The Moon again... stacked!

Moon - 2013-08-18
(Pentax K-5, MC MTO-11CA 1000mm f10, 10 shots stacked with Registax )

My first attempt at getting some extra detail into my shot of the moon by stacking multiple images using Registax. I'd say it went pretty well!

How well you ask?

Our sun

Sun - 2013-08-21
(Pentax K-5, MC MTO-11CA, 1/1600s, 1000mm, ISO 800)

Sun - 2013-08-21 (Close Up)
(Pentax K-5, MC MTO-11CA, 1/1600s, 1000mm, ISO 800)

Just a quicky: here's my first proper solar image using Baader's AstroSolar to make a solar filter for the MTO.

Note the sunspots. It works rather neatly, eh?

In case you are wondering: I used the orange contrast filter as a housing for the filter film. Look at the setup below.

Gratuitous moon shots

Just playing with the MTO-11CA. Here my initial impressions and two moon shots I took over the last days.

My first impressions are that it's sharp for a mirror lens! It is enormous.. both physical and in reach. Focus ring is rather tight, but that's great for precise focusing. It also helps keeping the focus where it is.

Also, I'm gonna need a better tripod...

Moon - 2013-08-18
(Pentax K-5, MC MTO-11CA, 1/1600s, 1000mm, ISO 1600)

Moon - 2013-08-20
(Pentax K-5, MC MTO-11CA, 1/400s, 1000mm, ISO 400)

A Russentonne!

It took a little bit of searching, but now I finally have my "Russentonne". The MTO-11CA. A Maksutov-Cassegrain mirror lens with a focal length of 1000mm!

If you look at the pictures of the lens by itself, it doesn't look that big. It has the normal proportions of a barrel.

Until you realize that it takes 116 mm (that's 4 inches for you imperial boys and girls) filters...

It. is. big!

Preparing for astro season: making your own autoguider - part 2

Ï guess it's a setup?

Last time I talked about the basic building of your own autoguider. Not that hard, right?

But now that we have it all assembled as shown in the picture here, we still need to give it a little TLC to make it work.

Here are the next steps!

Preparing for astro season: making your own autoguider - part 1

Very home made!

I've already teased you about making your own optical auto-guidance scope (or autoguider) in the previous post. You can read all about at this wikipedia page.

Summarizing: the cam will take images of the sky and send them to a guiding program, for example PHD Guiding (for windows). You select a star to keep centered and the program calculates how your telescope mount should be moved in order to keep the selected star stationary by calculating the apparent motion between the images it receives from the cam.

This method is better than inertial guidance (standard tracking in telescope mounts: the mount moving based on it's position and internal clock) as optical tracking doesn't suffer drift.

Pretty neat eh?

Again, you can buy these off-the-shelf, but they cost quite a bit of money (usually upwards of a hundred dollars like this Celestron unit). Why buy that when you can make one with some inexpensive parts you've probably got lying around the house?*

So let's make one!

In this post I'll explain what I did to the webcam and how it's mounted to the lens.

*Disclaimer: this is just one of the probably many mounting possibilities and strongly depends on what kind of webcam you have. Consider it for inspiration, unless you have the same parts of course. Also I have to admit that I'm assuming you have some sort of netbook or laptop to run the guidance and webcam software on. The Celestron unit is able to operate standalone (though that strikes me as being rather lonely for the guider.. poor thing).

Preparing for astro season: mounting stuff to a telescope

The Perseids aside, these months are poor for astro (as I've complained a bit about here). But it does give you an excellent opportunity to get your gear together for the winter. A mate of mine has a nice telescope with an equatorial mount, but no camera that can be triggered remotely in a practical way. I have a rather decent camera but no scope or mount that is able to decently track the night sky (no, the O-GPS1 doesn't even come close to using a real mount).

We figured it'd be stupid no to put the two together.

As we are on a budget, a bit of DIY is needed to make this happen. First up is a way of mounting the camera's to the scope.

From the depths of the ultra secret Nugigeruli Labs™: a DIY scope mounted base plate!

Perseids are coming: mark your calendar!

