Posts Made By: Paul McCarl

Ok, my tracking wasn't as good as I thought. Never trust a camera lcd... Even at the zoomed view on the lcd it is showing you an interpolated view of an image area nine times larger than the LCD resolution is capable of showing. Pinpoint stars on the camera back aren't on the computer. Live and learn.

Anyway this is a single 60 second frame of color with an overlay of five stacked 60 second frames as a "soft light" layer in photoshop. I used only the green channel in the five stacked frames to enhance the slight swirl of spiral structure that was just emerging towards the upper left.

No awards here, but I can't wait to try it during the new moon. The good news is I may get some rest before then as a storm front is moving in for the next week according to the weathermen.

Paul McCarl

Here is a 30 second shot on a tripod with the Canon D60 digital SLR at ISO 1000 using a 16mm lens. I had my son William hit me with a flashlight for about 1 second. Levels adjusted in photoshop and some selective sharpening of my face. Resized and unsharpmasked.

Thanks,

Paul McCarl

Hi all,

I have been finding it difficult to focus my camera due to the small scale of the image. Bright stars are easily seen, but the precision of the focus is difficult to judge in unmagnified state. I can get a right angle magnifier for my camera, if I don't mind dropping $300, but if I could afford that, I would just get a ronchi screen focuser, instead.

My question is how do these magnifiers work, and what kind of lenses do they use. I have tried a variety of magnifying glasses, and various lenses, but I can't seem to get the magnified image to focus correctly.

I realize that this is probably a simple question, but I am stumped.

Thanks,

Paul McCarl

Far from perfect, but a promising start to imaging with my D60. I spent an all-nighter at the Salt Lake Astronomical Society's Stansbury Park Observatory II. I was enjoying the views through the 16" Ealing scope with Mark Bloomenthal and occasionally we would take a break and let the camera have a turn. Many thanks to Bruce Grim and Patrick Wiggins for a night spent aligning that awesome mount and scope so that I can look good just by pointing a camera and pressing a button. The scope tracks beautifully.

Most of these were taken through a Vivitar 80-260mm Zoom lens with an M42 mount piggy backed up on the finder rack of the Ealing. A nifty little adapter makes all of my m42 lenses fair game for my Canon EOS cameras, including the D60. The closer view of Orion was shot through a the Orion Apex 127mm Mak that we use as a finder scope for the 5000mm focal length Ealing.

I am going to have to schedule a night to go out and concentrate on just photography. The seeing was pretty bad with lots of turbulence in the upper atmosphere, although transparency was good. I am thinking that I need to be a little more careful about vibrations next time because I think that may have been what was causing some of these spiky stars. Any of you optical gurus have a better answer? It wasn't tracking, because I could take longer shots through the high power mack than I could using the short camera lenses. But the piggyback mount is at the end of a metal plate quite a ways from the center of the scope. I think the longer moment arm was letting it pick up vibrations the Mak didn't. Suggestions?

Each picture has info on how it was shot. Hope you like them. It gives me some hope for a long and happy love affair with my Canon D60 and the night sky.

Enjoy!

Paul McCarl

P.S. to Ron:

If you can't stand how bad I botched the processing, just email me and I will send you the source files so you can really impress us. My wife won't let me have your book until Christmas. That will teach me to tell her to buy it for me as a gift. I just assumed she would get it now and let me have it, but no...

Here is a refugee from my less than wonderful session last night. I shot an hours worth of five minute exposures, but I wasn't checking them and all but these two were partially or fully blocked by the roof of the other scope room.

That was the start of my frustration, moonlight was next and then vibration for some unknown reason finally said go home and go to bed.

Paul McCarl

Here is another refugee from my less than wonderful session last night. Let's just say I will be looking forward to the New Moon. At 3 minutes I was about 70% saturated with moonlight. At 5 minutes I was imaging a white sky.

Paul McCarl

Hi,

I finally got around to processing the video of Saturn I took on October 14th with my Philips Vesta 690K webcam. This was taken through the 16" Ealing scope at the Salt Lake Astronomical Society's SPOC II observatory. It has a focal length of about 5000mm. The image through the scope was like trying to see through boiling water. It was impossible to get a good focus because the image was swimming in and out of focus all the time, so I made my best guess and took a shot. I took 5 minutes of video at five frames per second and used Registax to select align and process the whole mess. Neat little program.

Not up to snuff with some of the other images of late, but it is still my best shot of Saturn to date. I look forward to refining my technique and my focus. 8^)

Paul

Hi all,

I christened my "new" old LX-200 this morning. The seeing was great last night before I went to bed, so I set the alarm for planet watching. The alarm went off at 4 a.m. I got up at 5:40 a.m. 8^)

Needless to say, the scope was plagued with tube currents and the seeing wasn't as good as last night when I foolishly left the scope inside and just used the big binoculars. Hey, a guy can be tired can't he?

Anyway, this is a five minute, 1500 frame sequence shot with the Vesta and a 2X barlow processed in Registax and cleaned up in Photoshop. Not prefect, but getting better.

Enjoy,

Paul

Not much to say. I used the green channel for this because I just realized that the 6.3 focal reducer I got also had a "ALP SCT Filter" attached. I am assuming that is a light pollution filter. It strongly rejects the red and made all the images blue green. I had heard that Solar Skreen gives a blue cast, so I ignored it until later when I was looking at Jupiter during daylight and the effect remained without the filter. Good news is I have a light pollution filter. Bad news is it kind of messed up my solar views.

Anyhow, I took the green channels from four shots with decent focus and stacked them as grayscale images in Registax. I had to reduce the size due to registax' limitations. It isn't exactly Baader quality, but hey don't look a full aperture filter that was included as a bonus in the mouth, right?

Anybody got a guess as to the lineage of my ALP SCT Filter?

Thanks,

Paul

Well, I sold the LXD-55 and upgraded to an LX-200 8" f10. I know I discussed getting a G-11, but finances being what they are and considering all things, I decided that the LX-200 gives me a reasonable imaging platform and will still be portable and powerful at star parties. It is a compromise, but the most important part of imaging is simply using what you have and learning how to overcome the various weaknesses. Besides I am really enjoying myself. 8^)

This one is from my very first session with the LX-200. Rough polar alignment and nothing but piggyback to keep it simple. I was shooting with my Canon D60 digital SLR and an old Vivitar 85-260mm zoom lens with a universal screw mount. I have since discovered that stopping the lens down one stop corrects the minor abberations and delivers sharp little stars with almost no color fringing. Really a nice lens.

For you D60 owners out there, you really need to get an M42 to EOS adapter. You can pick up old universal screw mount lenses at really reasonable prices and extend your range without breaking the bank. Besides the adapters go for as little as $5 on Ebay. A no brainer.

Don't worry, they get better, but I was just learning my new system this night.

Paul McCarl