cvoid - big giant television

astronomy

telescopes

currently, most of my observing is done with a 10" orion reflector on a dobsonian mount. for astrophotography, and also more portable observing, i've been using a meade etx-90 on an equatorial mount. my eyepiece collection consists of an assortment of plossl eyepieces, my current favourite being a parks optical 32mm.

cameras

for astrophotography, i've been playing around with a lot of different things. a lot of my shots are done with a canon powershot a-80 in long exposure mode. it works, but isn't the greatest. i was recently given a meade deep space imager that i haven't had a chance to use due to weather conditions and the typical time constraints we all seem to face these days. when the weather clears up i'll start playing with it outside. i've also taken a few shots with a canon t90 35mm camera that was given to me by my father. while film astrophotography is fun, i don't have the patience for the development process and got irritated with the results rather quickly.

finished images

experiments in stacking and post-processing

various "finished" images that have been manipulated in some way. either they are stacks of multiple images, or images that have been post-processed in an attempt to bring out more detail. as you can tell, i am both a beginning astrophotographer and a beginning image processor. hopefully with some experience, my imaging techniques will improve.

jupiter with four moons jupiter with two moons mizar and alcor in ursa major sagittarius vega

lunar photography

digital camera using eyepiece projection

various shots of the lunar surface taken with a canon powershot a80 camera mounted to a meade etx-90 maksutov-cassegrain telescope. the camera was attached using a scopetronix universal camera adapter.

planetary photography

jupiter

some shots of jupiter taken using the meade etx-90 and scopetronix universal camera adapter. these shots didn't turn out very well, but you can see a few of jupiter's moons in some of them.

widefield astrophotography

analog

some 35mm shots taken with canon t-90 and canon f-1 cameras on kodak elite chrome 200 color transparency film. they were then digitally scanned, which caused some loss in resolution. i don't have access to a slide scanner, so i had to have them commercially scanned which is less than ideal due to the nature of the pictures.

wide field astrophotography

digital

various wide field photographs taken with a canon powershot a-80 in long exposure mode. the camera was placed on a tripod, and the exposure timer was set to allow the tripod to settle before the exposure was made. i was actually suprised at how well these turned out.