As I was made aware by +Vincent van Leijen, the Perseid meteor shower is almost upon us.

Although the summer so far has turned out to be pretty lame for observing deep sky objects (too light, too humid, too many clouds etc.), this event is more terrestrial. Meaning, you don't need uber clear condition to see the stars falling.

But it might be a good idea to get out though, as Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office explains:

Cooke recommends looking on the nights of August 12th and 13th between the hours of 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM local time. Before midnight the meteor rate will start out low, then increase as the night wears on, peaking before sunrise when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky.
For every fireball that streaks out of Perseus, there will be dozens more ordinary meteors.
"Get away from city lights," advises Cooke. "While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside."
In total, the Perseid meteor rate from dark-sky sites could top 100 per hour.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-perseid-fireballs.html#jCp

"Get away from city lights," advises Cooke. "While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside."
In total, the Perseid meteor rate from dark-sky sites could top 100 per hour.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-perseid-fireballs.html#jCp

Cooke recommends looking on the nights of August 12th and 13th between the hours of 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM local time. Before midnight the meteor rate will start out low, then increase as the night wears on, peaking before sunrise when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky.
For every fireball that streaks out of Perseus, there will be dozens more ordinary meteors.
"Get away from city lights," advises Cooke. "While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside."
In total, the Perseid meteor rate from dark-sky sites could top 100 per hour.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-perseid-fireballs.html#jCp

"Get away from city lights," advises Cooke. "While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside."
In total, the Perseid meteor rate from dark-sky sites could top 100 per hour.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-perseid-fireballs.html#jCp

Cooke recommends looking on the nights of August 12th and 13th between the hours of 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM local time. Before midnight the meteor rate will start out low, then increase as the night wears on, peaking before sunrise when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky.

For every fireball that streaks out of Perseus, there will be dozens more ordinary meteors.

"Get away from city lights," advises Cooke. "While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside."

In total, the Perseid meteor rate from dark-sky sites could top 100 per hour.

That's quite a show. So: mark your calendar on the 12th and 13th of August!

And keep your fingers crossed for clear(ish) skies.

via: phys.org

Little creepy crawlers in the garden 2

Turns out summer time is really bad for anything remotely connected to sky watching. So here's some more macro's I did with a reversed lens. This time I used the Pentax-M 50mm f1.7.

It's pretty fly...

Drone Fly
(Pentax K-5, reversed Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes,
1/250s, 50mm, ISO 800)

Drone Fly
(Pentax K-5, reversed Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes,
1/500s, 50mm, ISO 800)

Yellow Dungfly
(Pentax K-5, reversed Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes,
1/800s, 50mm, ISO 1600)

Damselfly
(Pentax K-5, reversed Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes,
1/250s, 50mm, ISO 800)

Repurposing an old lens: the reverse macro lens

Yesterday I got my lens reversal ring! It's basically a K-mount ring with 49mm male filter thread on it. This allows one to mount a lens onto a camera backwards and this works great for macro photography! There's a little background reading on Wikipedia.

I'm using the following configuration: my old Olympus 50mm F1.8 in reverse, macro extension tubes and a 2x teleconverter. I admit, it's an odd looking tower.

My "macro lens"

Little creepy crawlers in the garden

While I am still waiting for clear dark skies, I fancied playing some more with macro tubes. No flowers this time, but little bugs!

Young grasshopper
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes,
1/400s, 50mm, ISO 800)

Fly on the Wall
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes, 1/800s, 50mm, ISO 1600)

Come in to my lair...
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + extension tubes, 1/60s, 50mm, ISO 400)

Schermer mills by night

Last monday I was going out to shoot some stars, but unfortunately things turned cloudy very soon after sundown. What to do? Why not do some more long exposures on the way home?

Bovenmolen E
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-DA 18-55mm AL WR,
f/11, 30s, 35mm, ISO 400)

Ondermolen D
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-DA 18-55mm AL WR, f/11, 13s, 18mm, ISO 400)

Fun at fourhunderd (three black-and-whites)

Getting to know this lens a little more. Turns out you can also use it for portraits! Sort of... All shots were taken hand held (rifle techniques work surprisingly well here!).

