I am starting to write this post at around 5 AM in the morning, because I woke up from a random dream, in which I ended up being the titular character of a video game. After my divorce, one of the things I have been trying to find has been a diversion or something to focus on. Luckily, I have always been good at finding hobbies.
It was fortunate enough to have friends who would be willing to bear the cold with me and the insects in the middle of state parks.
The initial investment is a bit of a pain. I started with Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope. There are a bunch of reason. Please don’t mind me being nerdy and continue reading on.
- Compared to refractive telescope(one which uses just two lenses to focus), reflective telescopes are compact and images are not dulled down. (if you want to know more loop up refraction , photon excitation, concept of lasers)
- Reflective telescopes are less prone to chromatic aberrations. if a lens is not shaped correctly or has uniform density different light wavelengths get refracted differently and as a result focal length for each wavelength change leading to a blurred image with different colors. Here is an example:
- The last but not the least is that reflective telescopes are dirt cheap! But not as cheap as you think!
So I went with a reflective one. One of the beginner ones , a Celestron NexStar 6SE Telescope.
Its perfect for beginners and good for travels. One of the biggest issues in using a telescope is star tracking and this one is computerized, allowing for automated tracking. You set it up with location , date information, perform alignment configuration of your choice and then you are good to go.
My first attempt at the moon was hilarious, I didn’t know about alignments, tracking and focus. I was in the middle of Edgar creek state park and panicking with every gunshot sounds echoing.
After 2 hrs of agonizing pain, I managed to get it going and it was worth it!
The first one was a bit lost on the focus and so your can see the so mentioned chromatic aberrations.
Learning from my mistakes is not my strongest suit but I definitely learned a lot. The next time was at Jubilee State Park. Though not a full moon it turned out real good.
A special Note: IPhone are really bad for cascading with telescopes! They dont have built in correction for chromatic aberrations! I took this one with my Pixel 4 XL cascaded onto the telescope with a 3D smart phone camera mount and it turned out really well.
Astrophotography – The fun part!
Astrophotography was one of my best experiments ever. I learned a lot about using shutter apertures, exposure corrections, exposure times etc.
I used a Nikon D3300 at f /4.4 aperture size , ISO 800, 30s exposure shots.
The raw data is goood but I had to do a bit of image stacking to bring out the colors. Here are some!
There are a lot more that I am working on hope it comes out good! Happy Stargazing!
