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                        Photography of heavenly bodies

[The Kids Telescope] [1] [2] Last month The Kids received a telescope from
their father. I helped The Kids to set it up (read: I put it together) and
use it to view the moon and what I think was Jupiter. It's too nice to let
them keep it in their room, so it currently lives in our room.

Late Sunday night, I was talking with my friend Ken D, who just received his
Ph.D. in physics from FAU (Florida Atlantic University) [3] and currently
teaches an astronomy class and he pointed out that the bright star south west
of the moon was most likely Saturn, so when I got home, I decided to break
out the telescope and do a bit of viewing.

Or rather, an attempt at stellar photography. Or would that be, planetary
photography?

Anyway, I set up the telescope (which has a computerized controller which
makes fine adjustments quite nice) and then attempted to use my digital
camera to take pictures, first of the moon.

[Moooooooooon!] [4] [5] Considering I have no camera mount for the telescope,
I think I managed to get some decent photographs of the moon through the
telescope. Not an easy task to line up the camera optics with the telescope
optics and take a picture without the image becoming hopelessly blurry. Even
with a tripod it was difficult since the moon was so high up that the camera
would just barely reach the eyepiece if I tipped the camera tripod up on two
feet—in retrospect, I should have lowered the telescope, but hey, it was a
learning experience.

I spent so much time with the moon that by the time I got around to Saturn it
was just above a strand of trees and setting fast. At least, I think it was
Saturn—it was a planet (since I could make out a distinct disk) but the rings
were very hard to see, if in fact they were rings and not a form of spherical
abberation due to the telescope optics. Twice I moved the telescope and
lowered it in a vain attempt to get a picture of Saturn, but to no avail—it
had set behind the trees and the one shot I did get was a light blob, not
worth saving.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/04/05/thumb.telescope.jpg
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/04/05/telescope.jpg
[3] http://www.fau.edu/
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/04/05/thumb.moon.jpg
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/04/05/moon.jpg

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