I took these photos a couple of nights ago (30th September) with the digital camera - my first attempt at the moon with the Canon! Although they’re not amazing pictures in terms of sharpness etc., I’m quite pleased with them as a first attempt. The first few pictures I took were totally black - nothing in them at all - but I’ve learned enough recently to know what I needed to adjust (slower shutter speed, higher ISO) in order to get some more light into the picture. A good start!
I’ve just put resized pictures up here because they’re actually HUGE at full size (2MB each and over 3000 pixels wide).
This isn’t a patch on what I could see through the telescope, but it’s my first attempt at capturing Jupiter with the NexImage:
Jupiter through NexImage
In the telescope, I could make out the four main moons of Jupiter as well, but NexImage didn’t pick them up. In fairness, it’s not a great night - quite a lot of light clouds around, so not the best night for photography!
Had another bash at Jupiter and could see the two main stripes quite clearly in the telescope. Got closer to capturing a picture of it this time, but just as I got everything lined up and started to focus … the laptop went into power saving mode and switched off!! This happened a couple of times and was really starting to irritate me, so I moved onto the moon since it had appeared by that point.
We’re forecast to have a couple of clear nights, so hopefully I’ll get out again tomorrow.
Here’s the moon video that the picture was generated from:
The skies stayed fairly clear, so I managed to get this picture tonight:
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?
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)
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
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!
Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM
