Astrophotography on Hill's Space

Capturing Galaxies with Cameras

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:52:15 +0000

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!!

2025 Total Lunar Eclipse

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:13:51 +0000

Lunar eclipse! Funny enough the telescope made things brighter and therefore even during totality it looked less contrasting through the telescope than by eye

Mars Behind Moon

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 04:15:36 +0000

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.

Goodbye Mars!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(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.

Leavitt's First Light

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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. I don’t have enough room to fix it all the way before it hits the spider. Time to redesign.

Mars looks blurry. No detail. May be due to seeing. A hint of ice cap but not much else, and then my eyepiece fogged over.

Focuser is bad at holding eyepieces. They keep sliding out. Something with set screws is probably a better idea. I managed to take a few pictures but the weight of a camera meant it was no longer face-on and had distorted stars.

At least M44 looks great!

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 12:49:09 +0000

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?

A Partial Lunar Eclipse

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:40:01 +0000

Partialest of partial lunar eclipses

The planets... There's two of them

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:46:32 +0000

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. I think I need to finish my bigger telescope.

It's M42!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:15:58 +0000

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!

Half Moon

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 06:08:43 +0000

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!

The galaxies are aligned!!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:11:06 +0000

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?) so over 3 days I wrote some custom python code using astropy and astroalign to stack them myself!

Look at all those dim stars! That’s so many stars! In the bottom right that slightly fuzzy star is actually the core of M31’s satellite galaxy M110! I was hoping to see some dust lines or spiral arms, but I guess I’ll need more data for that.

THE STARS ARE ALIGNED

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 21:18:14 +0000

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.

The stars are not aligned

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +0000

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!)

Those galaxies are just too darn faint

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 05:35:50 +0000

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

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 04:59:55 +0000

Perseus double cluster

Equipment used: my 3D printed 4.5" telescope, custom mount, Pico pic-taker button, my phone

I have a raw version of this where some stars are noticeably blue or orange but it has more camera noise than this

My first Orion nebula!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 04:00:21 +0000

The first picture is at 36x zoom, the second one at 150x zoom. The more zoomed in one is fainter because the same light is spread across more area, but you can see the four trapezium stars as four separate streaks!

This was a very frustrating night for photography because finding things in a big sky is hard. Light pollution made it hard to see M31, I couldn’t find M33, and then finally clouds rolled in and it became a race against time to photograph the Orion nebula M42. I really need a motorized mount or other device to help me find things.

M13, the great hercules cluster

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:08:06 +0000

I found this with the help of an amateur with a huge telescope and laser pointer so bright it looked like a line pointing into the sky. Looked like a dim circular smudge to the eye. Picture taken with the 25mm eyepiece, so I bet I could get an even better picture through the more zoomed in 6mm

I GOT THE RING NEBULA

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:22:43 +0000

YEAHHHHH FINALLY

IT’S SO SMALL

FINDERSCOPE HELPED

ANDROMEDA GALAXY CORE

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:36:37 +0000

I got to see it with my own eyes for the first time!! It looked like a gray oval-ish but slightly pointy smudge. But it’s a cool smudge in the sky!!

This is a phone pic with a 2s exposure and ISO cranked up to it’s max, 3200. The rainbow snow is random noise from my sensor magnified by turning the sensitivity up very high. You can even see M32 as a slightly fuzzy star almost directly above Andromeda’s core!

I’m really glad I found it. Aiming the telescope was annoying, but rubber bands on the mount helped it keep its aim. I guess that means when I tried and failed to find the ring nebula, it’s just too faint to see in my light polluted sky.

I took many 1s exposures, too. I need to figure out how to stack them and use astronomy software but that’s a process for another time

JUPITER BELTS JUPITER BELTS

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 14:52:05 +0000

THE NEW TELESCOPE MIRROR IS GREAT

BEST $20 I’VE SPENT

On the Night of the True Enemy, I tried to find the ring nebula!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 23:28:28 +0000

For the record, past me was wrong. That’s not the ring nebula. There aren’t two bright stars aligned like that near the ring nebula. But that’s the prettiest Jupiter I’ve ever taken!

(Why is there a double saturn? I know why now!)

Oh my god there's so many stars in this galaxy

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 06:27:52 +0000

I drove a few hours to visit friends and a bortle 4 sky. wow there were so many stars. You could barely make out an arc slightly lighter in the sky than the rest of it! The Milky Way! Through a telescope, there were much more stars than before and they just kept going and going if you moved the telescope. Saw the plediades too wow many bright stars near each other

No photos of nebulae, my goal, because my openocular malfunctioned and didn’t hold the phone to the camera well. No eye sightings of nebulae like m57 either because oh god the sky is so big and aiming is so hard and you look into the telescope and it’s full of stars and you’re lost

This photo is a 30 second timelapse at ISO 3200, the strongest it can go, from my phone camera placed on a concrete block. Edited to increase contrast and saturation. THAT’S A GALAXY

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 22:26:14 +0000

Jupiter, four Galilean moons, and a blue star!

