The Waning Moon

Posted by Sean McCormack (Galway, Ireland) on 6 January 2010 in Plant & Nature.

After a frantic search on the day of the Lunar Eclipse, I had to give up on ever finding my camera adaptor for the telescope. I've a cheap Meade ETX-70, which is a 70mm refractor, for those that might be interested. I bought it in Lidl I think. Of course, when I had no need of it, I found the adaptor in a casual search. When I got home from work on Monday morning (4am or so), I took it out for a go. I spent the best part of an hour trying to get the largest image I could onto the sensor.

I eventually found that inverting my 12mm eyepiece inside the camera adaptor barrell produced the largest image. The shot above is the uncropped frame from the camera.

Of course, all is not rosy. The shot is at ISO1600 and at 1/400sec. Despite the EXIF thinking it's 50mm, it's actually 350mm @f5. Hence needing such a speed for camera shake. The full size shot is far from perfect. There's heavy blue fringing, it's noisy and a tad soft. The reduction process has sharpened it, and so it looks okay at this size. I'm presenting here because it's simply a record shot of my first camera scope session. I should note that I've still had to add about 2 stops of exposure and some brightness to the image also. There's also the small matter of the black and white conversion to finally remove the blue fringe.

Astrophotography isn't in my list of skills by any mean stretch, but I've always had an interest in Astronomy, so it is an interesting marriage of things I like.