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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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Introducing… Pingu Camera. I bought a used DSLR for astrophotography four months ago hoping it would take better photos than my phone. I 3D printed an adapter for it to fit into a standard eyepiece slot. Unfortunately it was a bit of a failure for two reasons: firstly, this camera isn’t mirrorless, so it had a shutter inside it, and when that shutter flips up to take photos it sends vibrations through the entire telescope.
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My grinding tool is making cool patterns!
You’re looking at water trapped under my 12" meniscus mirroe, and flowing between the channels in the home depot porcelain tiles on my grinding tool. Those tiles will grind flat eventually.
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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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I saw the aurora! It looked like light pollution at first, and I only realized what it was when I noticed the underwhelming “clouds” were in a different place after ten seconds. An hour later they had slight tints of red and green and distinct ray-like shapes! Very cool. Phone camera picked up way more color and detail than I could see by eye, and long 8s exposures picked up even more.
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I wanted to stack together multiple exposures to reduce the amount of sensor noise… and clearly this code has some precision bugs. but it looks really cool
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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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