astrolog – The Writing Life of a Tadpole

AstroBlog 2019.004.5 Imaging Jupiter – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

June 11 2019

Since I was having success imaging the moon, I was cocky enough to try for some planet shots. Jupiter was up and looking super bright (not the least of the reasons being it’s nice and close right now), so I went for it. The 25mm Plossl was my best bet previously, so I went back to it for my go-to lens for the attempt. Of course, it’s not going to get me very close shots, it’s pretty low power, but what the heck.

I started methodically…At ISO 24, I experimented with various short-duration bursts…1/800th of a second:

Then 1/320th of a second:

1/250th of a second:

1/200th of a second:

1/125th of a second:

1/80th of a second:

I had a lot of trouble seeing what the planet and moons were looking like in the viewer, so almost impossible to tell if I was getting a good image (i.e., in focus) or not. I tried to use the moons to get them pinpoint sharp, but even that was a challenge. Overall, at ISO 24, I would say the best image was somewhere between 1/125s and 1/200s. Cropped and shrunk, here is the 1/125s…I get a hint of bands on the planet, and the moons are faint:

At 1/200s, I get bands and no moons:

I tried bumping the ISO up to 32 next, and 1/100s…for some reason, the planet went almost blue rather than white, and I still managed some bands:

At ISO 50, 1/20s still had a bit of a hint of colour shadings:

While at 1/8s, it was all washed out:

When I boosted to ISO 160, even at 1/20s, it was all white too:

Similarly for ISO 250, 1/20s:

And again at ISO 800, 1/20s:

Further attempts at ISO 2000 produced just more white planets, and finally ISO 9000 just blew everything out in the image:

All in all, I would not say it was a screaming pile of success for planets. Fun, some interesting stuff, but I don’t have the methodology down for planets.

AstroBlog 2019.004.4 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 15mm plossl

June 10 2019

Continuing for my fourth outing of the calendar year (i.e. 2019 + 004), my fourth batch of photos were still of the moon, this time swapping out my Delos for the 15mm Plossl. I had NO trouble at all marrying the plossls compared to the larger glass and it makes me think I might end up picking up a few plossls if I see them on sale or used, just for imaging.

With the upper camera on my iPhone, settings were f/1.8, ISO 24, auto white balance, and initial duration of 1/250s. And I started out strong right out of the gate. Mare Crisium is still prominent to the right of centre, and the Sea of Serenity above to the left, with a nice ridge in the dark in between. It might be called Rimae Littrow, but that seems more like the name of a general crater.

A shot near the bottom of the moon, with a very prominent Theophilus at the 12:00 position, next to the Mare Nectaris:

And again:

And a zoomed-in version of Theophilus (a prominent impact crater between Sinus Asperitatis and Mare Nectaris, partially intruding into crater Cyrillus … Theo is 4200m deep, with central mountain 1400m high):

Mare Crisium again, just for continuity:

And a dark section focusing on the ridges (duration altered to 1/640th of a second) with the crater at the bottom being Plinius, and the ridges above named, wait for it, Rimae Plinius:

Overall, very satisfying. 🙂

AstroBlog 2019.004.3 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 17.3mm Delos

June 9 2019

I confess I was a bit excited to use my Delos for this batch. It is my favourite lens by far, perfect power for my scope. And yet attaching it to my iPhone with the adapter was a giant pain in the patootie. It has a larger FoV and display glass, should have been easy to set up, but I struggled more than with the plossls. I thought it was perhaps the power, but you’ll see later that it wasn’t. It just didn’t line up great.

I was still set on the f/1.8 lens on the camera, and it’s lowest ISO is 24, so I was still working with that….add in AWB, and 1/125th of a second exposures.

At first, I had an itty bitty FoV which allowed me to capture Mare Crisium again:

This next one was so small, it was hard to be sure it was still the same sea:

I was still struggling, and this one I don’t even KNOW where it is targeting:

Then, I repositioned the camera on the lens, and voila, I got this:

Super washed out, which is likely the 1/125s duration combined with the extra power. But Mare Crisium is at least identifiable again. Then as I was playing, I found these rilles:

Super fun, and when I threw a Lunar and Planetary filter on them, they REALLY popped. Very cool. But overall, I was disappointed with the Delos. I got a couple of pics but was expecting more excitement and an easier time with mounting.

AstroBlog 2019.004.2 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossls

June 9 2019

Since I had success at 1/200th of a second, i.e. .005s, with the Hyperion, I started with similar settings for the 25mm plossls. For my main Plossl, I had ISO 24 (lowest option for the f/1.8 camera) and AWB:

With my second Plossl, I doubled the time to 1/100th of a second:

Still, decent detail near the terminator but the rest seems a bit more washed out.

And finally, I have a weird thing in the second Plossl that I think is for help with either imaging or alignment, not sure which:

Most likely my go-to lens of choice in the short-term. Partly as later in the night, I was looking at a bunch of other stuff with the 25mm setup, and tried the moon again…glorious at ISO 24 and 1/250s:

AstroBlog 2019.004.1 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 36mm Hyperion lens

June 9 2019

One of my big astro goals for the year is to get my scope and iPhone working together to do some basic imaging. I’m not looking for Hubble quality, just some souvenir pics that I’m happy to keep and share. Maybe I’ll even print a couple. But that’s about it. And generally, I’m looking for single-frame shots, not detailed stacking and processing. I’ve broken the process down into six main steps, and step one is marrying the lens to the smartphone. I’ll talk more about that another time, but the moon is a great target to start with as it lets you see your results pretty fast — the so-called trial and error method.

First up for the night was my Hyperion 36mm 2″/1.25″ lens. It’s a big piece of glass, and I thought I would easily fit the whole moon into the image. Well, not so much. It was difficult to get the phone aligned over the EP, or rather the EP aligned under the phone, and with a good-sized image. I succeeded, but not as much as I expected. I put the ISO down to 15 to avoid washing out the whole image (after all, the moon is SUPER BRIGHT), auto-white balance, the camera is hard-set in the phone to f/2.4, and that left me playing with the duration time.

At 1/10th of a second, i.e. .1s, the upper right quadrant got overexposed and washed out: