ASTRONOMY

[Stephen]

so I decided to take up a hobby in astronomy

got myself a cheap 5″ scope last month along with a filter and 6mm eyepiece (holy **** expensive hobby.. the filter and new eyepiece cost me almost £100)

anyway first target was m45 (Pleiades open star cluster) and it looked great also had a look at the orion nebula which on a clear night in my area looks like 3 close stars with a small grey cloud glowing around them

last night i decided to have a go at spotting m13 (globular cluster in hercules) failed on my previous attempt but this time i made sure i was scanning in the right place and BOOM just below 2 stars was a faint ball of grey about the size of a large pea. It's strange cos even though you only see a faint blurry grey ball instead of thinking meh you're like wow its a ball of hundreds of thousands of stars clustered together plus you're looking at how it looked 25,000 years ago

anyway x2 I decided to buy an xbox live webcam and mod it so i could fix it onto my scope and take some pics of the moon and planets

http://i.imgur.com/j5csLsi.jpg

and here is a group photo of my first attempts at jupiter and saturn

http://i.imgur.com/SjiSgVR.png

hard to get any detail on jupiter but the top were my 3 attempts at trying
was surprised how many good frames i got to stack for saturn seeing as i did it at 4am this morning when it was low in horizon and so far away this time of the year

gonna buy a barlow lens next week so will hopefully get a better pic of saturn during opposition in may

tl;dr
bought telescope looked at stuff in the sky modded webcam took pictures of moon and planets

[Richie]

Didn't think you'd be into something like this steo :P. I remember getting a cheap telescope as a kid, i never used it, i got so frustrated looking through it and just seeing black space :O


You should post more pics.

[Stephen]

i lurrve space

hoping to upgrade to 10" by the end of the year

http://www.firstlightoptics.com/user/products/large/skywatcher_flextube_250px_dobsonian.jpg

flextubes are amazing because they collapse down into a headless r2-d2 plus its easy for storage
http://www.stjarnhusetonline.se/images/products/large/Flex%20collapsed%20sq.jpg

[Empired]

They look cool but I can't look at space through a telescope because it absolutely terrifies me
not sure i could afford that kind of hobby either :(

[welshcake]

Oh wow, that's awesome.
Scares me too though but really awesome pictures there.

[MKR&*42]

Sounds (and what you've done looks) cool.

I wanted to get into astronomy when I was a very young kid, but never went anywhere with it :P

[Empired]

Omg does anyone remember that episode of Arthur where Buster gets himself a telescope and thinks a meteor is headed right for Earth and the Brain is like nah m8 ur wrong and Buster shows him the telescope and IT'S TRUE
But then *spoilers :)* it turned out Buster missed off a cog when constructing the telescope so its calculations were off by loads phew

this thread reminded me of that

[-:Undertaker:-]

Very interesting, I used to be interested as a kid watching the Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore: had the telescope and everything.

The pictures you've taken(?) look amazing, well done. Didn't know that was possible for an amateur to be able to do outside of a lab/powerful scope.

[Stephen]

decided to screenshot a frame from the video instead of stacking cos stacked one looks abit blurry
also changed the brightness and contrast abit to try and get ring separation better

http://i.imgur.com/CQjYdNk.png


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQHkkGkEyYk&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZgfpH_xt10&feature=youtu.be

[Stephen]

yay i finally got faint banding through cam (2 faint dark lines) now it actually looks like jupiter and not just a ball with no detail

http://i.imgur.com/w4i2RKQ.png


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KHAywmZCzs&feature=youtu.be

can only get moons to show on my webcam if i up the gain and exposure which turns it into a white mess


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ou-QMVa6DI&feature=youtu.be
(Europa - Ganymede - Io) Callisto is next to Io but you can't see it because jupiter's shadow is blocking it atm

k im done with videos for now ill try get better quality stuff once i get my barlow and when saturn is in a better position

[thms]

wow cool the moon looks good

[Richie]

yay i finally got faint banding through cam (2 faint dark lines) now it actually looks like jupiter and not just a ball with no detail

http://i.imgur.com/w4i2RKQ.png


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KHAywmZCzs&feature=youtu.be

can only get moons to show on my webcam if i up the gain and exposure which turns it into a white mess


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ou-QMVa6DI&feature=youtu.be
(Europa - Ganymede - Io) Callisto is next to Io but you can't see it because jupiter's shadow is blocking it atm

k im done with videos for now ill try get better quality stuff once i get my barlow and when saturn is in a better position


I'm tempted to get a telescope to see what's like but I wouldn't want to spend a fortune + im not sure if it'd be hard to see certain things as i'm in the city, might be too bright hmm, any suggestions?

