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Today, I tried finding some galaxies. I couldn’t see M101, couldn’t see M105, but did see M81 and M82 by eye. It was tough, but I finally took a phone pic. I decided to give Pingu Camera a try… and the phone plus printed adapter plus phone remote shutter plus waiting a while for vibrations to die down worked! I got a picture of both M81 and M82!!
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Lunar eclipse! Funny enough the telescope made things brighter and therefore even during totality it looked less contrasting through the telescope than by eye
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Goodbye mars! (Zoom in!)
Taken using my 3D printed telescope, with a crowd of friends invited to watch the occultation of mars by the moon! The phone I was taking photos on ran out of battery, so I hastily threw a friend’s iphone into the holder just in time to capture these.
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(Zoom into these photos to see Mars!)
Taken using my Hadley 3D printed telescope, with a crowd of friends invited to watch the occultation of mars by the moon! The phone I was taking photos on ran out of battery, so I hastily threw a friend’s iphone into the holder just in time to capture these.
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I finally used my new 8" telescope with a working mirror cell! Report:
Jupiter is nice and bright!
M42 is so much brighter than in my first telescope! It’s green and I can the bat wings and texture in the trapezium along with four stars!
There are so many stars everywhere!
High power reveals flaws. High power stars look like ovals. After some investigation, my secondary mirror wasn’t centered in the eyepiece view.
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Cell phone pic of Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas!
It was visible faintly in the sky by eye too!
Weridly it seemed brighter by eye than through the telescope. That could be because my telescope wasn’t shielded from a nearby streetlight and stray light created a brighter background?
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Taken using my 4.5" telescope and phone! Both Mars and Jupiter fit into telescope view!
Very annoying observing session. Tried to take photos of the ring nebula but missed; planet conjunction was extremely slightly out of focus and I didn’t see until morning, and I looked for but still couldn’t see M33. Couldn’t see any detail on mars by eye either; that should change as we get closer to opposition.
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Since Orion was so high in the sky compared to my last photo I was curious if photos would look better… and they do!
This is one 1/2s phone pic, scaled to hell and back to bring out the “bat wings”: big dark edges that go from bottom left to top right. Now I know there’s many ways to make this better, such as motorizing or a bigger telescope or stacking multiple pictures - but for just one phone pic this isn’t that bad!
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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!