Astrojournal - A Lunar Expedition
This is a part of my #AstroJournal, documenting my foray into #astrophotography.
Observing Session 2025-03-03
Tutorial
I watched SarahMath's Great Tutorial on Imaging the Moon.
The Moon, happily, was Waxing Gibbous. So it I decided it would be my main target. Orion is still riding high in the sky in the evening so, I added M42 as a secondary target.
New Tech
Two new pieces of gear joined the set up. The first was the bucket lid seat and the other was an IR remote for the D3400.
I have now spent $27.88 on astrophotography.
Beautiful Night
The air was nice and clear. No clouds, low humidity, and not terrible cold.
As I was waiting a few minutes for the camera to cool down, I took a picture with my Pixel 7 of the Moon and Venus.
Moon
Took a ton of shots but only 4 came out as in focus and only one of those had a good exposure.
(270mm f/6.3 1/200 s ISO 400)
The IR remote was a good thing. I could take shot after shot. But it doesn't do any good if the shot is out of focus.
1 out of 16 shots.
Learning!
Orion
All the shots were out of focus. Bleah.
But using the 3 second shutter rather than 10 seconds means the blurs were round rather than ovals from star trails. The rule of 500 says I should only use about a 1 second shot. We'll see what happens once I lick the focus thing.
Learning! :/