It could be improved if I was better collimated, but I’m happy I got all 4 of them with the high power eyepiece!

Only bad space today, said the sky

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:17:42 +0000

Everything was very blurry today and I kept wondering why focusing didn’t seem to fix it before realizing it was cloudy.

My custom Pico Bluetooth picture taking button worked great though!

Welcome! Welcome, new galaxy!

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 18:43:00 +0000

I got the Andromeda galaxy!!!

Aiming the telescope was a nightmare. “I’ll use a star app to aim!” I thought. I tried downloading Stellarium, it complained about a Google Play error. I downloaded SkEye, and it had some weird gyro issues because it expected the phone to be pointing in the same direction as the telescope, but I use my phone camera to take pics so it was mounted sideways looking at the telescope’s eyepiece. I didn’t really know my constellations, so it was hard to figure out what stars I could see in the light polluted sky were which stars on the app, and the part of the sky where it was seemed perfectly dark with no landmarks to aim at. I ended up pointing my telescope at a bright star, aiming upwards to what I thought was the right altitude using my mount v3’s degree markers, then rotating left/right at random patches of dark sky, shooting some four second long exposures, and hoping it would appear out of the gloom.

And somehow, looking through my pictures, I got it.

And then I immediately lost the telescope’s aim trying to see Andromeda with my eye and despite like 10 tries never managed to find it again.

I tried stacking my 3 exposures in Krita in Addition mode, but it didn’t seem to work well, so you’re looking at the best 4s exposure lightly edited to increase contrast.

Pictures from My 3D Printed Telescope, with Mount v3

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 18:12:59 +0000

I finally finished Hill Mount v3, so I put it to the test. I got the clearest phone-cam Saturn I’ve ever seen! Wobbles still exist if you touch the telescope, but the wobbles are much smaller now and go away if I wait a few seconds or use a short exposure time.

Before the wobbles settle down, if you take a picture with a big exposure time, the wobbles cause the image to have two Saturns.

I think that confirms my theory that the long stretched out Saturn I saw with Mount V2 was caused by a tiny wobble. Overall, it's not wobble-free and could use some damping, but I declare Mount v3 a success!

I also got Jupiter again, and I could see two Galilean moons by eye but I couldn’t capture any using camera. I couldn’t see any of the stripes, though. Jupiter is way more featureless than I expected; I wonder if there are any cheap filters I can use to see more of the stripes.

In the last picture, I took a very long 4s exposure of Saturn. The earth’s rotation meant, Saturn blurred into a streak, but take a close look - there’s a smaller streak right next to it following Saturn! I think that’s one of its moons, possibly Titan! It’s so cool that I can see it from my backyard.

Things to improve:

Make the mount even stiffer?
How do I add damping, to make vibrations decay over time?
Just as I was writing this, I discovered some smudges on my eyepiece. Oops! Maybe that’s adding some glare. Hopefully once I clean that I can get even sharper images!
Try image stacking?

Gas giants, wooden wobbles

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:07:03 +0000

I took my new wooden-dowel telescope mount for a spin, and got pictures of Jupiter and Saturn with my high-power eyepiece!

I took many pictures, and a few videos. I also figured out how to control the shutter speed on my phone’s camera, and got many photos at 1/40s shutter speed. Using a smaller shutter speed takes the planets from blinding white blurs to circular colored blurs, I assume because it lets in less light. It can make a planet go from blindingly white to almost completely disappearing into the night sky. However, my phone doesn’t let me control those settings when taking a video. The second and third images show the best raw pictures I got.

Saturn through my telescope had this weird diagonal smear to it. Since I’ve been fighting vibration issues with my wooden-dowel mount, I think it’s a very small high-frequency vibration from left to right causing that problem?

Then I tried using image processing software, Pipp plus autostakkert plus registrax, following this video tutorial. There were some shenanigans because Pipp’s site got taken down and I had to find a backup, but eventually I made the heavily processed Jupiter in the first image. Sadly, I haven’t figured out how to stack my photos because the software complained my images were different sizes (from before and after I pressed the “save as raw” button), but I was able to take a video of Jupiter without the high shutter speed setting and process that. It was a bit underwhelming - I went from dim blurry sphere to SLIGHTLY STRIPED dim blurry sphere! Wow! If there’s one thing I learned I suppose it’s that my telescope was out of focus.

I hope the pictures will be improved if I make a new mount using metal EMT pipes.

A new rod challenger

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:49:23 +0000

Update: I’ve learned about the existence of EMT conduit, which is steel so it’s much stiffer, cuttable with a handsaw, and most importantly way cheaper than the aluminum tubes I bought before!

