First Light
It is always a memorable event when you set up a new telescope outside and peer through the eyepiece to see the first light coming through the scope... tonight was one such night for me!
When we arrived back home from the hospital tonight after another visit to Miss Ellie in the PICU, I immediately started setting up my new telescope in our driveway. Well... truth be told, it is about a month old now but I hadn't had a chance to observe the night sky before tonight. Tonight would be first light through this telescope.
Setup required about eight trips in and out of the house. I need to find a way to consolidate all the little odds and ends to make this task a bit easier and faster. Then I had to set up the scope... level it... align it with Polaris... then do an additional alignment on one to three additional stars. This went fairly well but I plan to do a bit more practicing on this because my alignment was off a little bit. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to slew using the direction buttons nor could I figure out how to set the speed of manual slewing. After some fumbling around with a few guesses, it was time to slew the telescope to my first object to view.
I knew I had a pretty good telescope on my hands but I wasn't sure how good until I peered through it tonight! Since we've been checking out Jupiter with our little telescope recently, I chose this as my first observation... "WOW!" was the first thing I said out loud... to nobody in particular, of course, since Sheila had already gone to bed. This new telescope is worlds better than our rebuilt small telescope! I was able to see the bands of Jupiter and four moons. It was easy to focus and the view was sharp!
Next on my plan for tonight was the moon. It is an easy object to find and I wanted to test out shooting photos through this telescope which is a type of photography that is exceptionally complicated. The telescope slowly slewed over to the moon... I looked through the eyepiece... "WOW!" was my response yet again.
The first thing I noticed was that the moon was far too bright through the telescope which means it truly does collect a lot of light. This is a good thing but the moon was far too bright to view with the naked eye! I removed my eyepiece and screwed on a moon filter to cut the light down to about 13%... the filter also helped to add some contrast... the detail I saw through this telescope is simply amazing!
Now it was time to shoot some photos. I decided to start out simple... I went with afocal imaging... I screwed an adapter onto my eyepiece... then screwed the eyepiece onto the lens of one of my cameras... I have an f1.8 55mm lens which is great for night shooting so I used that lens. I turned the camera on... adjusted my exposure and a few other settings... pressed the shutter release... I captured four quick photos in succession. I used these first four photos to create this moon photo above.
This image is a 96 megapixel image... 12,000 pixels x 8,000 pixels... then I resized it for the blog. That is one very large image file and the clarity is amazing!
Now it was time for a close-up detail shot...
I changed my eyepiece to my 8mm which gives me the most magnification that I currently have in eyepieces that can be used for afocal astrophotography. This image is also a 96 megapixel image at 12,000 pixels x 8,000 pixels and it shows the Montes Apenninus mountain range. This is also the site of the Apollo 15 lunar landing.
This relatively narrow mountain range reaches heights over 17,000 feet... similar height to The Alps here on Earth. That being said, the Montes Apenninus is named after the Apennines in Italy which are about half the height of the Montes Apenninus. Knowing this mountain range is over 17,000 feet kind of gives you a scale of this terrain on our moon.
I have to admit that I had some problems shooting this second image. Next time I'll do things differently but for a first night of first light and my second image through this scope, I'm definitely happy with it!
It was definitely a memorable night and I look forward to getting out there again!
POST EDIT - 27 May 2018: About a day and a half has passed and I found a few more images to stack into the first image, above. This time, I created a composite consisting of ten images for a 96 megapixel final image. These are all jpeg image files so they are starting out compressed but I plan to attempt to process the RAW image files sometime later. The RAW files should have a lot more fine detail which probably won't be all that noticeable at these blog sizes so I just did some quick edits to the jpegs this time around.
The six extra layers of images (added to the original four image files) provided more detail and made for less noise in the image both of which are a good thing. I still had an issue with all the images being terribly underexposed right from the start but this one with the extra six layers of images came out a little better than the first attempt with only four layers of images although it is difficult to see at these blog images sizes.
