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

Show Hide Moon Pic dot com

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



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 . 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


You should post more pics.

[Stephen]

i lurrve space

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



flextubes are amazing because they collapse down into a headless r2-d2 plus its easy for storage

[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

[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

Show Hide These were the original videos

[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





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


(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