Alright so you wake up one day and decide you want to explore space from your backyard and do some astrophotography without having to sell your house to afford it. What would you need after doing a week's worth of research?

1. Mid-size reflecting telescope: $450
2. Equatorial mount/tripod to hold the scope and counter Earth's rotation: $1300
3. Highly sensitive webcam + UV/IR filter + adapter: $300
4. 2x magnification lens: $30
5. High quality 3x lens: $140 (optional)

$1300 for a mount you say? Well it is really heavy duty and can hold a massive load. It weighs 35kg itself and can easily carry the 10kg telescope at any angle and prevent it from wobbling in the wind (something that's very bad when doing photography!). Also it has decent motors to rotate the telescope 15 degrees an hour which is the same rate and in opposite direction as Earth's rotation, ensuring your object of interest stays firmly in view for minutes/hours at a time (depending on how well you align it).

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_0.jpghttp://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_0.5.jpg

Now what? Hook up the camera to the laptop and fumble around for a few minutes finding Jupiter in the sky at such a high magnification (not easy!). Once found, configure: the frame-rate, shutter speed, white balance, gain .. until the perfect balance is found. Then record a movie of Jupiter with its moon Io and the shadow it's casting:





Looks a bit blurry and wobbly hey? That's caused by air currents in the Earth's atmosphere causing refraction of the incoming light from Jupiter, making high magnification viewing difficult. An analogy would be looking at the surface of a car on a hot sunny day and noticing the gassy turbulence.

But that's ok, we'll do some signal processing and stack the best frames of the movie on top of each other and make a still, each R/G/B channel processed separately. Then we unblur to bring out the detail, then recombine the colour channels:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_1.png

Much better, can definitely see the moon (at left) and its shadow on Jupiter! But hey, I just happened to take 5 movies, 10 minutes apart - so let's do a time-lapse animation of 40 minutes duration to show the moon orbiting the planet as well as the Great Red Spot going around:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_1.gif

And finally, replace the 2x magnification lens with the high quality 3x and repeat:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_2.png

Not as good as the photos that Hubble takes of the planet, but still not bad for gear costing about $2k.

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

that fukin ace dude

Good stuff ole chap.

Impressive. We expect regular updates.

Definately regular (weekly/monthly) updates. "Parabol's Astronomy Corner Mach 1"

We expect regular updates.

Yeah with this rainy weather I've barely taken the telescope out in the last 3 weeks :/

Oh I forgot the very first image I ever got out the webcam + telescope combo. This one was taken with the camera misconfigured (frame-rate, colours, shutter, etc) and probably improperly focused as well. But hey, can still see some detail, but haven't touched the moon since:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_3.jpg

wow awesome man.. defiantly something i would like to try one day :)

post m0ar, the movies are especially cool

holy s*** that's pretty damn cool
reminds me of iceman, a dude who used to be a gameop on ga a couple of years back, he got right into taking pics with his own gear
http://www.iceinspace.com/

I've been thinking about buying this sort of gear for a while now but it's too much money to spend when the chances are likely that it would all start collecting dust in a corner after a few months.

reminds me of iceman, a dude who used to be a gameop on ga

GA gameop? Wow, I never would have guessed.

Yeah I'm basically where he was (in terms of experience) about 3 years ago. Basically trudging through his footsteps. His site is awesome, arguably the best of its kind - it's where I did most of my reading to decide on what gear to buy.

It's a fairly tedious hobby. It can easily use up 4-5 hours a night (setting up, cooling the gear, assembling + polar aligning, recording, packing up, image processing), which I can't afford most of the time. But it's good putting the effort in on a free weekend and getting some good results.

f***, that's awesome. It's pretty amazing that these sorts of images can be seen straight from ones backyard.

Awesome stuff.. I used to get out in the backyard with the old man when we were in Mt Isa (alot less light pollution) when I was a kiddie and loved looking up to the skies through the telescope.

Impressive. :D
Can it pick up that toolbag dropped from the ISS a few days ago?

There's a thought, snap a pic of the ISS!