The downside is it’s sized in nominal diameter, which means lying. The size “1/2 in” has an outer diameter of 0.706 in. But I’ve faced nominal diameter before and this time I’m prepared. Let’s try this.

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 19:12:05 +0000

I woke up early and saw Jupiter and Saturn!

Thoughts on the observing: I have two eyepieces, a high power 6mm and a low power 25mm. I couldn’t get a picture of the planets with my high power lens because my mount is too wobbly and I couldn’t find the planets once I mounted my phone on the telescope. I did see Jupiter through it amidst the wobbling, and it looked like a featureless white blob. I could barely make out some stripes, whichwas cool!

To get at least some pictures before the sun rose, I switched to my low power lens. Using that, I found Saturn! And as the sun began to rise, I switched back to Jupiter, and I could see it as just a big round bright circle… but also with some of the Galilean moons next to it! And then morning clouds rolled in and covered everything and I went home.

Instead of taking pictures, now I’m taking videos so I can extract the good frames afterwards. I took a video of Saturn while trying to focus the telescope, hoping I’d get a good level of focus somewhere. Turns out my phone’s autofocus didn’t like Saturn and kept trying to focus incorrectly.

What that means is: as cool as these photos are I need to aim my telescope better, I need to focus better (I did find the button to turn off phone autofocus!), and if I do that, I can get even better photos with the higher powered zoom lens! There’s a ton of potential for improvement.

Moon Nyoom

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 16:42:31 +0000

With all those upgrades, I was able to mount my phone to my telescope. Recently, the moon finally reached the right phase for it to be visible, so I got great shots of the moon!

With my 6mm high power lens, the moon was super duper detailed. And I realized something amazing: the moon was moving. I was so zoomed in I could see the rotation of the earth! That’s incredible!

Now that my phone is mounted, I don’t have to manually hold it up to take a picture, meaning video became possible. To my amazement, 3 minutes was enough for the moon to enter and exit the telescope’s view. I took a video and made a timelapse:

It’s one thing to know the earth is rotating. It’s another thing to see it with your own eyes. The universe is so cool.

Telescope upgrade 2: Electrical tape and openocular phone mount

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:05:23 +0000

(Part 3 of my adventures with my 3D printed telescope! Previous part)

I tried adding 3 upgrades, but only two of them worked. Check out an amazing moon photo below!

Upgrades

My mount is very wobbly. To reduce the wobble I had two ideas: first, place wooden dowels along the diagonals of the sides to make the mount more rigid, and second, print an openocular.com phone holder so I didn’t have to touch the telescope to take pictures with my phone and wobble it.

I bought three more wooden dowels, then I designed two versions of 3D printed pieces to hold the diagonals in place. After printing, they didn’t fit my base. I forgot to account for the fact that there were plastic parts at the top and bottom of the pipes that would stop me from attaching them there. In the end, I just taped the dowels to the mount using electrical tape. I think it worked pretty well to make the telescope rigid, but it didn’t stop the wobbling.
The openocular.com phone mount is a 3D printed piece that lets you place a phone up to an eyepiece. That works for me, because that means I can place my phone in there then step back and the telescope’s wobbles will settle down! It still wobbled, but the wobbles died down after a while. Nice.

The mount itself is very fiddly, and it doesn’t help that if I see black through my phone, I can’t tell if the mount is aligned wrong and my phone isn’t pointed in the eyepiece, or if the mount is aligned correctly and the telescope is just pointed at dark sky. It’s also hard to focus with the mount on because the phone will also try to autofocus.

The open ocular and eyepieces are heavy, and plastic on plastic is slippery. If I put the open ocular on, the entire telescope rotates down because of the weight. To fix that, I unscrewed and adjusted the position of the center piece on the rods until it balanced. But I also added some electrical tape to the curved circular rockers, to make it less slippery, and that was a massive improvement. Now the telescope stays in place much better. I wholeheartedly recommend doing this.

Using all these upgrades, I took this picture of the moon using the phone mount.

Wow! You can see so many craters!

Telescope upgrade 1: basket

hillexed@email.com (hillexed) — Fri, 26 May 2023 21:59:57 +0000

(Part 2 of my adventures with my 3D printed telescope!)

I printed a collimation helper and a basket! The collimation helper helped me find out that I thought I was collimated, but was actually misaligned. With proper collimation, I went out again and took this new picture of Venus.

To the eye, collimation didn’t seem like it did anything, because my telescope and its mount was just so wobbly it looked the same to the eye as before. But my phone pic definitely seems better - now you can see the waxing gibbous shape instead of bright dot. Don’t know why.

I also found out “open ocular” is a 3D printable mount to hook a phone up to a telescope. I’m making one now. Hopefully that’ll help make it less wobbly?