Author Archives: John

October 3, 2012
11:13 am
by: John

Dark Site Adaptation

At my light-polluted home in Labrador, Gold Coast, the limits of exposure with my Canon 550D on my 120 mm telescope (900 mm focal length) appeared to be 10 – 12 minutes at ISO 1600. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) … Continue reading →

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August 29, 2012
10:57 am
by: John

Fusion Power

The Orion Nebula M42 looks nice when the exposure is sufficient to show all the neat nebulosity and dark clouds. When you show people the picture, you explain that the nebula is brightened by the central stars which you can’t … Continue reading →

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August 28, 2012
3:28 pm
by: John

First Dark

After enjoying my “first light” shots and then remembering that they had all been shot as jpegs, it was almost a month before I could try out taking shots in RAW and applying “darks”. On 15th July 2012, I set … Continue reading →

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August 25, 2012
11:41 am
by: John

First light

At 9.15 pm on the 14th of June 2012 (12 days after receiving the telescope), I achieved my first alignment and got my first guided shots. I had been taking test pictures of the Southern Cross (Crux) or more specifically, … Continue reading →

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August 12, 2012
7:34 pm
by: John

It’s just a Small Refractor …

My goals in selecting my next purchases were: * getting a bit longer exposure times than the 8 seconds used so far * magnifying the objects I had been seeing when zooming in on current photos * finding smaller objects … Continue reading →

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April 21, 2012
6:04 pm
by: John

Committing my Camera to the Stars

DSLR cameras like my Canon 550D are designed to produce pictures with the correct colour appearance during the day, despite the fact that the camera’s CCD chip is sensitive to the infra red emissions from warm objects. DSLRs achieve good … Continue reading →

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April 20, 2012
3:28 pm
by: John

Slipping over to the Dark Side

In February 2012, I decided to try just a little bit of the image processing I had been reading about: Nebulosity to take the shots, stack the subs, crop and “Adjust Color Background (Offset)” ; then save as a “16-bit … Continue reading →

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April 18, 2012
1:38 pm
by: John

First Steps

Join the Club In mid-2011, O’Reilly’s Guest House (in the mountains on the Queensland – New South Wales border) put on a Stargazer’s Weekend which I attended. The speaker was Noeleen Lowndes, NASA’s representative for the Saturn Observation Campaign and … Continue reading →

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