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!