Also, awesome pics hope to see regular updates.

nice setup parabol :D i hardly ever drag out my celestron nexstar gt114 anymore.. in fact it's over at a mate's place coz he lives up at mt.mee... very nice for viewing up there once the weather is clear! i could never get a camera to work with mine... do you use some sorta adaptor to put the wevcam on the eyepiece? i tried making one & it didn't work & i gave up :P

one thing i can recommend for ppl that perhaps don't want ot jump in quite so deep... the maidenwell observatory up near bunya mountains. ~3 hour drive north. they have some awesome 15" refractors that are hard mounted. on the night i went we didn't do any photography but it's all setup for it. jupiter was in it's full glory & heaps if clusters & nebulae. pity saturn won't be visible till march next year but my old man & i are thinking of going up again then. $25 for a full night of viewing & awesome steak meal at the pub next door for $15 ! :D


last edited by demon at 20:55:27 26/Nov/08

breathtaking. i wonder if there is oil on jupiter?

do you use some sorta adaptor to put the wevcam on the eyepiece?

I go for (magnified) prime focus, so no eyepiece. I use a special adapter that I bought for about $40, it screws into the webcam (with its own lens removed!) and the other end is a 1.25" barrel that slides into the focuser. So basically the telescope becomes the webcam's primary lens. Can put stuff like Barlows in between to magnify further.

pity saturn won't be visible till march next year

Some people who have good views of the horizon are already taking snaps early in the morning, just before sunrise. I wouldn't mind giving it a shot sometime.

are there any reasonably well priced mounts for digital SLR cameras out there?

last edited by scuzzy at 21:39:30 26/Nov/08

You mean a camera adapter for mounting onto a telescope's focuser or do you mean a standalone tripod suitable for long exposure astro-shots?

For the former, I'm quite sure you can pick up an adapter somewhere for $40-100. Here's one:

http://www.myastroshop.com.au/products/details.asp?id=MAS-238

For the latter, if you want to do long exposure shots then you might be able to get a lighter motorised mount for about $500, maybe less.

last edited by parabol at 21:54:06 26/Nov/08

reminds me of iceman, a dude who used to be a gameop on ga

GA gameop? Wow, I never would have guessed.

Yeah ice was the head of our RTCW team too, O2 (Oxygen) way back in the day. Good bloke.

thats f***ing awsome, i used to be a massive astro nerd in the day. was a pain in the ass tho, this was pre internet and all the mags where northern hem. now with gps, tripods like that and teh interweb, so easy!

was that bright f***er last weekend jupiter? i was down past beauy, bright as. can you get scopes that mount slrs?

cant belive how cheap reflectors are. went into nat geographic store the other day and was looking at em.

last edited by mooby at 22:14:41 26/Nov/08

demon, that sounds like a great plan.

i cant believe you can see f***ing jupiter from your house

thats crazy

Awesome. Do mars next!

ok, that was slightly cool

props

Do mars next!

Earliest I can do that is maybe May next year. Mars is only overhead during the day at the moment :/

venus was always a bit cool too. mercury was f***ing hard to find.

I'd love to do something like this, too many trees around here though I'd have to build some sort of platform up on my roof or up in one of the trees to be able to see anything :(

Can you put more filters on it & take pictures of the sun?

^ Yeah looking at about $200 for a filter that will show you the sun without much detail. If you want to make out solar prominences and stuff, you're looking at a few grand for a single filter. Not cheap!

so, who wants to take bets on how long until this gets used to spy on the neighbours wife? :p

So the hubble telescope takes proper coloured pictures? Always thought most of the stuff that comes out of NASA was coloured in? I know a lot of the pictures is touched up a bit.

Nice! Very Nice! Needs more Pluto!

So the hubble telescope takes proper coloured pictures?

Well colour is just a perceptual thing, it's not exactly real.

A typical CCD with a Bayer pattern will have a matrix of sub-pixels, some of which are more sensitive to wavelengths we perceive as green, others sensitive to red and the remaining blue. So basically each sub-pixel will collect light within a range of wavelengths, not an exact colour.

