Lunar Photography

After quite some time of taking a break from the moon, I again return to this eerie object that pierces the serenity of the night sky. But this time its not just observing that I did. I also tried some astrophotography featuring the moon. As you can recall before, I had previous posts (Photos of the moon and A tribute to the Moon) of moon pictures using a webcam held directly over the eyepiece. Now with a new camera generously given by my friend Rafael del Rosario, I try taking pictures of our world's nearest neighbor. 

Here is the list of the equipment that I used during the observation and photography:

My 60 mm f/15 equatorially mounted refractor

22 mm Huygenian Eyepiece

Nikon Coolpix L16 Digital Point and Shoot Camera

Generic Camera Tripod from CD-R King

Patience and Determination

To give you an idea of what my setup is, here is a photo showing the equipment's arrangement : 

The setup is very straightforward - once I have set up the telescope, I just position the camera and adjust its tripod in a way that it will align with the eyepiece. After that, I check the LCD screen of the camera if the image of the moon can be seen clearly without vignetting or darkening at the corners like the ones I took before. When everything looks fine, I take the photos. I am sure that anyone with a digital camera, a telescope and a tripod for their camera can take astrophotos of the moon and planets.

After a few adjustments and trial shots, I came up with these shots of the moon.

And finally, a landscape picture with the moon (but in a portrait orientation) joined by Jupiter which is the bright star North East of the bright moon.

In my opinion, good astrophotography is possible with even the most basic equipment. Of course capturing photos of galaxies and star clusters are not possible with my setup due to the lack of a manual exposure but its not a loss to try what you can do with equipment available to you just like the way I did.

Jupiter

Finally after a few months of cloudy skies and inactivity, I'm now back with new experiences in amateur astronomy. 

Since the season here in the Philippines showcases the planet Jupiter during the evening, I have been taking every opportunity to observe and attempt to photograph the giant gas planet. My most recent observation was at the evening until early dawn of September 10, 2010. A good dose of rain have been falling early that afternoon and when late evening crept in, the skies cleared up like all dirt and dust and smoke were removed by the rain. Visibility that night was very clear and observing conditions were one of the best in my experience.

Jupiter was very clear with its four Galilean moons during that night. One cloud band was prevalent and other soft details were visible at around 100x. Observing at low power was also a joy - the Gas Giant floating about like a brilliant gem in the darkness of space adorned with four gleaming pearls all lined up perfectly with the planet.

I also used the opportunity of good seeing to do some experimental astrophotography using a Nikon Coolpix L16 point and shoot digital camera and a generic camera tripod. Equipment used was a 4.5 inch f/7.8 reflector - equatorially mounted and manual tracking. Images were obtained using a rather weird eyepiece projection technique where I placed the camera's lens right in front of the eyepiece and then secure the tripod where the camera was mounted. The camera's lens were zoomed all the way to its longest telephoto setting in all photos.

Here are some of my photographs of Jupiter

Low Power View

Galilean moons and jupiter at low power

Like brilliant gems embedded in the sky

100x using 9 mm eyepiece

Trying to capture detail at 100x

100x using 9 mm eyepiece

Only three or two of the moons are visible in the photos because the last one is quite far from the other three and my camera has a very limited field of view. Most of the photos are also overexposed because of the camera's lack of sophisticated metering as well as inferior sensor compared to high end CCD equipment and DSLRs.

I also tried getting a video of Jupiter in a desperate attempt to capture some detail and avoid overexposure as well as trails caused by inadequate tracking or camera shake or both. The videos can be viewed below.

I also did a composite of the video and stacked the frames using Registax and came up with the following pictures

1st composite image

2nd composite image (Note two dim specks of light at the northeast part of jupiter, those are two of its moons.)

3rd composite image. If you'll view this full screen (which can be done by clicking on the photo), you can see two tiny specs of light which are moons of Jupiter.

An enlarged crop of the 1st composite image, saturation adjusted in Photoshop to show detail.