First Light for Phil Light

Criticism welcome but please be gentle, I’m an astronomy/astrophotogr​aphy virgin.

Except for a “toy” one a few decades ago, I’ve never even looked through a telescope before, let alone polar aligned it and attached a camera to it. So, after receiving all these top-notch components over the past month or so, it was finally all here and ready to point to the sky. So I packed it all up, went out to the darkest place I could find (by myself), polar aligned it (first time ever doing that) and took my first real look ever through a telescope. OMG! So then of course I HAD to put my camera on it. This is one of the first shots I took. It’s a single, uncropped image that I really didn’t do much to other than some very minor tweaks and reducing the size.

Finding objects in the sky is pretty complicated but it turns out I’m a natural. If my calculations are correct, this is Mars.

IMAGE LINK: http://s177.photobucke​t.com …6-Apr-2016%20Sml.jpg.html

Great your excited and trying your hand out. However this is the moon shot, not Mars. What kind of scope did you get ?

Phil Light wrote in post #17974707
Criticism welcome but please be gentle, I’m an astronomy/astrophotogr​aphy virgin.


Finding objects in the sky is pretty complicated but it turns out I’m a natural. If my calculations are correct, this is Mars.

IMAGE LINK: http://s177.photobucke​t.com …6-Apr-2016%20Sml.jpg.html

Congratulations. I have some good news and some bad news.

First the bad news: This is horrible picture of mars. It doesn't look anything like it.

Now the good news: This bears a striking resemblance to our Moon. Good job on that!!!

Mars is a tough object right now. It's "angular" size (from edge to edge) is a mere 14 arc-seconds (vs. the moon which is roughly 30 arc-minutes). That make the moon appear to be nearly 129x larger. It's difficult to resolve detail on such a tiny thing. A telescope's ability to resolve fine detail is expressed as Dawes' Limit or the Rayleigh Criterion (the larger the aperture, the easier it is to resolve fine detail.)

Mars will reach "opposition" on May 22 (meaning that's the point where Earth passes between the Sun and Mars and that makes Mars the closest it will be for the year.) On that day Mars will appear to have an angular diameter of 18 arc-seconds (that's quite a bit bigger than 14 arc-seconds... but still tiny.)

When imaging a planet, it's easiest to shoot about a minute's worth of video and then use a program such as Registax to find the best frames and combine them. The video is typically shot at low resolution and a higher frame rate. My Canon 60Da camera has a mode where it can drop the video down to a 640x480 "crop frame" mode that shoots 60 frames per second.

If you've seen the images of Jupiter that have been posted... Jupiter is currently about 44 arc-seconds in diameter vs. Mars at 14 arc-seconds. That makes Mars only about 1/3rd the diameter (even though it's much much closer.)

It's tough to resolve any fine detail on Mars without a telescope with a wide aperture and a really long focal length.

Celestron wrote in post #17974873
Great your excited and trying your hand out. However this is the moon shot, not Mars. What kind of scope did you get ?

Ok, busted!

Here are the major components I ended up with: Celestron CGEM DX Mount, Celestron 8 Inch EdgeHD Scope, QHY PoleMaster, Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider, Celestron Off-Axis Guider and Canon 6D DSLR. I haven't connected the autoguider yet. Baby steps.

TCampbell wrote in post #17974930
Congratulations. I have some good news and some bad news.

First the bad news: This is horrible picture of mars. It doesn't look anything like it.

It's funny you mentioned Jupiter. That's the only other thing I really messed around with last night. Last night was the first time I've ever seen it through a telescope. And I've never seen Jupiter's moons through a scope. I was blown away! I realize there is nothing technically good about this image, it's just a single image straight out of the camera - except for a slight crop. I'm looking forward to becoming familiar with the best methods and techniques for shooting and stacking images, but for now, even THIS excites me:

IMAGE LINK: http://s177.photobucke​t.com …23h25m26s741ms_​1.jpg.html

Gosh when you went all out you do it well !! Great scope, take your time and learn it well , learn constellations well, learn about DSOs' ( deep space objects) . You are starting a trip down a great road of astronomy . Never be afraid to ask anything you need help with. Clear Skies , Dark Skies !!

Celestron wrote in post #17975429
Gosh when you went all out you do it well !! Great scope, take your time and learn it well , learn constellations well, learn about DSOs' ( deep space objects) . You are starting a trip down a great road of astronomy . Never be afraid to ask anything you need help with. Clear Skies , Dark Skies !!

Thank you! I've been getting some great advice around here and I greatly appreciate it. I hope that one of these days I'll be in a position to pay it forward.