Postcard from the Universe – Page 8

Postcard from the Universe – Orion Nebula with the EOS-M

The first astrophoto taken with the EOS-M. Considering the trouble it is to manually trigger the exposures without proper camera control, I am surprised I stuck it out to take 40+ subs. Since 30 seconds was the longest I could program the camera for I simply maxed out the ISO and took a lot of subs plus a dozen darks. There is still way too much noise in the resulting frame. Still, the ISO 12,800 frames are not all that bad, better than I expected. If this camera had remote control it would be a decent little astro camera. Longer subs and a lower ISO would deliver decent results.

NGC1976 The Orion Nebula — The Orion Nebula with and EOS-M, 40x30s exposures @ ISO12,800, AT6RC and 0.8x focal reducer, a set of 12x4s exposures used to reveal detail in the core.

Postcard from the Summit – TRICK

Spent the last few days at work absorbed in the TRICK project, adding a new IR tip-tilt capability to the Keck 1 AO system. Still a long way to go, but some of the parts are now in place…

TRICK Dichroic — Ean and myself lifting the dichroic pickoff stage into place for the TRICK IR tip-tilt sensor

Postcard from the Universe – Morning Conjuction

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter — A morning conjunction of the three brightest objects in the night sky, the Moon, Venus and Jupiter on the morning of July 15, 2012, the Pleiades star cluster can be seen at the top

Postcard from the Universe – Galactic Center Grande

On request I am publishing a larger version of my galactic center shot. I really do need to re-shoot this with an Hα sensitive camera.

As usual, click on the image for the larger version…

Postcard from the Universe – M46

M46 & NGC2438 — The open cluster M46 and the planetary nebula NGC2438 in Puppis, 32 x 1min exposures with the AT6RC and Canon 20Da

Postcard from the Universe – Galactic Center

The last time out I fitted a camera ball mount to the counterweight shaft of the Losmandy mount. This allowed me to shoot an additional camera at the same time, along with the camera attached to the telescope. The second camera can be aimed at a different target completely. With a relatively wide angle lens, tracking errors become insignificant.

With the center of the Milky Way high overhead it made an obvious first target to test this wide-field setup. The results are quite nice, a series of one minute exposures reveal the star clouds in fine detail. The camera for this run was the Canon 60D, as the 20Da was shooting the Lagoon at the time. I need to swap places and try the shot again with the 20Da to see what the Hα sensitivity reveals, capturing more of the nebulae that is mingled with the stars.

The lens was an older Nikon 50mm f/1.8 stopped down to f/2.8, nice round star images right into the corners of the frame. Yes, a Nikon lens mounted to a Canon camera, you can do that. A very nice lens, I will be using it again for this work.

Category: Postcard from the Universe