Limerick Astronomy Club

Hi Guys'n gals,
Given we had a good moon in the sky, I turned the 20" obsession on it earlier this week and at the impromptu observing session we had last night at Roys place, thanks Roy for the site, it was a great night, got home at 3.15am , tired but happy. !!

Anyway, I found that I cannot reach focus with the Canon using "prime focus" or "eyepiece projection", so I have to use "afocal" where I use the cameras lens and the scopes eyepiece. I know I can cut the truss poles, but am not going down that road for now. Focusing was done by eye, through the cameras finder. I used the Canons standard lens and a 31mm T5 nagler eyepeice.

This one is of the southern polar region, its a single frame (no registax) from the camera, with levels adjusted in photoshop.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

This is slightly further up north
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

Shows several seas on the Moon including the Appenine mountains, again a single frame
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

Shows Tycho during an almost full Moon, note the splatter rays to the top and left. This came out alot better then I thought it would and are far more obvious then they would be through thr 12" scope I have.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/5540936394/

First quarter, slight vignetting is due to me not having the camera centered over the eyepiece.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/5540906752/

This one shows the western edge of the ocean of storms, including Schroters Valley, Aristarchus and Kepler, 12 images were stacked for this shot.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

A more close in view of Aristarchus, visually through the eyepiece, you could clearly see the steps in Aristarchus's crater with a peak in the center,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

Next time, I hope to get enough good images to stack them in registax,focusing was very easy as you can imagine the moon is extremely bright through the scope/camera combination. Also, the view through the eyepiece is far sharper then any image here, but the seeing that night was not the best.

BTW, thanks Frank for the loan of the camera, I'm getting my batteries sorted out!

BTW again, you were right Roy, it is afocal, the 3 different types names are always muddled in me head!

Dave,
you're gonna get some cool shots with
that set up!!

It does have some serious potential, I'm happily surprised how well the afocal method work here, I can get most of the Moon or zoom in using the camera lens to get a specific area. The 31mm is just shy of getting a full moon image, so maybe something like a 35-40 mm eyepeice will do it.
As for DSO's, thats another story, the making or breaking of that will all come down to the tracking.

Savage images Dave

Pity you didn't get P3 Leo
transiting the moon....
that would've been a beauty...

Cheers Roy

Ya, the trackings gonna gave to be good
BUT lots of shots stacked will make up for
it to some degree due to the size of the scope.
The shots guysvget from the big obsessions
on the obsession site are class.
I've been tinkering with the idea of making a bracket like that for the hd cam corder,
for transits n the like.

Lads,
As cool as the transit is, I think actually seeing it is better then imaging it, a webcam would struggle to see a mag 6 or 7 star and as soon as the bright side of the moon gets anywhere near it, it would be quiet difficult, a camcorder would be better, then again faintish stars might be an issue.

Agreed, but Im curious none the less to
see how HD the HD is through the eyepiece.
As a regular camera the 1080 HD is amazing
especially when its played back to a HD tv
with a hdmi connection (or burned to blue ray)
disc