Category: Astronomy

Despite feeling a bit ill, last night I ventured outdoors to try and take a few starry night photographs with my camera. It took a little fiddling, but the quality improved dramatically over the course of the evening.

Here’s my best photo of the orion nebula (around the middle star in Orion’s dagger)

This was taken with a 15 second exposure through my 8″ telescope. My telescope has tracking, so there isn’t any crazy star shift going on, but I think I didn’t quite have it aligned North/South so the stars fall a little bit in the image. I also had to set a timer for the camera, because just touching the camera button was enough to introduce dramatic shake into the image.

What impresses me most is the color.

I’ve always been annoyed by deep space photography because of its false color. A scientist may decide, for example, to color a picture according to its temperature because it’s far more interesting than if you used the natural light image which, frankly, would probably be pretty boring.

Unfortunately, this had me thinking that the night sky wouldn’t be too exciting without photoshop. Thankfully, I was proven wrong. And while I hope I’ll be able to improve the focus and the shake next time around, I’m quite pleased with today’s results.

On Thursday my camera adapter arrived for my telescope. And wouldn’t you know, the next five days were cloudy. But the gloom finally parted and I quickly pulled out all the equipment for some celestial photography. This first picture shows the sun in all its glory! Actually, not quite all its glory because I can’t adjust zoom, so I couldn’t get the whole sun in a single view. Not a bad problem to have really.

I did, of course, have a sun filter on my telescope. Otherwise anyone who saw this photo would immediately go blind.

Now that the sun has set, I will be returning to the great outdoors to try my hand at some planets and or stars. Stay tuned for more exciting photos!