AstroJournal - New Targets
This is a part of my #AstroJournal, documenting my foray into #astrophotography.
Observing Session 2025-02-25
New Targets
With the success of the last outing on Venus, it was time to branch out to other targets. In my defense, the weather wasn't great on the first 2 session.
But this night was great! It wasn't that cold (my hands stayed warm the whole time) and the seeing was as good as it gets in this area.
With the planetary parade in progress, it made sense to make Jupiter and Mars my two main targets with the Pleiades as secondary.
The results
Jupiter and Aldebaran with most of Taurus
Well, hmmm... Way overexposed. And startrails. Apparently, even at 70mm 10 seconds is too long.
(70 mm f/22 10s ISO6400)
Here, I tried to get the Pleiades in the frame as well. In some ways even worse since I opened up to f/4.5
(70 mm f/4.5 10s ISO 6400)
The Mars/Castor/Pollux shots suffered similarly. I won't bore you with those.
But one "happy accident" happened.
I decided to try to get a picture of the belt and sword of Orion . I THINK I got one of the nebulosities (Maybe M42?). Hard to tell to be honest!
(300mm f/6.3 10s ISO 1600)
I wasn't aware how bright that was.
Problem Solving
Image Quality
Image quality suffered because of :
- overexposure
- star trails
Bringing down the exposure time will solve both, but can I bring it down low enough while actually still getting some signal ? We shall see.
Mutiple exposures of a target
The Nikon D3400 self-timer requires you to select it each time you want to use it. So, getting a set of pictures is a bunch of button pushing on the back of the camera (set up the autotimer, hands off, wait for the delay, take the shot, repeat). Th D3400 does not have a port for a wired remote, but it does have an IR remote sensor. I guess I will look into that.
Comfort
Using the kneeling pad was an improvement on trying to do things standing. But it still wasn't great. Half-way through the session, I remembered I had a 5 gallon bucket in the basement. I put that on the ground bottoms up and put the knee pad as a cushion. This worked great!
Well, until I realized that the ridges on the bottom of the bucket were gouging into the cushion, ruining it. So I've ordered myself a cushion designed to fit as a lid on the bucket. Hopefully, I'll get it in time for the next session.
Aligning targets.
Seeing faint targets like the Pleiades in the camera's view finder was guess and hope - especially at the longer focal lengths. The viewfinder is simply not bright enough.
Not sure what to do about this. Maybe try a laser pointer or something ?
Progress!