Cresent Moon

Here are some moon pictures taken a number of mornings ago right as the sun was rising. I darkened the photo background with Photoshop.

Viewing the Moon - Louisville, Kentucky

Here are some images of the moon taken on April 4, 2009 to celebrate Galileo Galilei viewing the sky with a telescope back in 1609. We were able to view the planet Saturn as well but the rings appeared as a straight line. Also the image was so small even with the 15 mm eyepiece that I did not try and take a picture through the lens.

I took these pictures through the 32 mm eyepiece with a Kodak 4 mega pixel camera. There are a lot of street lights so using the telescope in the yard is challenging. These pictures were taken from Louisville, Kentucky.

100 Hours of Astronomy - Louisville, Kentucky

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy and to celebrate that on April 4, 2009 telescopes from around the world will point toward the planet Saturn. This event is called 100 Hours of Astronomy to honor astronomer Galileo Galilei. Thanks to an e-mail that reminded me of this event from this NASA site

Here is a picture I took of the moon yesterday while pruning grapes.

Around the Louisville, Kentucky area there are several events going on. The Louisville Astronomy Society will host an event April 3, 2009 at 8 PM Urban Astronomy Center. Here is their announcement from their website:
"The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the heavens in 1609. This program will highlight what Galileo accomplished, what he didn’t accomplish, and how research that is going on right here in Louisville is helping to shed more light on Galileo’s talents as an observational astronomer and telescope maker. Speaker is Professor Chris Graney
The LAS Urban Astronomy Center is located in the Root Cellar Building at the back of E.P.“Tom” Sawyer State Park on Freys Hill Road in Louisville, Kentucky. Take the second park entrance off of Freys Hill Road and go to the end of the road. Clear Skies!"

The University of Louisville's Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium will be celebrating its 47th birthday from 11 AM till 1 PM Saturday, April 4, 2009. Weather permitting, solar viewing will take place to celebrate 100 Hours of Observing. Admission is $5 and includes Skies Over Louisville and a telescope workshop. See their website for more information.

I will get my telescope out as well this weekend and try to catch a glimpse of Saturn and the moon.

Venus

Here is a picture of a rather bright Venus in the western sky. I tried to get a picture of the cresent moon but it went down.

Tomorrow I will try to get some pictures of the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury after sunset.

More Moon Pictures

Here are some more pictures my cousin sent me he took of the moon through the telescope located in Memphis, Indiana.

Moon Picture

Here is a picture my cousin took last month using is camera pointed through a telescope viewing lens. Not too bad for using that method.

Blurry Picture of Jupiter with Handheld Camera

Here is my attempt to take a picture of the planet Jupiter with a camera pointing through an eyepiece in the telescope.

I did not have a tripod and was in a hurry since we were ready to put the equipment away.

Since I have done stuff like this with the microscope I am sure this can be done with the telescope. Just need patience.

Moon Pictures (continued)

More photos continuing in yesterday's topic. Lots of craters and greyish-white images.

Pictures of the Moon

Continuing with yesterday's topic on telescope pictures. Here are some images of the moon that
were processed with RegiStax software. The camera highest resolution is 640x480.

The temperature was in the upper 60s to low 70s Fahrenheit. There was some shimmer in the atmosphere when looking at the moon.

Planet Jupiter

My cousin Kenny and I took the telescope out in a yard in Indiana and used a CCD camera to take pictures of the moon and Jupiter. Jupiter was in opposition this week and so it was bright for viewing.

Unfortunately, I have yet to master the imager to get a good picture of a planet. The view in the telescope was excellent with the layer lines on the planet very visible. We did not see a spot but we only looked at for 45 minutes. Here are the pictures and one with the red filter some of the layer lines are visible. The other shows 3 moons around Jupiter which is over exposed.

More Telescope Images

More images from the telescope. The first is an open sky shot where there are no stars and lots of noise. The moon shots are nice with craters showing up in these images. It was too cold last night or this morning for me to go out and take pictures. The thermometer is showing 6.8 F or -14 C.

More Images From the Telescope

The telescope was not cold when the pictures were taken so I think the images shimmered.

More Moon Pictures From a Cold Winter Night

Very bright moon with the temperature at 12 degrees Fahrenheit. No wind this time so that was a plus. Tried to get the pictures as fast as possible so I did not try to get the images lighter like the moon.

Moon Pictures

The nice thing about winter is really clear skies appear and the moon, planet, and stars seem exceptionally clear. The BAD thing about winter is it is REALLY COLD OUTSIDE!!! So I go out about 6-7 PM and see the moon with the planet Mars practically right next to it in the sky. Wow, this is a great opportunity to move the telescope out to look at it. So I do and it looks great except the telescope is about 40 degrees warmer than outside air so the images seem to shimmer. I decide well I will go run some errands and leave the telescope in the garage to cool off. Before I do that I set up the tripod with a Kodak digital camera with 3x zoom and 4 mega pixels and take a the picture with the moon and planet Mars labeled below. The moon seems to have saturated the image. Next time I will try the auto setting with a timer to take the shot.


Early morning I take the telescope outside and it is 12 degrees Fahrenheit with some wind at times. I get had to get the image capture software installed earlier and that took a while. After getting outside the CCD camera shows a big white blurry image so it is getting saturated. It takes some time but I finally get the image below which almost looks like a negative of what I was looking at. If you look on this blog, I posted some pictures I took at one time and that was about the last time I used the camera and telescope together successfully. I tried a number of times after that to image planets but the moon is about all I seem to get an image of.
Tonight I tried to capture Mars since it was so close to the moon but no luck.
The cold finally drove me indoors and my feet are in front of the heater now trying to get warmed up.

The two large moon pictures have been processed out of about 10 to 50 images I captured. The camera captured two sets of moon images. One for about 15 seconds and the other for about 50 seconds. The first was too dark or out of focus to get any good pictures.

Moon Pictures

I was able to go out and get some pictures of the moon tonight. The temperature is much warmer than when I was out last collecting pictures. There was quite a bit more light and the camera seemed saturated at times.

Processed Moon Image from Last Night

Here is my first processed image from RegiStax. It is a neat program and I picked out 8 images and stacked them.

Moon Picture

I have taken my first image with the NexImage camera attached to a Meade telescope. The quality is poor due to several factors: 1) cloudy skies made the moon hazy, 2) I did not read the manual for the NexImage so I was muddling through the program while capturing images, 3) I need to read the manual for the image processing program as well. After capturing the images, I will probably upgrade to a faster computer to grab images. Also after finding the manual on the CD, I found that I was not using the maximum resolution to capture images. Also my exposure was not correctly set.