Astro-Photos

[farcry]

Nope, there's no cool long time exposure images of nebulas or beautiful multiple exposure layered images of saturn and her rings here Just some grainy, crappy images i have caught using my camera of certain easy to see celestial objects.

These pics of the moon where captured by holding my camera up to my reflector telescope's eyepiece. Until my camera mount arrives my hands have to do the job instead of a perfectly still mount, so i have to use high ISO settings to keep lower exposure times. The result is rather grainy, but it's the best i can do without a mount.

[farcry]

These images where all taken without a telescope, except for the saturn images. Capturing Saturn without using a camera mount is pretty hard and frustrating after spending an hour of taking blurred, streaked, out of focus and out of position shots. I have about 35 images of the inside of my telescope which was the result of my camera not focusing properly or me moving the camera out of position while trying to photograph saturn. To reduce streakiness and blurring i used really high ISO settings so the images are very grainy, and the shots with saturn and the moon have the lunar surface completly blown out while trying to capture saturns fainter light. I find that with these images, and even professional ones you might look at on the net, the view from a telescope first hand always beats a photo, even if you are using a low quality telescope.

The image of the Orion Nebula is pretty hard to make out unless you compare it to the view seen through a telescope. This picture was just taken using the digital zoom on my camera, no telescope. You can see the faint gas around a group of stars at the core, which is about at much as i could get from my camera. The view through a telescope is obviously much better, but i couldnt manage to capture the Orion Nebula through my telescope without a mount.

The other photos are just a few i took as i saw them out my bedroom window of the moon and Venus.

[farcry]

Two more that i didnt have room to add on the other post

[Clay]

really nice. I love the fact that you actually captured Saturn with the rings! I had a telescope once but couldnt get past aligning the mini scope and the actual scope... too bad you didnt get them a day earlier to capture the alignment! A star (cant remember the name) Saturn, Venus, and the moon were all in a straight line in the sky on Saturday night.

[StarLord]

Well done farcry, I know how hard it is to maintain the camera perflectly lined-up in front of the lens.
And yes, you do need to have an high ISO in order to remain motionless long enough to take unblurred pictures.

What kind of telescope and camera are you using?
I have a Celestron C8-NGT with a digital Pentax IstD-S camera with the camera/telescope adapter. I've just bougth a few months ago a CCD camera, but still need to use it though.

Well done again.
StarLord

[Dallidas]

that 4th one of the moon is beautiful

[farcry]

Thanks guys

The telescope i am using is a 6inch reflector with an equatorial mount. It's only a basic one (£230) but the eyepeices that came with it where good quality. The camera is just a Fujifilm S5600 i got about a year ago. Again, not that great, but i havent needed to upgrade yet. Hopefully i will get some more (and better) ones soon, but typical british weather has restricted my view of the night sky for a while now.

Edit: I forgot to add, the last two pics of the moon in the first post where taken during that eclipse a few months back