End of Semester Highlights

It's nearing the end of the semester and I'm very glad to see that several people have taken the opportunity to use the wonderful telescopes and imagers available to the class through Tzec Maun. I wanted to highlight some of the images here on the front page of LPCA9 as they are truly beautiful images. There are many more amazing images taken by the students of the Las Positas Astronomy 9 class in the image gallery. I hope you'll stop by and enjoy what the students have done.

M104 by Kristyn

GSC 505421 by Simone

M8 by Michael

NGC 4725 by Ron

First Experience with Meade DSI

Anxious to get started imaging for the semester, I decided to try out the Meade DSI recently, (Friday 2/2/07). The weather had not been great for imaging recently, and Friday was noexception, but at least it wasn't raining. In between wispy clouds I could see the moon and stars, so I decided, what the heck... it was worth a try. I wasn't out to capture world class images anyway. I just wanted to become familiar with the DSI. I also thought it would be interesting to compare the Meade DSI to the Orion Starshoot... and as long as I was checking things out, I figured I would see how well Nebulosity (the image capturing program I use) works with the DSI. Following are my results from the evening.

Several people were asking what kind of equipment would be suitable to get into astro imaging, so I thought I would relate my experience in starting.  As you will see, all of my equipment is from Orion.  Let me stress up front that I have no connection to Orion, nor do I mean to imply that Orion is the only or best choice.  That is simply the direction I went, and so far it has worked out well for me.  So this is how I went about it...

If anyone was feeling overwhelmed last Wednesday night, take heart.  Although astroimaging can be very involved, getting your first few pictures you can be proud of doesn't have to be overly difficult.  The main  thing is to have fun with it.  As you progress and become comfortable with the basics, you can get into the more technical and detailed stuff if you want to.

  In my case I had virtually no experience with a telescope before last  March, and I had absolutely no experience with imaging.   But last spring I bought a telescope and the Orion Starshoot Deep Space Imager, (which is very similar to the Meade DSI we are using in class).  Being excited to try out both the telescope and imager, I headed out with barely any idea of what I was doing.   I put the telescope up in my front yard and roughly aligned it with Polaris.  Saturn was in the sky, so I swung the telescope around to find it.  It took a little effort to find it with the telescope, but when I did, and I sayw the rings of Saturn, I was in awe.  This was totally unbelievable.  Anxious to try imaging, I took the eyepiece out of the telescope and put the camera in its place.   I opened the 'quick start guide' that came with the camera and began following it step by step.  Sometimes I wasn't too sure what I was doing, but I just followed the instructions as best I could.  It wasn't always straight forward, and I wasn't sure I would get any kind of picture at all.  To my incredible surprise though, even with almost no knowledge of what I was doing,  this was my very first image...