Friday, January 26, 2007

Sunset with Venus ....

I'm try to keep my camera on me at all times, and I was finally rewarded the other night as I came out of the office with a fantastic sight of Venus hanging over a dusty orange sunset.


It's a single shot, 2 seconds at ISO100, but that was all it took. Just a shame I did not have my camera with me at this same spot a couple of weeks ago with comet McNaught ... or indeed at the weekend when a slender New Moon was cradling Venus. That will teach me not to keep my camera with me at all times!

New Moon, New Kit, New Fun ....

I finally got my Canon EOS 10D attached to the Skywatcher ED80 whilst the sky was clear. Normally once the former is done, the latter disappears! These 2 nights were no exception, but at least I managed to get a few shots off.

The first was through thin, but striated, cloud. The result was a stack of 10 shots that smeared the cloud cover out even more into a kind of ethereal frame for the moon. For extra artistic impact I rotated it around for that classic 2001 A Space Odyssey opening credits look :)


The second was via eyepiece projection with my 30mm 80 degree Moonfish eyepiece (what a great piece of kit that it!). I had to hold the 10D up to the eyepiece though as I did not have the right adapters to fix it in one. The optical train passed through a William Optics diagonal to get the required focus - I think some extension tubes might be the order of the day. This time 9 frames were shot, along with 9 darks.




I tried to capture some frames at prime focus with my ToUCam Pro shortly after the above shots, but the clouds were too patchy to complete the 4 frame mosaic needed at that focal length. Although the ToUCam is quite sensitive, it is very twitchy to changes in brightness. This means that you get over or under exposed frames extremely easily, and when shooting something like Moon with its high dynamic range, it's pretty much terminal.