My Astronomy

 

 

Click here for main

Home Page

 including Dominic

Ford's excellent

monthly calendar

 

 

 


My New Book May 2018

 

ABOUT THE WEBSITE - CLICK HERE

My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

My Recent Tweets
« More Almeria Birds | Main | Cabrera - Red Legged Partridge »
Sunday
Jan302011

31st January 2011 - A clear night again!

Following a week of cloud and rain, clear skies seem to have returned once more. The sky to the East and South were brilliant with stars and I was tempted to try some DSLR photography with the Sony Alpha camera mounted on the 12" Meade OTA driven by the CGEM mount. I first used a 50mm standard lens and then changed to a zoom lens set to 300mm focal length. I used my small laptop PC with the "Wilkinson" interface and DSLR shutter software to set exposure times. This was the first attempt at Orion with a 10 second exposure using the 18mm lens.

 

I then managed to get a 5 minute exposure of M42 with the 300mm lens

 followed by a 10 minute exposure

 

and then tried for the "Flame Nebula" adjacent to Alnitak in the belt of Orion.

 

 

and then a 5 minute exposure of the Pleiades