Attempt at Astrophotography

By FAR the best picture I got. Helped, in part, by 
the magic that is Adobe Photoshop!

Tonight, I went out, armed with a telescope and a camera, to get some pictures. Of the 20 some pictures I took, only 3 came out well, and all of them required enhancing in Photoshop. I used a Jason Rotary Power 50mm telescope and a Nikon point and shoot camera. Ironically, I got better results with a $130 Nikon point-and-shoot, than a $400 Canon EOS Reble 300D.

Meh...

Note: These are very large image files and will take a little while to load on a slow connection.


One of my great passions in life is astronomy. However, it can be an exhausting hobby. All of these required going out in near freezing temperatures with a steady wind. Not only did the wind make me cold, but it caused slight disturbance in the images. But, as all good astronomers know, the best time for using a telescope is during the winter because of the lower temperatures and humidity.

Better, though it still has room to improve.

This, in turn, makes astronomy quite a hobby. It requires a REALLY good tolerance for cold weather. But, most of all, it requires MONEY.


This is, by no means, a cheap hobby. Even small telescopes, of good quality, cost at least $100. Even for that money, you are only getting a small 2 inch diameter Galilean Refractor (I live in the US, sue me for using my own measurement system!). Good telescopes are Newtonian Reflectors, and cost at least $300 for a 4 inch one on even an alt-azimuth mount. A good telescope mount is called an Equatorial mount, the main merit of these are the ability to use a polar tracking motor. What the motor does, is follow one point in the sky at the same rate that the Earth rotates at. Using one of these mounts, an astronomer can attach a camera eyepiece to the telescope, and have the camera expose for minutes without the image moving out of place. This is necessary because, while the normal exposure times are fine for the moon, they are simply too short to catch the faint light of nebula, stars, and galaxies. The way I took these photos is about as rudimentary as possible, I just pointed the telescope at the moon, and the camera into the eyepiece. The originals were not very good quality, I had to play around with the ISO setting for a little before   I settled on using 3200. Then I had to line up the camera PERFECTLY to fit the whole image in frame. I also had a hard time focusing the images because this process involves 2 items that need to be focused. While the camera has a pretty good auto-focus, the telescope requiters VERY specific and small movements to focus properly. It is a headache that I don't usually do.