The onboard electronics (or external computer) will then process to produce something that approximates what we should see with the naked eye. You can treat the received data however way you like but the moment you try to prepare it for purely visual purposes, you have to accept the fact that there are many ways to produce the image.

For example, the 'green' pixel of my webcam is actually sensitive to light ranging from the fringes of blue through to all of green. So technically treating it as pure green like the webcam software does might not actually be the best approach, it's closer to picking up aqua in reality.

Here's the default RGB mode, and then there's my manually processed version where I ditch the blue completely but treat the green channel as aqua. Which is more correct? Hard to say:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/space_4.png

The CCDs are also very sensitive to IR which we can't see ourselves, so that bleeds in and is picked up by the red sub-pixel which deceives us into thinking there's more red content than there really is. Hence I use a UV/IR filter to prevent this from happening :)

last edited by parabol at 01:09:32 27/Nov/08

Here's a photo of Jupiter and its four main moons my dad and I took with his $300 digicam up against the lens of his (about) $900 celestron mirror telescope at Sandgate in the backyard (hardly good light conditions).

http://gallery.me.com/nick.bedford/100012/IMG_0061/web.jpg

For whoever was asking, Venus was probably the bright object you saw in the sky. Jupiter and Venus are pretty close together in the evening in the west in the evenings ATM.

3dee: you lose :P

Awesome doode.

Not bad 3dee, taking photos like that (with eyepiece, without adapter) is not easy!

Thanks fpot!

Yeah we were just looking at different objects and thought of trying to take a photo with dad's digicam. Took a few tries but for a cheapass camera and not a huge reflector t'scope, we managed to get even the four moons.

with my 4" refractor scope venus & mars are pretty boring... venus is an orange circle & mars is a red circle :P saturn & jupiter are where it's at for planetary viewing imo. even a couple of years back when mars was on it's closest to earth in a very long time... i had to use light filters to see any detail on it's disc & still at best i could just barely make out the valles marineris as a brownish blur :P

(edit) check this guy's astropics site... it's a canada dude i sometimes talk to on efnet. pic of his scope ...
http://ozastro.dyndns.org/images/scope3.jpg
the guy is mad keen on astrophotography... makes a lot of his own equipement & produces some awesome galaxy & nebulae photos.

last edited by demon at 11:13:20 27/Nov/08

yes get some photos together need a new wallpaper :)

Can you see any proof on the moon that the US were there ?

f***ing cool parabol. Can you do some galaxies?

Can you see any proof on the moon that the US were there ?

no. info from this nasa site.

And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

Can you do some galaxies?

With some circuitry and soldering, I've modified my webcam to do unlimited-duration exposures to be able to take galaxy/nebulae snaps. Just waiting for the freaking weather to clear up so I can try it out for the first time!

In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

Thank Christ. I would have chipped in $10 to the funding just to shut up all the conspiracy theorists.

http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/22000/TV-Studio-Moon--22478.jpg

You think that will shut them up?

If they think that the original event was faked then a few photos from NASA won't make any difference. Until you can see structures on the moon with the naked eye from earth (or we blow the moon up!) some people just won't believe we can go there.

asif it'll shut them up
the reason they come up with and maintain the conspiracies in the first place is to fill an emotional void, not because evidence isn't available

Try googling images of the moon and the planets and you get better quality images, what a horrendous waste of $2000+

You obviously haven't done any astronomy before...

Also, we could see the cloud bands of jupiter in that photo (obvsiouly with our eyes not the camera) which was sweet. Though our eyes can't expose for long enough (or are sensitive) to see any accumulation of colour so it was only white.

Dude they are f***ing awesome pics! About the time Iceman started his website I started getting interested in that stuff and have been thinking about buying a bunch of gear, but I just haven't had time to do anything about it, and don't want to do it half-assed and end up with assloads of gear that just takes up space that I never use. So I have been living vicariously through APOD, ice's site and Bad Astronomy.

Those photos are amazing, I can't wait until I have time to do it and can gaze upon the moon in that sort of detail with mine own eyes.

parabol, just adding my congrats on the images man. Well done.

All are very awesome. I really like 3dee's pic though - something more "realistic" about it.