[Stephen]

well my 5 inch telescope is this one http://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-heritage-130p-flextube.html

http://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ is good to check light pollution I live in a light orange/yellow area so quite bad but not major city bad

planets aren't really affected by light pollution but atmospheric turbulence can mess up focus. Like tonight I quickly had a look at jupiter and even though the north and south equatorial belts were in view the planet started wobbling in and out of focus. Looking through a 5 inch scope looks like my last jupiter pic but alot brighter with the brown n+s belts popping in and out of view and the moons in a line next to the planet (plus the wobbly focus)

also you need to remember that galaxies, nebula and globular clusters will just look like faint fuzzy shapes of smoke (ive only seen orion nebula, hercules cluster and a few open clusters) not had any success with galaxies with this size scope.. anddd averted vision is needed more with this scope too (looking slightly away from the object to see it better out of the corner of your eye)

imo unless you're doing serious astrophotography (them colourful galaxy/nebula pics which are taken with hour long exposures using equipment that costs £2k+) you aren't gonna visually see amazingggggg things, it's more like a "wow that faint smoke is another galaxy millions of light years away" kind of thing

another thing is if you are trying to find deep sky objects then the moon is your worst friend as it washes out everything except close open clusters and planets (although I had a great view of the orion nebula the other day during the full moon)

ANOTHER THING is the eyepiece I use to view planets cost me £49, the filter which slightly reduces light pollution and brings out more contrast in some planets cost me £44 and the barlow that I'm buying to further magnify views of planets + hopefully get better webcam pics with is costing another £40+

expensive hobby when the accessories cost more than the scope + you get what you pay for

.... i heard local astronomy clubs are a good way to see if you might be interested in astronomy

[Explorator]

You can see the rings on Saturn, looks good!

[Lindsey]

omg this is so cool! I remember my dad having a telescope when I was younger.

[The Don]

Taken any more pics Stephen;? Looks like a really fascinating hobby. Love browsing the pics at /r/astrophotography (http://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography) but obviously as you said their equipment costs thousands of pounds.

[Stephen]

nah i think i've done my best i can do atm also the weather is ****

I've got a 2.25x barlow lens on the way though so hopefully will be able to get a better shot of saturn soon

[Stephen]

http://i.imgur.com/17e7lTz.png

http://i.imgur.com/vzLX2zw.png

second pic messed up the white balance

[Stephen]

http://i.imgur.com/fW5pIfH.png


http://i.imgur.com/iEQMAyp.png

[Gina]

wow loving those most recent pics u get some pretty +rep for them

[flyingcheese101]

nice

[Stephen]

still have my scope from before but got some new pics

mars
http://i.imgur.com/t2xwPzI.png

Saturn (messed around with a few things to make ring planet separation look better) pic below is pretty much what I see through scope although slightly brighter and blurrier
http://i.imgur.com/fXPyrJa.png

[Empired]

That is a good 1 of saturn
very obviously saturn

[Gina]

both of them look really good
pls post more

[Futz]

pretty cool hobby it pick up

post if you get any spicy pictures we can admire

[Stephen]

Clear skies make for some good viewing

better mars pic:
http://i.imgur.com/q6maLAH.jpg


Enlarged slightly plus messed around with brightness and contrast
http://i.imgur.com/AmqYcRI.png

(http://i.imgur.com/AmqYcRI.png)
Also made that past saturn pic brighter and didn't realise the pic was so big it looks wide-field :S
http://i.imgur.com/XDBZ2U1.jpg

And finally edited my jupiter pic abit to bring out the banding (well i think i brought out banding also made it bigger AND BIGGER IS BETTA)
http://i.imgur.com/fA6viyl.png

sorry 2 edits of prev photos but here are some nice moon picshttp://i.imgur.com/oy5agL8.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/oOmE73N.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/oOmE73N.jpg)


also a lovely sun in it's natural colour using a tablet camera with some solar film (can't use a telescope as it's flextube and id rather not set fire to my eyeballs)
http://i.imgur.com/OVbwFaf.jpg

I'll buy a 250px soon so its k my pics will get better