Furry sleepy
(Pentax K-5, Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO, f/5.6, 1/500s, 400mm, ISO 3200)

Cleaning the old camera
(Pentax K-5, Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO, f/5.6, 1/500s, 400mm, ISO 3200)

Seagull and farmland
(Pentax K-5, Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO + 2x TC, f/11, 1/1250s, 800mm, ISO 3200)

Moon! (to TC or not to TC)

Full Moon
(Pentax K-5, Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO, f/8, 1/1000s, 400mm, ISO 800)

So last night, I went out to snap some quick shots of the full moon. I was lucky as we haven't seen clear skies the past 2 weeks here and probably won't for another week at least.

As I still have to receive my M42 to Pentax adapter, this test was only about the newly acquired Sigma lens. Nonetheless, I was curious to see how the results at 400mm and at 800mm, with the teleconverter (TC), compare.

Extending my reach

From left to right:
smc PENTAX-M 50mm F1.7 (for size),
Auto Chinon 200mm F3.5,
Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO

Turns out that a 50mm lens, even though very fast, is not so great for Messier objects.

So cue new, longer lenses!

After some considerable Marktplaats.nl (a dutch trading site) hunting and some friendly folk over at PentaxForum.nl (thanks Guus!),  I am now in the possession of  2 new long lenses and a teleconverter!

The middle lens in the picture is an Auto Chinon. It is an M42 lens with a focal length of 200mm and an f-number of 3.5. It's pretty fast and according to most reviews quite sharp as well. Operation is completely manual though.

It feels really nice and heavy, as it is all metal, and is actually quite wide. It has an integrated lens hood but came without front cap though. I think the filter thread is 62mm, so I'll fetch a cheap one via eBay from China.

I've ordered an adapter on eBay, so it'll be a while before I get to use it. As the flange distance of M42 and Pentax K-mount are identical, it should work really well out of the box.

The other "new" lens is a Sigma 400mm F5.6 APO manual lens. I say manual, but it is a K-mount lens with so-called "A-mode", which means the aperture can be controlled from the camera. This makes it quite suitable for wildlife photography as well.

It's a tad on the heavy side, though pretty compact for such a long lens. Focus action is really light and smooth; a joy to work with! Like the Chinon, it comes with it's own lens hood build in.

With the Sigma I also purchased a 2x teleconverter to double the focal length (at the expense of making the setup slower); effectively giving me a focal length equivalent of 400 (lens) x 2 (TC) x 1.5 (crop) = 1200mm!

The setup does look a tad on the bulky side, though nothing extreme by photographic standards (and tiny by astronomic standards):

The K-5 with the Sigma 400 and the 2x teleconverter

I can't wait for the skies to clear up so I can start shooting.

Note that all this equipment meets the "On a budget" criteria as even the most expensive one (the Sigma) only cost me €50,-! #Lucky

Long exposure fun!

Here are two pictures I did while waiting for the cloud cover to disappear during my last outing.

Sheep shed near the IJsselmeer
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm 1.7, f/4.0, 15s, 50mm, ISO 1600)

I got really lucky with this shot as a passing by car accidently light painted the shed for me. Trivia: the bright yellow lights you see are from the locks in the Afsluitdijk. Bonus puzzle: how many sheep can you spot?

Lighting the path
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm 1.7, f/4.0, 30s, 50mm, ISO 3200)

And this is me faffing about with a flashlight. The black tracks are the shadows of my feet! The vegetation looks a bit blurred because it was actually really windy that night.

Stacking troubles with Pentax (DNG) RAWs

I'm just writing this down because DeepSkyStacker v3.3.2 was giving me headaches: it would crash the instant I wanted to load a RAW-file (I use the DNG format). The error has something to do with accessing "ntdll". Turns out that reinstalling, scrubbing your registry etc. does not work. In short: the current release version (3.3.2) is broken with my K-5 files.

Luckily, the fix for this is very simple: get the latest beta! Version number 3.3.3 beta 51 works for me. Finding the latest beta isn't that simple though. Some clicky action led me to the correct page.