Was only just taking some long exposure star trail shot last night, the wife is complaining that she wants a EOS T-Mount adapter for her C10-NGT, but I wouldn't mind modding my 10d with some added sensor cooling for astrophotograhy

last edited by HerbalLizard at 19:42:52 27/Nov/08

Hi guys

Wow, some trips down memory lane here.. Nice to see you again Trog, Jim and Orbitor! I hope you guys are well. Orb, how's Insolence going?
I do miss those RTCW days.. they were great fun.

Nice photos too, Ash (parabol). I remember you posting them on IceInSpace. You're coming up to speed nice and fast.

For anyone interested, I've created my own personal website for my images and a blog. You can see it at:

http://www.mikesalway.com.au

Cheers guys, thanks for the memories!

Nice photos too, Ash (parabol). I remember you posting them on IceInSpace

Yeah I normally wouldn't post stuff like that outside astro forums, but I figured posting a non-technical walk-through to an off-topic audience might inspire some people and make space seem a little less distant :)

there is actually physical proof men have been to moon.

gentlemen i give you the moon laser reflector!

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm

It's from a nasa site it is part of the conspiracy.

there is a vast quantity of physical evidence that nasa has been to the moon multiple times, but as jim said, the halfwit conspiracy theorists will never believe it. coz conspiracy theorists don't like proof... they like conspiracies.

make space seem a little less distant :)

Cue quote: "Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

gentlemen i give you the moon laser reflector

I wonder if one day Nasa will discover that its their high energy laser that is pushing the moons orbit out... lol

sup ice! Long time no speak. Prepare to be deluged with emails once I get some spare time :)

I wonder if one day Nasa will discover that its their high energy laser that is pushing the moons orbit out... lol

Haha, I remember a question in a physics textbook that asked how long you have to shine a certain laser to push yourself back to the shuttle if you're stranded during a space-walk. The next part was comparing it with throwing your space-shoe in the opposite direction to gain velocity :)

how cool, & scary, would it be to test out those nitrogen powered jetpacks that nasa astronauts use for propulsion in space!@ untethered ~!@~!@` :D i remember seeing an apod a while back where it showed an astronaut doing the furtherest untethered spacewalk with one of those mmu's & the pic was taken from the iss & the astronaut was this tiny little dude in the distance. that'd be pretty exhilarating i rekn! puffing along... hoping like hell you have enough nitrogen left to get back to the iss ;p

it wouldn't need much nitrogen though would it? just accelerate a small bit and let the frictionless void carry you along.

Sunlight not only heats the earth, but it (the light itself) exerts a repulsive force on the earth as well. That force amounts to about 660 million newtons, equivalent to 74,000 tons.
This force is trivial compared to the 36,000 billion billion newtons (800 million billion tons) of gravitational force attracting the two bodies together.

Also,

Sunlight exerts a very gentle force. The power of sunlight in space at Earth's distance from the sun is between 1.3-1.4 kilowatts per square meter. When you divide 1.4 kilowatts by the speed of light, about 300 million meters per second, the result is very small. A square mirror 1 kilometer on a side would only feel about 9 Newtons or 2 pounds of force.

last edited by 3dee at 12:54:37 28/Nov/08

it wouldn't need much nitrogen though would it? just accelerate a small bit and let the frictionless void carry you along.

i would also assume so... but what if you missed & went shooting past!? ;p

how cool, & scary, would it be to test out those nitrogen powered jetpacks that nasa astronauts use for propulsion in space!@ untethered ~!@~!@` :D i remember seeing an apod a while back where it showed an astronaut doing the furtherest untethered spacewalk with one of those mmu's & the pic was taken from the iss & the astronaut was this tiny little dude in the distance. that'd be pretty exhilarating i rekn! puffing along... hoping like hell you have enough nitrogen left to get back to the iss ;p

check out #29 here - I thought it was that at first and was like, f*** THAT! but it was just an empty suit

Cool pics.

I wish we could use our telescope. We can't get it to sit still and every time we look through it it is moving :(

stop using your daughter as a tripod!