To make this observatory project to become a reality, I’ve got a lot of planning to do! Part of that is figuring out what it takes to set up at the remote site and how to make that as easy as possible, and I’ve already made several trips out. Here are some of the first night sky images I’ve captured on those trips, as well as a few little projects that will make visiting easier.
Continue reading Building an Observatory, Episode II: First Light From the Land
After backpacking out of the Olympic Mountains, we made our way south to our final stop in the Pacific Northwest, Mount Saint Helens. My favorite shot of the trip almost got us stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Continue reading Summer 2019 Road Trip to the Pacific Northwest, Part IV
After a long journey from Albuquerque to Olympic National Park, I backpacked some of my camera gear miles into the mountains. What happened next was incredible.
Continue reading Summer 2019 Road Trip to the Pacific Northwest, Part III
Back in late July/early August, my family and I took our first-ever camping/backpacking road trip. We drove a total of 3700 miles, from Albuquerque, NM to Port Townsend, WA and back in 18 days. Would the weather cooperate?
Continue reading Summer 2019 Road Trip to the Pacific Northwest, Part II
Back in late July/early August, my family and I took our first-ever camping/backpacking road trip. We drove a total of 3700 miles, from Albuquerque, NM to Port Townsend, WA and back in 18 days. Of course, I wanted to take some space pictures, too! Would the weather cooperate?
Continue reading Summer 2019 Road Trip to the Pacific Northwest, Part I
I’ve described at length many of the techniques I use to shoot nightscapes. In this tutorial series, I’d like to keep things much shorter and pick apart some of my photos with minimal step-by-step instructions. The shot we’ll be going over this time was taken at 11,000 feet in Carson National Forest.
Continue reading Anatomy of a Nightscape, Episode IV: Tracked Sky, Stacked Foreground
A couple of months ago, I started looking around for land to serve as a remote observatory site. I’m excited to say that today, we’ve closed on a piece of land where we’ll build Face of the Deep Observatory! Here’s how it all went down.
Continue reading Building an Observatory, Episode I: Land Secured!
The Celestron C11 Starbright SCT (pre-XLT coatings), weighing nearly 30 lbs and large enough to hold a basketball inside it, is a large telescope. With a native focal length of 2800mm and 280mm (11 inches) of aperture (F/10), it’s a long, slow scope and requires a substantial mount. Its field of view is too narrow for a supermoon to fit inside an APS-C sized sensor, even when reduced to F/6.3 (1760mm-equivalent), so it’s best-suited for shooting globular clusters, galaxies further than Andromeda, and planetary imaging. Below is a summary of tests I’ve performed on this telescope in conjunction with Celestron’s F/6.3 Reducer Corrector.
The following 100%-crop mosaic was made with a Canon EOS70D. No filters were used for this test, although it’s possible to attach 2-inch filters using a Blue Fireball SCT Eyepiece Holder with any 2-inch nosepiece adapter threaded for filters, or in conjunction with the Orion Thin Off-Axis Guider.
Figure 1: Single exposure of Messier 13 taken with a Canon EOS 70D (unmodified), 120 seconds, ISO 400. Several dozen exposures, including this one, were stacked to create the image of the Great Cluster in Hercules in Figure 3 below.
Some color fringing is present, but it isn’t anything that can’t be dealt with in post. What’s disappointing is that the corners and edges exhibit elongation of the stars, so it appears that the field curvature native to the telescope itself is not well-corrected throughout the entire APS-C frame.
Below is a contoured image created from flats produced by a Canon EOS 70D.
Figure 2: Vignetting profile for the Canon EOS 70D.
In the extreme corners and edges, more than 50% of light gathered in the center is lost. The end result is that these extreme edges must be cropped out in most final versions of processed images. The odd shape of the contour in the upper left is caused by the prism of the Orion TOAG just barely sticking into the path of light reaching the 70D’s sensor, between it and the Reducer/Corrector, so this is not a deficiency of the Reducer/Corrector.
All telescopes of Schmidt-Cassegrain design project a curved field of sharp focus, so a field flattener must be used to get decent image quality when using larger sensors. The Celestron F/6.3 Reducer/Corrector provides some level of flattening, but not all the way to the edge of an APS-C sensor. Micro Four Thirds sensors will fare much better where flat fields are concerned. This corrector also may be somewhat soft, although it’s hard to tell if the softness in my images is coming from the corrector, bad seeing, or bad focus (I did use a Bahtinov mask). Perhaps a comparison with either of the available Starizon SCT Correctors is warranted.
Figure 3: Messier 13, taken with a Canon EOS 70D.
Figure 4: Messier 101, taken with a Canon EOS 60Da.
Figure 5:Â Messier 81, taken with a Canon EOS 60Da.
Over the past year, my career path changed, and so did my budget for gear, so I stopped buying it. What might seem like a downside for my toys turned into an upside for my processing skills. Here’s what I learned in a year.
Continue reading Processing Skills: What Difference Does A Year Make?
Awhile back, I converted a NexStar 11 GPS OTA to forkless with the intention of using it for long-exposure deep sky astro-photos. It’s been a long road, but things are starting to work out.
