Amateur Astronomer

Best pictures of Jupiter ever

In my little 4 1/2″ and 8″ telescopes, I can see anywhere from three to five stripes on Jupiter on a good night.  A friend said he saw the big red spot when he was over the other night, but either he has way better vision than I do or he was full of it.  Either way, nothing I could ever see from my telescopes would even come close to what the 8.2 meter telescope in Chile was able to capture!  I find it amazing that they could get a picture like this, but that the resolution is high enough that can see objects as small as 180 miles across.  It’s hard for me to imagine 180 miles as being ‘high resolution’, but I guess when you’re several light-minutes from the object you’re observing, that really is a sharp image.

Beehive Cluster by Bradford

I’ve put my personal attempts at astrophotography on hold for a while. My new telescope uses .965″ eyepieces, meaning the adapter I have for the Canon Rebel XTI won’t work. But I’m still playing with some of the online observatories I found last month. I’ve been a little surprised by the Bradford Robotic Telescope; I was under the impression that they had such a big backlog that it could take up to 6 months to get a picture, but I’ve gotten my first two in under a month. The first, a picture of the Orion Nebula, was overexposed to the point of being useless. I figure it was probably taken close to sunset given the time of year and low altitude of Orion in the sky right now. I’ve requested another picture with a shorter exposure time, but I’m figuring it’ll run into similar problems.

On the other hand, my second request turned out pretty well. It’s also overexposed, but not to same degree. You can take a look at it here. There’s a hair or a scratch on the lens which would probably annoy the heck out of me if I was actually paying for this. I’m giving this photo another try with a shorter exposure time and a neutral filter, so I’ll hope for the best and post it in the WPG2 folder when it comes in. Some time in May.

That was quick: Harvard Micro-Observatory

I’d played with the Harvard Micro-Observatory Guest Observer Portal yesterday, but I didn’t realize that it’d send me my own picture overnight. True, there’s only a few real choices, but that’s still more than enough to see what the MO is capable of. I chose to get a picture of the Hercules Cluster, something I can’t really see from my backyard. The picture came in this afternoon and was surprisingly clear. I could do more with it if I used their FITS software, but I’ve got more than enough software already installed on my system. I’ve place the picture in my gallery, but something you might notice fairly quickly is that I’m still working on getting the Gallery2 software set up just the way I want it. In any case, at least I didn’t hose the whole site in the process of getting it set up … this time.

Wired: Four Online Telescopes

It’s funny how when you get interested in something it just starts popping up in your life; at least that seems to be how my life works. So I wasn’t all that surprised that once I got interested in astronomy and astrophotography, I suddenly started seeing more astronomy articles pop up. One of the first ones I’m really excited about its a Wired article about four online telescopes you can use to take your own pictures of the night sky.

I’ve signed up for an account on the Bradford Robotic Telescope, since it has the advantage of being free and being in color. The disadvantage is that you have to wait an indeterminant amount of time for your picture to be taken and sent to you. In todays “give it to me now” internet culture, that may be too much for some people to handle, but given it’s just a hobby, I’m willing to wait a little while. I’m sure the Wired article has made the wait a little longer than it was before, but I can live with that. I’ve put in a request for pictures of the Great Orion Nebula (M42) and the Beehive Cluster (M44) since those are things I can see here and would like to compare what can be seen in the Canary Islands to what I can see in my backyard.

I looked at the other three sites, and for now I’m going to experiment with the Bradford project and leave the others alone. I’m tempted by Slooh, but I’d rather save the $100 annual fee towards my own telescope instead. Given that my budget for a first telescope isn’t too much more than that, it’s probably a good idea.

Are there any other free astrophotography resources?