July 18 2005

July 18 2005 - These two images of M57 were taken with my 5" f12 mak cassegrain telescope and my g3 camera. Image is composed of 11x15sec exposures for a total of 165 seconds at ISO400. Dark frames where stacked to produce a master dark frame which was used in the picture. The original results still had a lot of noise so I subtracted the bakground.

This (m13) is so far my best deepsky shot. From now on, Ill probably be trying to take more deepsky shots then planetary shots as I really want to learn more on this type of photography. i also want to see how far I can push my canon G3 digital camera. This image was taken with my 5" F12 mak cassegrain. Image consists of 10 x 15 second exposures at iso 400. No dark frames were used on this image but as I learn about dark frams and flat feilds I will use them more often.

July 18 2005 - Old new animations 2

July 19 2005 - Okey here is another old new animation. When i took this animation on june 8 2004, the animator program I used did not allow me to use color images since I had to convert them from JPG to GIF. Now I don't have to convert to gif which means I do not loose the color. I also increased the size a bit and the brightness.

July 17 2005 - old new animations!

July 17 2005 - Well this animation is not new infact i took these pictures back in february 2004 but I went back and redid this animation cos I felt it wasn't good enough! Over the last year I have learned new processing technique which I used to bring out a little more detail on the planet and brighten th moon. You can see the original animation and the new animation right above it. Please click for large size to see the details better.

July 13 2005

July 13 2005 - These latest images are of the moon and were taken with my 5" MCT telescope and canon G3 digital cam. When I was taking the images, they appeared much sharper in the LCD screen but were less sharp when I saw them on my computer screen which in a way was a bit disapointing. None the less after some processing these images, I am still happy with some of them.

May 31 2005

May 31 2005 - Jupiter looked very nice today so I decided to concentrate on jupiter for the whole night. Here are three photos that I took that show jupiters moons and even one of them going behind the planet. All pictures were taken with my 10" LX200 SCT a 2x barlow and a canon G3 digital camera

May 17 2005 Part 2

These pictures are not new but recovered pictures from last weeks horrible incident where I lost some of my best astrophotos. Lukily all is not lost for 2005, i found a cd that had the raw images from may 17 and may 31 2005 which in time i will reprocess and add the best ones in here. Some you have seen posted in the best of 2005 and will look semilar but hopefully these new reprocessed images will look better since from may 17 to now i have learned new techniques in processing. To start of i will add this processing sequance. It is one of jupiter. Unfortunately the exposure and f/ratio details have been lost with most of my data in the computer but i can say that the final image is of jupiter that was stacked with 18 pictures. From left to right: 1. The raw image - no processing done yet!, 2. the 18 images stacked - you can see after stacking there is an improvement in image detail but still need alot of work, 3. the final processed image - you can see not only it shows more detail but is brighter and more pleasing to the eye! This is the general process that an astrophotographer goes through to capture as much detail as they can!

May 17 2005 - This is a contuniation of the last photos. These again were all taken with my meade 10" LX 200 SCT and canon G3. Included a closeup of jupiter which although rather blury shows how dynamic the atmosphere of jupiter is.

May 17 2005 Part 1

May 17 2005 - These are some of the many photos I took on this day. These were all taken with my 10" LX200 SCT and my canon G3 digital Camera. These photos show some of the very interesting regions of the moon such as the Apenine mountains and the strait wall which is a large cliff on the moon. On all these photos semilar processing was done by stacking multiple images to reduce the noise and increase sharpness.

May 11 2005 - First light with 5" Mak

May 11 2005 - Althought they can't campare to some photos out there, I was very surprised and happy that my little 5" F12 mak is capable of being able to capture some deepsky shots. I am by all means not a deapsky astrophotographer so I am quite happy with these two 15 second exposures with my canon G3 and 5" mak! Almost forgot! These are two images of M13.

May 11 2005 - This is one of my best moon images I've taken in a while. This image was taken using my newly aquired Orion Starmax 5" Mak Cassegrain telescope and my Canon G3 digital camera. This is a mosaic of 6 images. The original picture showed the lines where the photos where stiched. I later went and played around in photoshop and menaged to remove most of the lines.

UPDATE: This lunar mosaic has been my best and most "succesfull" photo to date. So far this photo has acomplished the following:

1. Won 3rd place (out of 600+ photos) in the Everymans Photo Contost which resulted in some money as a prize.

http://www.theeveryman.com/54a.php?cat=4

2. Won 2nd place in 2005 Schmidt Cassegrains Users Group photo competition. This resulted in a free astrochair.

http://www.rothritter.com/contest/2005/entries_cat_6.html

3. Has been featured in a 2006 calander published by Our Dark Skies group.

http://www.lulu.com/content/187271

So as you can see I am quite happy with this image. Hope for better images in the future though :-)