Scattered Thoughts . . .

This evening, I was sorting through all the photos I shot through my new telescope the other night and came across a few series of images that might be worth processing. So, below is another photo from that "first light" observing session. Unfortunately, most of the photos I shot the other night were very underexposed so some detail and crispness has been lost due to that mistake. In this particular series of photos, the images were all grossly underexposed but I thought I might be able to salvage something out of them so I loaded the series of photos into Photoshop as a stack of layers. Just like the two other photos I shared the other night, the final image is a 96 megapixel image after processing it. I started with seven images and stacked them... adjusted levels... did some noise reduction because I had to lift the levels a bit too far after starting with gross underexposure... some selective sharpening... I removed some chromatic abberations along the top edge of the

Sony a6000 camera So, after writing about my "first light" experience last night, I realized that I haven't really written anything about this telescope or even the camera I used. Let me start by saying that both of these pieces of equipment are considered "entry-level"... the telescope is an entry-level telescope for just getting started in astrophotography... and the camera is an entry-level, all purpose mirrorless interchangeable lens camera.  Let's start with the camera since that is what actually captures the imaging. It is a Sony a6000 camera body... quite small and almost pocketable... but works great for action photos of the grandchildren as well as wildlife photography. This is also the camera I bring to the hospital because its shutter is quieter than my better camera and because it is a bit smaller than my better camera. This is an old camera by digital standards but it far surpasses entry level cameras produced today by all other manufact

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 th