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Below you can find images taken with a videocamera through my 6'' Newtonian telescope. The results are very promising. I really wouldn 't be able to achieve this resolution and image brightness with film. My camera is a SONY TRV-110e and the telescope is a MEADE Starfinder equarorial. Unfortunately the equatorial motor doesn't track the sky due to the camera's weight ...

Every image is really an average of 5 to 100 or more(!?) frames.
Until summer '02, they were grabbed with a Pinnacle PCTV Rave card. I made use of its [analog] S-video input, and the camera's digital 'freeze' to download the frames that look sharper as 'uncompresed' images.
Now that DV works fine for me under Linux, I just download the video via firewire to the PC [digitally], and then split the video to frames. Each frame is then split to two semiframes :-).
Note that the camera's digital freeze, blends the 2 semiframes in one 'mean' frame, so that splitting in 2 semiframes does not have much meaning. On the other hand, the DV (video) file keeps semiframe information. Since each semiframe is a different succesive exposure, one of them maybe blurred by bad seeing, so it can be located and discarded.

Moon
Triensneker region
Moon mosaic
Same frames, better stacking than old
Alpine Valley region
These two images, moon1, moon2 were made by two videos taken at 11/11/2002, some minutes before the Meade focuser broke down :(( Sadly due to the camera's weight the plastick teeth of the rack and pinion focuser were made flat! It will be replaced by a much better Jmi focuser soon, so I won't be whinning anymore.
The moon was setting at 11.5o altitude at the time and the seeing was bad.
Crater Fracastorius. Even if the focuser was still broken, I couldn't resist getting a short video of this interesting crater, while in very favorable lighting conditions at 23/11/2002 23:22 UT. This is an average of the sharpest 280 frames out of 1500. The seeing was not that good.
I have also made a comparison (348Kb) of the above photo with orbiter data. As you can see, the aspect is quite different. Nevertheless, one can easily spot the two little domes #1 and #2 on both pictures. If my calculations are correct, dome #2 measured 0,88'' that night, which is about the theoretical limit of what a 6 inch telescope can do.
Partial lunar eclipse (16/08/2008)


What if you only have a camera with one or more lenses, but no telescope? Then you can do...
Star Trails
startrails
startrails
startrails

These pictures were taken with a ZENITH SLR camera, its standard 58mm lens with a 100 ISO Kodak film from Mt. Parnasos in summer 2001. All you need to do is compose a scene, point the camera and take an exposure of several minutes long. Use a focal ratio of f/2 to f/5.6 depending on how bright the background sky is. (You'll have to experiment with focal ratio, exposure and film speed.)

startrails
startrails
startrails

Same as above, but in 2002 with a Fuji 200ISO. There were some fast clouds that night, and they made some special efectcs with the star trails! Notice the trails' shape - they're different in every image. A rare occasion that clouds actually work in favor of the astrophotographer :)

Star Fields

Another (less simple) way, is to guide the camera piggiback on a telescope that follows the stars, or using a "barn door tracker". For example, here is the heart of Cygnuswith the same camera and film at f/2.8, and a 3min exposure. For guiding I used the equatorial mount of my 60mm refractor, turning the RA knob manually.
Meteor Showers

This is a 25sec exposure with my new Canon 400D digital camera. You can see the bright trail of a Perseid meteor, caught at 12/08/2008. On the left is Cassiopeia and on the right the western part of Perseus.




All the software I use is under Linux. (The Gimp for image processing)
I hope this page will grow in time and become helpfull to others. :-)



Other amateur astronomy pages from Greek people
Hellenic Amateur Astronomy Association in greek
Astrophotography by Kolovos Dimitrios in english
AstroForum in english
Astrovox forum in greek
Anthony's astronomy pages in english

Usefull links for planetary photography
Video astronomy portal (a must!) in english
High resolution astrophotography by Antonio Cidadao in english



Home Last updated: 30 Mar 2010 Mail me