Thursday, January 28, 2010
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 [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
Tried this simple Michelson interferometer for measuring the error of a 100mm translation stage yesterday. The interferometer and stage are mounted to the same optical table, but there's still a fair amount of vibration of the measurement corner-cube which causes instability in the signal when the stage is not moving. Some sample data here: interf_data. One [...]
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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?
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Monday, September 14, 2009
The mirror for our 240 mm Newtonian has now been coated.
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Monday, September 14, 2009
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.
Monday, September 14, 2009
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 [...]
Act 0 (anecdotal): In which the Builders catch the Aperture Fever and start to dream of mirrors large. Act 1 (2008 July 22): In which the Builders acquire the Glass and first smell the Carborundum. Act 2 (2008 July 30): In which the Glass is bevelled. Act 3 (2008 August 1): In which the Builders [...]
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After 11 months in the making, July 2nd 2009 will be the historical date to remember when our 240 mm Newtonian saw First Light! July is not dark at all in Finland, but that didn't prevent us from setting up in the back-yard to have a look at the moon. Predictably the clouds soon rolled [...]
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About 9 hours compressed into 38 seconds. 566 frames shot at 1 minute intervals from around 10:00 in the morning to 19:36 in the evening. Played back at 15 frames per second, which makes for a ~900x speedup. I first re-sized the jpegs to 1024 pixels wide and then used this matlab script to assemble [...]