Astronomy and Astrophotography

Quicklinks: Illawarra Astronomical Society
Transit of Venus 2004 images

Introduction

I'm interested in encouraging ANYONE to take pictures of the sky. No matter what equipment you have, from the most basic telescope to a computer controlled one with all the bells and whistles, you can get great enjoyment from taking your own photos. OK, you won't get Hubble quality shots, but you WILL get something you can be proud of, and you will learn. Taking an image can be done from simply holding up a camera to the eyepiece, to a long, "guided" shot. With digital cameras, it's not going to cost you a lot in film stock, and you can enhance your images on a basic PC, very easily. Enhancing your images will bring out detail you never thought was there.

By doing, you can progressively get better and better.

I have deliberately kept these pages relatively simple to show you by example the kinds of things you can do easily, and surprisingly. Visit often, because I'll usually have something new.

My equipment consists of:

Meade ETX-105EC (Go here)
Kodak DX4330 Digital Camera 3.1 Megapixels (Go here)
Kodak DX 7630 Digital Camera 6.1 Megapixels (Go Here)
Televue Eyepiece Camera Adapter
A JMB Identi-view Solar Filter for Sun Observation (Go here)
A MEADE Lunar and Planetary Imager (LPI). Go here.

Meade with Minolta and Solar Filter

Mary has 3 Minolta SLR Cameras bodies and both an Eyepiece adapter, and a T-Adapter. Photo's from .

So, apart from the 35mm SLR this is a pretty cheap entry into doing basic astrophotography, but you can get some pretty interesting results.
Some Principles you should know:

ANYONE can take interesting pictures of the sky;
You don't need expensive camera equipment to get interesting results;
The sky has more going on than just the Moon, Planets and Stars;
A simple Digital Camera will give you surprising results, from taking a picture through the eyepiece of the telescope to taking time exposures.

Go here for a description of the assembly I use most often.

Go to each of the pages that interest you (I've reduced the images to make them quicker to load): SUN Transit of Venus MOON PLANETS STARS COMETS SATELLITES LIGHTNING MISCELLANEOUS

Links for Astrophotography and Astronomy

Illawarra Astronomical Society. An active group of active astronomers in the Illawarra. I'm editor of the magazine.
Spaceweather.com has updates regularly on the sun, and links to galleries of photographs of aurora and sunspots.
Meade ETX70 Website. A very good site indeed.
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Page. Lots of useful information
Heavens-Above.com. Go there to get lots of good information on how the sky looks, and what's going on in the sky, from your location.

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