I'm looking forward to getting back out there on a clear night to do more observing and attempt more astrophotography.
When we arrived back home from the hospital tonight after another visit to Miss Ellie in the PICU, I immediately started setting up my new telescope in our driveway. Well... truth be told, it is about a month old now but I hadn't had a chance to observe the night sky before tonight. Tonight would be first light through this telescope.
Setup required about eight trips in and out of the house. I need to find a way to consolidate all the little odds and ends to make this task a bit easier and faster. Then I had to set up the scope... level it... align it with Polaris... then do an additional alignment on one to three additional stars. This went fairly well but I plan to do a bit more practicing on this because my alignment was off a little bit. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to slew using the direction buttons nor could I figure out how to set the speed of manual slewing. After some fumbling around with a few guesses, it was time to slew the telescope to my first object to view.
I knew I had a pretty good telescope on my hands but I wasn't sure how good until I peered through it tonight! Since we've been checking out Jupiter with our little telescope recently, I chose this as my first observation... "WOW!" was the first thing I said out loud... to nobody in particular, of course, since Sheila had already gone to bed. This new telescope is worlds better than our rebuilt small telescope! I was able to see the bands of Jupiter and four moons. It was easy to focus and the view was sharp!
Next on my plan for tonight was the moon. It is an easy object to find and I wanted to test out shooting photos through this telescope which is a type of photography that is exceptionally complicated. The telescope slowly slewed over to the moon... I looked through the eyepiece... "WOW!" was my response yet again.
The first thing I noticed was that the moon was far too bright through the telescope which means it truly does collect a lot of light. This is a good thing but the moon was far too bright to view with the naked eye! I removed my eyepiece and screwed on a moon filter to cut the light down to about 13%... the filter also helped to add some contrast... the detail I saw through this telescope is simply amazing!
Now it was time to shoot some photos. I decided to start out simple... I went with afocal imaging... I screwed an adapter onto my eyepiece... then screwed the eyepiece onto the lens of one of my cameras... I have an f1.8 55mm lens which is great for night shooting so I used that lens. I turned the camera on... adjusted my exposure and a few other settings... pressed the shutter release... I captured four quick photos in succession. I used these first four photos to create this moon photo above.
This image is a 96 megapixel image... 12,000 pixels x 8,000 pixels... then I resized it for the blog. That is one very large image file and the clarity is amazing!
Now it was time for a close-up detail shot...
I changed my eyepiece to my 8mm which gives me the most magnification that I currently have in eyepieces that can be used for afocal astrophotography. This image is also a 96 megapixel image at 12,000 pixels x 8,000 pixels and it shows the Montes Apenninus mountain range. This is also the site of the Apollo 15 lunar landing.
This relatively narrow mountain range reaches heights over 17,000 feet... similar height to The Alps here on Earth. That being said, the Montes Apenninus is named after the Apennines in Italy which are about half the height of the Montes Apenninus. Knowing this mountain range is over 17,000 feet kind of gives you a scale of this terrain on our moon.
I have to admit that I had some problems shooting this second image. Next time I'll do things differently but for a first night of first light and my second image through this scope, I'm definitely happy with it!
It was definitely a memorable night and I look forward to getting out there again!
POST EDIT - 27 May 2018: About a day and a half has passed and I found a few more images to stack into the first image, above. This time, I created a composite consisting of ten images for a 96 megapixel final image. These are all jpeg image files so they are starting out compressed but I plan to attempt to process the RAW image files sometime later. The RAW files should have a lot more fine detail which probably won't be all that noticeable at these blog sizes so I just did some quick edits to the jpegs this time around.
The six extra layers of images (added to the original four image files) provided more detail and made for less noise in the image both of which are a good thing. I still had an issue with all the images being terribly underexposed right from the start but this one with the extra six layers of images came out a little better than the first attempt with only four layers of images although it is difficult to see at these blog images sizes.
I'm looking forward to getting back out there on a clear night to do more observing and attempt more astrophotography.
Comments
Post a Comment