Searching for the error in this context gave me poor results. So hopefully this post will save a fellow Pentaxian some work!

Hunting swans at dusk

A part of Cygnus at dusk
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm 1.7, f/2.0, 180s (stacked), 50mm, ISO 3200)

Yesterday, poetically on Ascension day, I went out to shoot in what hopefully would be darker conditions.

I travelled to the Dijkgatsbos in North-Holland (52.889538 N, 5.069368 W). This is one of the places in The Netherlands with the least amount of light pollution. At least according to the charts. It also has ample space to set up your gear; considering it is only a half hour drive away from me, it really is an ideal shooting location!

Unfortunately, I knew my clear skies were going to disappear very quickly that day with a cloud front coming in from the west, giving me very limited shooting time. Translation: I could only shoot until about 1,5 hour after sunset.

I was hoping to make shoot a picture of the Milky Way, but that required quite long exposure times as well as properly dark skies (well past midnight). That wasn't going to happen, so I turned to shooting Swan ..or Cygnus.

I'm pleased with how this turned out! As always, annotated version after the break.

Fun with a fifty: macro time!

And now for something completely different: the fifty came with macro extension tubes. I had to use them. These are some of the results from a sunny day in the garden with more after the break.

Pretty in purple: some asters
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm f1.7, 1/125s, 50mm, ISO 100)

First impressions: a 50mm for astro

The constellation of Lyra

Yesterday I showed you my new lens. Last night I went out for to try it.

Rather than doing it in my garden, I went to a patch in the neighborhood, which was more or less in the middle of farmland. I hoped this would help to limit the background lighting even if there are two medium-sized cities near my town.

And this is what I shot.

There's an annotated version of the shot after the break if your constellations are a bit rusty.

Nifty Fifty

This was in the mail today: a SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7.

A completely manual lens that is optically very very good. Even better: it's also very cheap. You can get a good copy for around €30,- on eBay or Marktplaats (dutch). Mine even came with a UV-filter and a set of (metal!) macro extention tubes.

So why bother with an old lens like this?

First impressions: the Pentax O-GPS1

This little GPS unit is one of the reasons* I bought a Pentax K-5. Not only because it allows me to find true North or navigate to Pentax HQ in Japan (which you actually can do with this thing), but because of the Astrotracer function.

Basically, the camera moves the sensor to compensate for the motion of the earth relative to the stars in the sky. It's like having a tracking telescope mount... in your camera!

The mechanical components are all in the camera, thanks to the in-body shake reduction, but it needs a bunch of information from the O-GPS1; I'm guessing location, orientation and so on. Also focal length of the lens is important; a longer focal length means more perceived motion. Don't forget to set it on the camera if you're using a manual lens!

Plenty has been written about the device, so I won't do that. Here are some in-depth reviews if you feel like reading up on it, especially the PentaxForums one is thorough:

• ePHOTOzine
• PentaxForums

What I am interested in is what is most important: does it really work?

A photoblog!

I suppose this is where the traditional first post comes in: an introduction!!

It's been awhile since I've blogged. So why start now? Well, I've started getting a little more serious about my photography. And astrophotography in specific.

Why (mainly) astro? Well, first and foremost because it's about stuff in SPACE! That ought to be more than enough reason. It's amazing to see what is out there and what the camera can reveal.

Secondly, it's technically challenging, especially when you're on a budget. Terrestrial photography is pretty much understood, with camera's nowadays calculating the optimal settings themselves. No such thing when peering into the cold void of space: there are no set rules for shooting stars (pun intended). Well, maybe there are guidelines or best practices, but it's all pretty experimental. And that makes it fun: it's a puzzle and the outcome is almost always a surprise!

Hopefully this blog will help me remember what I did and how I did it (equipment, settings, locations, etc). With a little luck, blogging my "experiments" will help me make sense of what works and what doesn't.

Maybe it will even help others who start out themselves.

Of course this blog will probably also contain other pictures I've shot. It is, after all, called a photoblog. As long as there's a nice story to tell about them!