saturation to middle
  • Set shutter speed to slightly darker than I’d like (I usually do this bit anyway)
  • Change output size to 320 x 240 (currently set to 640 x 480 so this will hopefully make a difference)
  • Change the frame rate to 20-30fps for focus, then back to 5fps for capture

Those are the instructions in the PDF linked to above, so we’ll see how it goes.  Now all I need is another clear night…



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Full moon tonight

Astrophotography, Gallery | Posted by Carol
Sep 04 2009

The skies stayed fairly clear, so I managed to get this picture tonight:

Picture of the moon using NexImage

And here’s the video:

We think we also saw Jupiter last night but struggled to get a good clear view of it (and couldn’t get anything more than a fuzzy blob in NexImage).  Not sure why that was, as I believe the NexImage is quite capable of capturing Jupiter.  Maybe the “seeing” wasn’t good enough last night?



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Tonight’s moon photo

Astrophotography, Gallery | Posted by Carol
Sep 01 2009

I managed to get a quick video of the moon tonight, before it disappeared behind clouds again:

moon010909-1

Here’s the whole video recording:



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Reducer lens

Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Aug 31 2009

I’ve just ordered a reducer lens for NexImage, which will double my field of vision – meaning I’ll be able to record more of the moon (or whatever my subject is!) in one shot.  Ordered from Telescope Planet again, so fingers crossed they’re quick off the mark! Hopefully should get it in the next few days.

For my readers in the US, the reducer lens is available through Amazon.com: Celestron NexImage Reducer Lens

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Video from yesterday’s moon watching

Astrophotography, Gallery | Posted by Carol
Aug 30 2009

If there’s one thing yesterday’s video recording has taught me, it’s the need for polar alignment and a drive motor. Without a drive motor, the object being recorded drifts out of view in the telescope (as you can see above). A drive motor allows the telescope to automatically track stars as they move across the sky and they will therefore appear stationary in the telescope’s view.

The drive motor for my Celestron C6-N Telescope is the Celestron Motor Drive, DA for CG-4 mounts (model #93522) and costs around £125 (£125.35 + p&p from 365Astronomy.com)

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My first moon photo

Astrophotography, Gallery | Posted by Carol
Aug 29 2009

I had literally less than 5 minutes between finding the moon in the telescope and getting it photographed with the NexImage before it went behind a cloud.  Consequently, it’s not an *amazing* picture, but it’s a good start I think!

My First Moon Photo on NexImage

My First Moon Photo on NexImage

Oh – and it was taken through my [not very clean] living room window shortly after sunset, so was pretty bright outside still. Not a bad image, considering all that!

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NexImage has arrived!

Astronomy Shopping, Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Aug 27 2009

365Astronomy.com have made it onto my “recommended suppliers” list, now that my Celestron NexImage has arrived (the day after ordering). I’m very pleased and have done a practice capture in daylight to make sure the camera is working and to have a shot with the software.  Everything worked fine and was straighforward enough.  The software works by recording an AVI video of whatever you would like to photograph.  Then the software aligns and stacks the frames from the video, takes out the duff ones, and leaves you with the best possible final image.  There are a lot of controls and settings within the software, so I imagine there will be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to actual astrophotography, but I’m reasonably confident I’ll be able to produce a half-decent picture.  Famous last words?!

I’ve also ordered a 3.3x Barlow, which is coming from “Lotnabox” via Ebay.  I ordered this at lunchtime and have since had a message to say it’s been posted, so we’ll see how long it takes to arrive (never can tell with Royal Mail these days!).

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Astrophotography

Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Aug 21 2009

I’m particularly interested in taking photographs of what I see through the telescope so I’ve been doing some research into the options available.

  • Specialist CCD astrophotography cameras: these start from around £300 upwards and look to be the best way to clearly photograph the night sky. Unfortunately it’s WAY out of my budget!
  • Although, I’ve seen the Celestron NexImage Solar System CCD Imager, which is £134 and looks like it would be perfect.
  • I’ve tried doing what I think is called Afocal Coupling (where I just point the camera right up at the lens and shoot). I’ve only tried this in daylight (thanks to the lack of clear skies at night) but the picture was quite fuzzy and affected badly by vignette. (Vignette is when an image is missing its sides – e.g. a square image shown with round edges). I still need to try this at night.
  • Adapting a webcam – I’ve seen a couple of tutorials on different ways to “adapt” a webcam for astrophotography. One pretty much just involves screwing it into an adapter whereas the other one is a more complex taking-the-webcam-to-bits procedure. I think I do have an old webcam sitting around somewhere so I might look into this one! Minor detail is that I have to use the telescope outside due to the view being obstructed by neighbouring buildings, so I’m not sure how I’m going to power up the webcam without a laptop. This is also a problem for the NexImage CCD Imager.

So it seems that I either need a specialist camera, or a mount of some kind to use my existing camera.

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