Astronomy

Back in 2005 I bought a decentish telescope. I used to have one before a fire at the house and decided to replace it. To be honest I haven't done all that much with it, partly because it's a bit of a pain to set up every time. It's an equatorial mount, with motor drive, 150mm reflector. To use the motor drive you have to set it up pretty accurately and I couldn't use it on the garden as it was. Using it on the front was pointless with all the street lights.

At work I made a contraption that could hold my Sony Cybershot digital camera at the eyepiece and on April 14th 2005 I took these shots. My first attempt at astro-photography.

From left to right, Callisto, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede (and no I didn't know without running my Starry Night software). The image has been rotated 180 degrees because through the telescope Callisto would have been on the right. It's a 2 second exposure, which has over exposed Jupiter but it's hardly a professional setup. Jupiter is the bright "star" low in the south that you might have seen recently.

The photo of the Moon has also been rotated 180 degrees and I was chuffed to bits with it. Magnification is x30. I have no idea what the exposure was because I lost all that data with the software I used. What I do remember is moving the spot meter to get different settings.