It seemed to make sense to begin collecting my astrophotographs into a single gallery for viewing. It is not a very large gallery at this point, but it will grow as I continue to take new images and gain more experience. You can see the gallery here.
Category Archives: Astronomy
My First Astro Imaging Session
Finally. I’d been waiting for weeks for an evening that would provide decent enough conditions for me to attempt my first imaging session with my new telescope, camera, and mount. Between clouds and smoke from forest fires, I’d been stymied for quite some time, but last Thursday evening finally presented clear skies and a little dark time before the moon rose so I could set everything up and try some long-exposure imaging of deep sky objects.
William Optics UniGuide Scope with ZWO ASI290mm Mini Guide Camera
In my quest to put together a decent starter package for doing deep sky imaging, I purchased a William Optics UniGuide 50mm guide scope and a ZWO ASI290mm mini guide camera to use for guiding my main telescope during imaging. Both appear to be fine pieces of equipment, but when I did some bench testing I discovered that in order to bring images to focus in the ASI290mm mini guide camera, it had to be positioned in the guide scope such that it was just barely inserted. Some additional length in the guide scope would be a good thing.
Continue readingComet Neowise and a New Chapter
Well, comet Neowise has come and (pretty-much) gone, but it put on an impressive display while it lasted. I managed to get out my camera one evening and take a few pictures, including this one:
12V Rechargeable Lithium Ion Battery Pack for my NexStar 6SE
I’ve been running my NexStar 6SE scope in the field using an old 12V 7-Ah gel cell battery for awhile now, but it’s kinda heavy and has to sit on the ground, meaning I have to pay attention to not getting the power cord wrapped around the mount as I slew the telescope. I really wanted to find something that was light enough to attach to the arm of the mount itself but still had enough power in it to run the scope for at least an evening. Surfing some of the message boards, I found several reports of people using battery packs from TalentCell. The message board posts claimed up to several nights of observing with their battery packs. It sounded like I had found the answer.
Continue readingControlling Your Celestron NexStar with a Laptop or Tablet Part 3
Wifi Connections Between Scope and Laptop
So, this installment of the series didn’t work out quite like I expected. While, in theory, everything I describe below ought to work, I found problems maintaining the wifi connectivity between the NexStar mount and my laptop. Thus, all I can say is give it a whirl if you want, but I make no guarantees. I’m leaving the instructions up here in case you feel the need to give it a try. If you really want to use your laptop to control your NexStar scope, wired is probably best (although I’ve had some success with bluetooth, too, which I’ll cover in another installment).
In Part 2 of this series we went over the basic setup for connecting your NexStar to a laptop using a wired connection. It works great, but cables between your telescope and laptop can be a real nuisance, because you have to start worrying about the cables wrapping around the telescope as it slews in azimuth (although turning “Cord Wrap” on in the hand controller can mitigate that). In general, cables in the dark seem to me like a recipe for disaster. So in this installment, we’re going to cover connections between telescope and laptop using Wifi. (The next installment of this series will cover using a smartphone or tablet instead of a laptop to connect with the NexStar via wifi.)
Continue readingControlling Your Celestron NexStar with a Laptop or Tablet Part 2
Wired Connections Between Scope and Laptop
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some of the reasons why you might want to use your laptop or tablet to control your NexStar, and went over some of the options for how you can accomplish that. In this part of the series we’ll get a laptop set up to control your NexStar using the Stellarium software package through a wired connection between the scope and the laptop. With Stellarium, you’ll be able to point and click to easily slew your scope to any object you’d like. Stellarium also is capable of showing a ton of information about that object. It also provides a very pleasing and easy-to-use interface. We’ll go through the process from start to finish. Even if you decide to use a different connection type (WiFi or Bluetooth), the instructions for Stellarium will remain pretty-much the same.
The fundamental requirement for controlling your NexStar with a computer of some sort is, of course, establishing communications between the two. As far as I know, a wired connection can only be done between a computer with a serial port or a USB port and the scope–tablets are not supported for wired connections (but let me know in the comments below if you know of a way).
Continue readingControlling your Celestron NexStar with a Laptop or Tablet Part 1
Links to other parts in this series:
Introduction and Overview
Since I purchased my Celestron NexStar 6SE a few years ago, I’ve enjoyed dorking around with the different ways I can drive the thing with a computer of one sort or another. Of course, you can use the NexStar SE just fine with only the hand controller, but where’s the fun in that? Truthfully, while it’s certainly usable, the hand controller’s interface is a bit on the clunky side–especially when wading through its menus to find some DSO to which you’d like to slew. I much prefer to be able to use a planetarium app like Stellarium or SkySafari to find and slew to objects of interest.
As I investigated the possibilities, I learned that there are quite a few different ways you can control your NexStar SE with a computer. For starters, the connection between your scope and the computer can be wired (through a serial or USB port), WiFi, or even Bluetooth. Then, once the connection is established, you have quite a few apps from which to choose to do the actual controlling. All of the possible configurations of connection and control have their positives and negatives, and which one might work best for someone depends largely on their own personal preferences.
Continue readingOrion Support Back in Digital Setting Circles ASCOM Driver
Thanks to some help and testing from Pete Eschman, I’ve been able to restore support for Orion telescopes to my ASCOM Driver for Digital Setting Circles. Specifically, Orion Sky Wizard 2 and 3 and Orion Intelliscope platforms should now be working. Please let me know if you have problems using the driver with these platforms.
Orion itself gets no credit for this–they repeatedly ignored my requests for technical support on this issue, despite the fact that the ASCOM driver they published was a slightly-modified version of one of my earlier drivers.
The Total Lunar Eclipse
Here’s an image I took with my NexStar 6SE and Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT DSLR of the total lunar eclipse on the evening of 27 Sept 2015, just after the eclipse reached totality. The image was taken with the DSLR mounted at the prime focus of the NexStar 6SE. This is a 1500-mm f/10 setup, with the camera set at ISO 400, 15-sec exposure. Unfortunately, with the long focal length I couldn’t quite fit the entire moon in the frame.
