This is the top plate of the wedge which will be tilted so that the alt/az mount which is bolted to it has its azimuth axis pointing towards the celestial north pole. The side-plates will have to wait until next weekend.

I’m building an equatorial wedge which will transform my new alt/az goto-mount into an equatorial mount. This is the first part which attaches to the tripod. Two smaller side plates will be bolted to this plate and support a similarly shaped tilted plate to which the alt/az head attaches. The design is similar to the [...]

Wide-field shot of the area around Leo. The bright dot low and right of center is Mars, and I think next to mars is the open cluster M44 (a.k.a. “the beehive cluster” or “Praesepe“). These pictures really need to be taken on nights without the moon. There’s a huge gradient from dark to bright towards [...]

3 x 20 min = 60 min exposure of Ursa Major through a 17-40/4L lens at ca 17mm and stopped down to F5.6. There is something funny with the polar-alignment or the guiding which makes the stars in the lower left corner not look good.

Canon 500D camera with EF-200/2.8L lens on EQ6 equatorial mount guided by a QHY5 camera and  PHDGuiding. Stacked 5 frames in Deep Sky Stacker, total exposure ca 5 minutes. Shot on Sat-Sun night 23-24 Jan 2010 in cool -18 C but calm weather. Would have wanted longer exposures and more frames, but the guiding wasn’t working very [...]

Someone better than me at astro-photo processing took my M31 RAW-data and processed it into this much better looking picture: Anyone know any good astrophoto-processing tutorials? For GIMP?

The mirror for our 240 mm Newtonian has now been coated.

After M31, and before the clouds started rolling in, I pointed my camera at the North America Nebula NGC7000 right beside Deneb (the bright star low/right). A single 10 minute exposure at iso400, 70-200/4L lens set to 200mm and F5.6.

A stack of four 10 minute exposures at iso400 through a 200 mm F5.6 lens. I really need to get a handle on processing these RAW frames for best results… Autoguiding now seems to work quite well, here’s a comparison between 10 min frames with guiding on/off: More exposure is better, this one has about [...]

117 frames taken 1 minute apart with 1/20s exposure through a 40mm F/5.6 lens, iso100. Shot between ca 1am and 3am early morning on Thursday 16 July 2009. I’ve also combined all the images into one, using either all (1 minute interval) or some (2 and 3 minutes) of the frames: This is clearly worth [...]