Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

The first rule of astronomy.

New kit = never ending cloud cover

Yup.

Clouds for the next 7 nights.

++ no one’s getting fired for buying Meade.

Looks like it could be clear skies tonight...finally.

And maybe more cannibal CMEs!

Was super clear up in Leeds last night, spent 4 hours shivering in a field to get this.
1477 1.3 second exposures, untracked and then stacked in Siril. Done on my Sony a7 and a 40yr old Canon 135mm FD lens.

Pretty damn chuffed for my first proper go at stacking and using Siril.

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How do you do that untracked?

Shoot 50 shots, then re-centre the camera back onto it. Bit laborious but does work.

Really nice! Always impressed when you can pick out the dust lanes

Cheers man, was totally shocked when siril popped this out after about 6 hours of it processing. Surprised myself 😂

Argh, so Clear Outside is wrong. Supposed to be completely clear skies outside and it's 80% covered in thick clouds. More clouds all the way across the horizon.

Edit. It cleared up a bit later. Couldn't get the Nexstar system to align, tried 4 or 5 times.

However, I managed to find Saturn using Stellarium.

Wow. It was tiny, really tiny, but could clearly see it was Saturn.

That is fantastic, great work!

This is glorious!
I'm looking for a suitable sharp and bright lens for my L mount S5ii, not that much choice, though I could get an adapter for a manual focus lens.

My andromeda effort from a few weeks ago:

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Ta very much!
Yeah I'd have a look for a Manual focus with an adapter, will save you a fortune and if you get a nice clean example they will quite often outperform modern lenses. I use quite a few Canon FD lenses as well as some Minolta AF Dynax primes and they tend to be super sharp.

My 70-300mm is fantastic, but it has some zoom creep, and not very bright. Fly by wire focusing with it is challenging when it’s dark outside.

Found this in the loft, need to grab an adapter and see whether it’s any good!

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Yeah I'd give it whirl, a quick look at reviews seem to point out they are pretty damn sharp but suffer from a bit of aberration. Probably nothing that can't be fixed in post tho.

Ooof! Wow!

Royal Observatory Greenwich’s annual competition in The Guardian, some impressive photos:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2024/sep/13/astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-2024-winners-finalists

Some absolute stunners in there. Unbelievable skill and preparation too.

Beaut. Didn’t realise you could grab so much with such short exposures!

Well I have discovered that you cannot just book a dark sky area visit and hope for clear nights.

I barely had 30 minutes for the telescope to enjoy it's first light, there was too much cloud and on one occasion I had to quickly pull it back in between downpours.

I still managed to get ~150 x 10 second exposures in of Andromeda... but lolz, the sheer number of those that are not usable due to small clouds coming in and obscuring things.

It wasn't a wasted venture though, I had some lovely rainy walks in Pembrokeshire during the day, a yurt with a log fire in the evening, and I did learn enough about how to control things, set it up, operate things.

What I need though, is to be far more reactive, to track sky conditions in advance, and have things at hand to get out of London and take advantage of the clear skies when they come.

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That's a tidy looking piece of kit.

What a fabulously engineered bit of kit that is. Enjoy.

Love. It.