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Introducing “Finley”, probably the jankiest and most colorful eclipse imaging setup of all time. The only telescope I have which is enclosed (and therefore safe to use on the sun) is this donated finderscope, meaning I’ll have crosshairs in all my images. I’m taking pictures using my friend’s phone which he gave to me after the screen cracked. I designed a 3D printed adapter so it fits on the sturdy 3D printed mount I designed for the far bigger Hadley telescope.
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A quick moon pic from my 3D printed telescope and phone cam. Some out of focus tree branches snuck into the top and traced some faint dark lines!
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I have many projects in mind for telescope upgrades. Since the last list I’ve completed one and added one. Here’s what I want to do this year telescope wise:
#1: Sliced Pifinder (complete!) Complete! I built a Pifinder for 1/5 of the list price by using a different cheaper camera, secondhand older pi and battery pack, and printing and soldering parts myself. It’s been very helpful when it works, and let me take pictures of M33 even without seeing it!
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I drove out to what Google maps said was a park and then saw a sign saying “state property no trespassing” and a second sign saying “don’t steal road salt or gravel from here, if we catch you you’ll be prosecuted”. I guess that’s what some silly rural fellows get up to in their free time? So I parked right in front of the entrance off the side of the road, since it was pretty dark.
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This is the best photo I’ve made of the Andromeda galaxy!
It’s my second time stacking pictures to bring out faint details. You’re looking at 20 phone pics taken through my 3D printed telescope, each 1/2s exposure so the Earth didn’t rotate as much during the photo and smear the stars. I tried the program deepskystacker, but it failed to stack my pictures (maybe my phone camera’s pics had too much noise?
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BEHOLD, MY FIRST STACKED ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY IMAGE!
This combines 20 1/2sec exposures taken with my phone through my 3D printed 4.5" telescope. You can see stars down to magnitude 12!! This is so cool.
Turns out I didn’t see a galaxy in my photos because… I was looking at photos of a non-galaxy. This is the ring nebula, M57. Oops.
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I took many 1/2s exposures of the galaxy M33 but it wasn’t visible. I’m trying to combine them in python to see if together it can simulate a long exposure. It’s not going too well
(The lines are from stars moving as the earth rotates!)
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There’s a galaxy (named M33) in most of this picture
but it’s so faint I couldn’t see it by eye or by camera :(
The pifinder helped me find this place, so I took like 30 exposures in the hopes that I can stack them and see it
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Oops. NOW my Sliced PiFinder is done.
The original PiFinder uses a $50 USB GPS module. To avoid spending $50, I wrote some code to fake a GPS. Eventually the dev brickbots switched PiFinders to a $10 solderable GPS module that uses UART instead of USB, and $10 felt reasonable, so I bought one and soldered it in. I thought I was done and that all I had to do was edit the software to remove my fake GPS code and use the regular GPS code!
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