Astrophotography

Friday, January 21st, 2011

Over the past year I’ve developed more of an interest in astronomy. I’ve also been interested in it but more so recently; perhaps because now I can afford some equipment for it.

Shortly before Christmas I bought myself a telescope, a Celestron Astromaster 130. It is a 130mm reflecting telescope. This has given me far better views of various objects than I have ever been able to achieve with the naked eye or binoculars. I would really like a bigger telescope now, but that would have to wait for a while I think.

I’ve been trying to take some photographs of planets and starts as well, this has proved to be quite difficult. I haven’t got a lot of the equipment necessary. I’ve been using a Samsung PL65 compact digital camera. It has a night mode that allows up to 16 second exposures but the images can only be saved as jpegs and there seems to be a lot of noise on them.

Below are some images of my attempts though. Some are attempts to take photos through the telescope, others are just the camera on a tripod. The descriptions give more details on each photo.

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