Tasmin's Astronomy Page

Introduction

My childhood interest in Astronomy was re-kindled in October 2003 when I peeked through a friend's telescope during the 2003 Mars opposition. That was the first-ever time I looked through a real telescope. Allowing myself to be overcome with the "fever", I bought my first ever telescope, a 6-inch Orion Deep Space Explorer (a dobsonian), and now I am on my way to becoming a true deep-space astronomer, wife and funds permitting.

Equipment

Sofware

Astro-Photography results

The first two images (last two in list below) were taken with an Intel PC Camera after removing the lense. The cameara was held in hand at the focuser. There was a lot of shaking, but I managed to get some clear shots. Unfortunately this camera was borrowed from my home PC setup that my family uses, so I had to return the nice camera.

The later images were takes using an old logitech QuickCam Pro I got from e-bay, and mercilessly hacked it to remove the lense and IR filter. I found that the CCD was too far back inside the casing, and the focal point of my telescope didn't reach it. So I removed the casing, made a hole in the cap of a 35mm film canister, cut off the bottom of the canister, and stuck the empty lense holder of the web cam into the hole I made in the 35mm canister cap. Attaching the canister to the cap made it fit the focuser and brought the CCD to the focal point of the telescope.

And more images were taken with Canon Powershot A95, and with Canon digital Rebel XT.

All telescope images were taken untracked, with a dobsonian mount. The images were captured using K3CCD sofware while they drifted in the field of view. The telescope had to be manually moved after every set of exposures, and the target re-found before capturing the next set of images. The resulting avi's were aligned, stacked, optimized, etc, and some image processing was done -- all with RegiStax software. Further enhhancements were done in Adobe Photoshop 6.0, mostly iterative levels and curves, some hue/saturation, and color balancing.

The Results

14-Dec-07 Mars 102 of 299 images stacked in RegiStax v4.0, processed in Photoshop.
Distance to Mars: 0.59118AU
 
30-Oct-07 Comet 17P / Holmes Wide field captured with Canon Digital Rebel XT
 
03-Nov-05 Mars 74 frames stacked in RegiStax 3, processed in Photoshop.
Distance to Mars: 0.46595AU
 

Click to enlarge
28-OCT-05 Mars and Pleiades Wide-field long exposure with Canon PowerShot A95 on tripod. 15 sec exposure with 16mm @ F/4, ISO400; 4 images registered, stacked and processed in Photoshop
 

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge
23-Apr-04 Moon and Planets Wide-field long-exposure photographs with Canon EOS Rebel and 50mm lense.
28-Mar-04 Jupiter Used Logitech QuickCam Pro; stacked 12 or so images using RegiStax, and improved the image by using wavelet filter, contrast, etc.
I timed the imaging session with the transition of the Red Spot, which you can see here in the center, top half of the planet.
 
28-Mar-04 Jupiter Brightness and contrast adjusted in previous image to bring out the satellites (moons) of Jupiter.
 
28-Mar-04 Jupiter Imaged with a 2x Barlow lense attached to Logitech QuickCam Pro; stacked 12 or so images using RegiStax, and improved the image by using wavelet filter, contrast, etc.
 
28-Mar-04 Jupiter Brightness and contrast adjusted in previous image to bring out the satellites (moons) of Jupiter.
 
12-Jan-04 Saturn Used Logitech QuickCam Pro; stacked 64 images using RegiStax, and improved the image by using wavelet filter, contrast, etc. Then flipped, rotated, and enlarged the image.
 
2-Dec-03 Almaak - double star Test with Logitech QuickCam Pro with lense and casing removed. No long-exposure modifications made yet!!!
 
2-Dec-03 Da Moon Test with Logitech QuickCam Pro with lense and casing removed.
 
7-Nov-03 Da Moon Another quick test using Intel PC Camera.
 
7-Nov-03 Da Moon Quick test using Intel PC Camera with lense removed. The WebCam was held in hand at the focuser.
 

Ramblings

Having tried my luck at some deep-space objects, I added crude setting circles to the dobsonian, and increased my success rate tremendously. I use the setting circles with AstroInfo astronomy software on my palm pilot. I also made my own list of deep-space objects for it, that are observable from ligh-polluted areas, like the city I live in. My list is customized to my latitude and gives me a sky tour without too-wide a jump between objects, as is sometimes the case when you go through a list in right-ascension order. My list also has major stars before each new group of objects, so I can re-align my crude setting circles, and alleviate errors when the movement would be too large.

I have also developed a web-based sky tour charts program. The charts have telrad circles and my eyepiece fields of view superimposed on them. They follow the same deep-sky objects' list as in my palm pilot, but do not have the major stars in it, which are in the palm pilot list for aligning the setting circles only. I was able to find some difficult objects using my sky-tour charts program.

Most recently I acquired an old web cam (a logitech QuickCam pro), mercilessly hacked it to remove the lense and IR filter, and removed it from its casing to bring the CCD of the web cam to the focal point of the telescope. The results of the webcam astro-photography are shown above.
I still need to hack the web cam circuit board to remove the shutter trigger and vertical transfer pulse, so I can do real deep-sky astro-photography. But I suspect I will need to add tracking feature to my telescope, otherwise the objects might drift across the CCD too fast for the prolonged exposure to have any effect. We shall see...

I have also designed and partially started construction of a fork-mount base. Please wish me luck and pray that I get it working successfully, and without causing family problems ;-). If it works right, I'll then think of adding the single axis tracking feature to it, so the web cam may work better.

E-mail: tasminahmad at yahoo.com
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