Lunar imaging with a new camera
It's lunar photography tonight, with an 83% waxing moon. I'm out with the 8" Newtonian, 800mm FL at f/4 and the ZWO ASI715MC color camera. This is my first experience with the 715, so far so good, considering average atmospheric seeing--lot of turbulence up there. And these two are just single unstacked shots. I have a pile of SER files to process in AutoStakkert.
The Newt with the new ZWO 715:
Posted December 22, 2023
Sony A7s Test with a Waxing Moon
There's a beautiful moon out there this evening! This is from my first set of test shots with my Sony A7s on the 1350mm f/9 Astro-Tech AT6RC.
[Update: I shot this with the Sony A7S on the Astro-Tech AT6RC 1350mm f/9 scope while preparing for the total lunar eclipse May 15-16th, 2022. Unfortunately, the clouds moved in a day after taking this and didn't leave until after the eclipse. So I missed the main event, but did get some pretty nice test shots. This is a single exposure, f/9, 1/60 sec at ISO 400 with the Sony Full-frame A7S]. Here we are around 9:15 pm, this time with the Celestron UHC/LPR Filter:
Here's the AT6RC scope:
Posted May 13, 2022
Our moon
There's a beautiful moon out there tonight! Nikon D750, AstroTech AT6RC 1350mm f/9, 1/2500 sec exposure.
Posted June 23, 2021
Nearly Full Moon Rising
Our moon is especially beautiful and bright tonight. Notes: AstroTech 6" Ritchey–Chrétien f/9 1350mm, Nikon D750 32 x 1/500 sec, ISO 3200, stacked in AutoStakkert 3.0.14.
What's cool, is Jupiter is just up along the ecliptic from the moon, and I swung the same setup there and captured a very dim shot of our system's largest planet along with three moons, Europa, Io, and Ganymede.
Another one from earlier this evening, a plane flying through while I was setting the focus on the Nikon/AstroTech.
Posted July 16, 2019
Lunar Photography
There’s a beautiful moon out tonight. I shot this with the Nikon D750 + AstroTech AT6RC 1350mm f/9. A nearly full moon always makes deep sky astrophotography difficult, but that’s when you pair a full frame DSLR with a 6" Ritchey-Chrétien. The rest of the sky can wait for the new moon.
Posted April 17, 2019
Total Lunar Eclipse 2019
A terrible night for a total lunar eclipse--it's freakin' cold (5°F / -15C) and cloudy, but here's a sequence going into the total.
It's very cloudy out there tonight, but I did manage to capture the lunar eclipse in progress. Not a great shot, but was through the cloud layer.
Posted January 21, 2019
Astro Session - February 27, 2018
Our moon is looking especially beautiful tonight, even if it's making it difficult to do some deep space imaging. This is a single frame with the William Optics GT81 refractor and Atik 414EX CCD camera and a Celestron UHC/LPR filter that's been sitting in its box for a couple years--so I thought I'd give it a try. I also added a subtle RGB color layer from a few months back.
