Thinkpads Forum

Here's a picture of my "desktop" after a night of imaging...

Btw, images w/ this setup can be found here...
http://www.pbase.com/jeffcrilly/astro

http://crilly.org/coppermine/albums/use ... prings.jpg

Moderator edit: Links to images only please

gosh.. looks nice..

ur telescope reminds of the movie 'A Walk To Remember'

[censored], and i thought my telescope was tiny...

haha great pictures!

that's a pretty swell setup, what kind of telescope is that?

p.s. you're images are absolutely wonderful.

naro wrote:gosh.. looks nice..

ur telescope reminds of the movie 'A Walk To Remember'

hahah thats the first thing i thought of when is saw the pic....lol

I am speechless. I just saw the photographs at your site, and I never thought you could get these sort of pictures without using one of the expensive government telescope installations. What's your usual location, by the way? Arizona?

Absolutely stunning pics.

I have been trying to get a setup like this for so long. My neighbor enticed me into getting one a long time ago, after I was able to see inside the craters on the moon....then Haley's Comet.

Wow that head mount must be pricy.

great site! Reminds me of one I keep running into that I also like:

http://www.eanet.com/kodama/astro/

Could you link up some stuff about your equipment?

So far it looks like you have a canon 300D body, what sort of mounting you doing? just piggyback style? also are you using the software that comes with the canon for camera control?

Does anyone know if Nikon has this software? I'd love to get into astrophotography but the cost of the mount and a scope is prohibitive.

Thinkpaddict wrote:I am speechless. I just saw the photographs at your site, and I never thought you could get these sort of pictures without using one of the expensive government telescope installations. What's your usual location, by the way? Arizona?

I'm in the SF bay area and typically go to some remote sites south of gilroy. That site is on some private land south of holister.

One site I frequent is described here: www.fpoa.net.

I also typically travel out of town - up north, or to the sierra foothills, or down south about halfway to L.A. Sometimes I'll make a three hour trip for just one night.

dannyp wrote: Could you link up some stuff about your equipment?

So far it looks like you have a canon 300D body, what sort of mounting you doing? just piggyback style? also are you using the software that comes with the canon for camera control?

Does anyone know if Nikon has this software? I'd love to get into astrophotography but the cost of the mount and a scope is prohibitive.

The camera is indeed a canon 300D, however the IR block filter has been removed to make the camera more sensitive...
http://www.pbase.com/jeffcrilly/image/50725632/large

The camera is mounted in the "prime focus" position; essentially the telescope is like a 3000mm telephoto lens. The other black square thing is a guide camera used for fine adjustments to the mount tracking. This is mounted on a device w/ a prism that allows some of the starlight to be sent to the guide camera.

The mount is from astro-physics and is quite solid.
http://www.astro-physics.com

The telescope is from meade - its one of their new SCTs in an RC design... http://meade.com/lx200r/index.html

For software.. first off I shoot in RAW mode. I end up taking lots of short (5 minute) exposures of the same object, then combine these images to reduce the noise in the combined image. There's a fair number of "DSLR astrophotography" applications out there, but the one I use is maxDSLR...
http://cyanogen.com/products/maxdslr_main.htm

I've been doing the astrophotography thing for about 5 years, and the astronomy thing (e.g. visual, etc) for 10 years. I'd recommend starting out simple. It can easily turn into an expensive and frustating hobby.

Btw, the image from the other night is here...
http://www.pbase.com/jeffcrilly/image/65928679

Moderator edit: Links to images only please
BTW, Nice pics

Absolutely stunning pictures!

absolutely incredible It's been a while since something amazed me so much as your pictures. Great job and ver interesting post.

Probably no one has looked at this in a while but my astrophotography setup consists of Celestron C8+ along with a Pentax *ist DL at prime focus on an equatorial wedge i use an illuminated reticle in a modified 50mm finderscope to make corrections. The laptop of choice "ED". I will post some pics as soon as I can mark them to limit them from "photo theft." Not to say that someone from within this fine forum would do something like that, but others from the outside. (It has happened to a friend of mine.)

Those pictures are awesome - great setup and great work!

those pics

do you do much post-processing afterwards or are those colours all "real"?

very nice anyway

@ OP:

Your pics rock. Your setup is sweet.

I am both envious and happy for you. Astro-photography has been a passing interest of mine for the past few years and I would like to get some starter gear.

So I have this wonderful T41. What's a good telescope to start with and camera. Basically for less than $1500 what would I be looking at?

Temetka, that is one souped up T41p you have! I am SO envious.

Thank you so much for sharing these, I am just so impressed that you took these; I also thought you had to be in one of those large observatories with the 40' ladder up to the eyepiece. Pretty humbling images, all that beauty is out there and most of us are unaware

gator wrote:Temetka, that is one souped up T41p you have! I am SO envious.

I love my T41P. It has been a labor of love (and money) to upgrade and care for this machine. If figured that since the little guy has taken such good care of me, I might as well return the favor.

I would love to combine this wonderful machine with another love of mine: space.

Purcy wrote:Thank you so much for sharing these, I am just so impressed that you took these; I also thought you had to be in one of those large observatories with the 40' ladder up to the eyepiece. Pretty humbling images, all that beauty is out there and most of us are unaware

The universe is indeed beautiful and humbling.

Temetka wrote: I love my T41P. It has been a labor of love (and money) to upgrade and care for this machine. If figured that since the little guy has taken such good care of me, I might as well return the favor.

Do keep us posted if you do something interesting ... and I want to see some pics of the T41p. You have time for taking some pics?

Temetka wrote:@ OP:
Basically for less than $1500 what would I be looking at?

How about one of these?...

http://www.astrotrac.com/

Do widefield with a DSLR camera. (or film) Much less demanding of mount quality. You'll need something like photoshop, and ideally something to control the image capture, e.g. http://cyanogen.com/

are you an astronomer?

No. I just do this in my spare time. I write code for a living.