Last weekend we made some rings for mounting a finderscope on the main telescope. Today I got the holes drilled and tapped so the rings are ready to use. The gallery below shows the adaptive pocketing paths that were used to cut both the part and the jig that allowed drilling the holes at +/- [...]

The big picture shows a normal photo through an f=1000mm F/9.8 telescope with a Canon 20D. The field of view should be around 1° 17‘ 20″ according to this FOV calculator. The small frame is taken with an additional 2x Barlow lens between prime focus and the camera sensor. It ends up magnifying the image [...]

30s exposure at ISO400 of the Pleiades. Again some light clouds rolling in around 22:30 preventing further photos…

Had hoped to shoot the Pleiades with some longer exposures today, but clouds rolling in prevented that. So some snapshots at ISO100 and 1/4s of Saturn instead. These are 100% crops, so maybe I need to get an adapter for eyepiece-photography for shooting planets at higher magnification? The clouds caused this round halo-effect around the [...]

Pooling our hardware resources together in the lab, we now have a 102 mm F/9.8 (f=1000 mm) refractor on an EQ6 equatorial mount and either a Canon 20D or a Canon 400D to shoot with. When one camera is coupled to the scope the other one can simultaneously take a wide-field photo. Did not bother [...]

I’ve made a first attempt at pointing my camera towards the night sky. Achieving good results is not an easy task – some people spend considerable amounts of time and money on the hobby of astrophotography ! (and the results are breathtaking) Just a fun thing to do for me – for now… (they call [...]