Conjunction of Moon and Jupiter

IT'S LIFE JIM,........ BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT..................

Not got the must fancy stuff but it works not to bad . The scope is a skywatcher 8inch reflector mounted on a heq5 tracking mount, the camera is a cannon 350d mounted to the scope on a t-ring. Abit hard to focus as can be seen but works ok. those shots were really 10-15 long exposures all stacked one on top of the other.

If you go back in the Model Engineer there are articals on making telescopes ie., 1941 W.E. Moorhouse Constructing a reflecting telescope, or 1912 Grinding Mirrors, so telescopes have been with ME for over 100 years. Ian S C

I know someone who went to night school and ground up their own mirror, many years ago. He found the whole process so soul destroying that he never had it seilvered, let alone built a frame for it. He has an off the shelf digitally controlled scope, but feels that being able to 'dial in' a position is fantastic in some ways, but takes half the fun out of it!

Neil

Hi Everyone,

A video shot in New Zealand.

**LINK**

Regards, Bear..

It's worth looking at Dave Walker's photostream.

MichaelG.

Oddly enough, astronomy is what finally pushed me into deciding I really ought to have a lathe. There are quite a number of telescope accessories that shouldn't be too hard to make given a little skill in turning and milling and given the prices of buying some of the gear the lathe could well pay for itself fairly easily. There are also things that are hard to find to buy in the first place, such as solar finders.

I have a number of telescopes (from my point of view, usually one fewer than I'd like; from my wife's more like far more than I need) and get outside with them as often as possible. I'm not a hardcore imager, but I do indulge a little. These are some of my recent favourites:

A transit of Jupiter's moon Ganymede (Ganymede is about 40% of the size of the Earth)

Mars, complete with some white clouds and polar ice cap:

Saturn, which is awkwardly placed for imaging from the UK for a few years:

There are more of my images, including some solar and lunar and a few "wide field" here:

**LINK**

The planetary images above are created by combining thousands of video frames taken at tens per second (the more the better up to a point), applying mathematical transforms to reduce noise and "undo" some of the distortion caused by our atmosphere. I have a couple of old webcams build around sensors that are particularly good for this purpose. The lunar and solar shots on the website are processed by a similar method, but I start with a hundred or so frames from a DSLR.

James

wow very impressive stuff

I am impressed. I have a cottage in north Wales and on a night its pitch black. I sometimes think i should have a telescope as the sky is so clear to view.

Bri

I had a plastic kit telescope when I was perhaps eight years old. It wasn't that great, but it got acceptable views of the Moon. I've had an interest in space and cosmology ever since, but back in my teens decent telescopes cost an absolute fortune and there's no way I could have bought one though if I'd realised at the time that it was possible to grind your own mirrors I'd certainly have had a go. I know it's hard work, but it is actually possible to build a machine to do a fair bit of the job for you.

A good few years on and we live just off the edge of Exmoor where there's very little light pollution and probably mainly thanks to the Chinese telescopes have become much more affordable (though I might be tempted to suggest that quality control has suffered at the lower end of the market). If you're prepared to do the work of finding things yourself then these days £300 (or a fair bit less second hand) gets you a very capable telescope for visual use and in a location where the sky is fairly dark will show you a huge range of objects. I just wish I'd realised how cheap they'd become before we had children and a money-pit of a house...

James