Well the mount arrived for my camera at last, and I tried to use it last night to take some pictures with my telescope. Conditions were pretty useless and it's a real bugger to focus so all I have from the evening are a bunch of pictures of Jupiter that show no detail at all. On the plus side the planet is about 90 pixels across so it's better than I could get through my 800mm lens. Of course it's cloudy at the moment and looks like it will remain that way all week so I'm probably not going to...

Tonight, after the pub of course, I saw clouds on another planet. I find that really amazing when you consider the distance between us and Jupiter, which means I'm hooked. I have a 5" telescope now, but how long before I want a bigger one? Still no camera mount, and conditions are still very bad to actually see much so I'll have to go somewhere a bit less populated sometime soon but I still need to buy a case and some more view pieces so that I have a bit more magnification before that. I think I almost got the goto feature...

The first rule of astronomy says that when you buy a telescope it will be cloudy for the first few days, weeks or months. I did get a few minutes of clear skies on Saturday night but the T2 adapter for my camera hasn't arrived yet so I couldn't take any pictures. It was almost a full moon too, so all I could see was craters around the edge of the moon (What do you mean it's not flat? You know what I mean) and Jupiter plus the first 4 moons. Hopefully I will have some pictures this by the...

Last week, after an evening in a pub and a challenge from a friend saying "Do better than this", I spent a while in a field in the middle of the night with my camera. These pictures are what happened. The pictures were taken using a Canon 20D with a 400mm lens and a 2x teleconverter. neither have been scaled at all, but they have been heavily cropped. The moon is too bright at the moment to allow me to improve on them to fix their flawed exposures, but in a few weeks I'll try again. Would it be...

I was out taking photos again on Saturday and one of the things I was aiming for was to get some black and white shots. I'm useless at seeing in black and white so I'm never that good at it, but this image is the best so far. It's far from perfect of course, there is some white follage at the top left and the bottom left of the frame is a little dull but all in all I'm happy with it. I like the contrast between the shadows on the branches and their highlights and I think the branches...

It's cold and clouds keep getting in the way, but here's the best effort so far from tonights pictures. I know I can do better than this as I learn what I'm doing, but for a first attempt with a new lens I'm happy. As before the linked image is at 100% and just cropped to remove lots of black around the edge. The image is shot with an 800mm lens (400mm with a 2x teleconverter). One thing I'm finding now is that it's a lot harder to get the moon framed up properly. The moon takes up a large part...

Here's the best image that I took last night: I think that's the quality limit of my camera and lens. The link is to the 100% image cropped down to size and sharpened in photoshop so there's no scaling involved. Hopefully my next picture of the moon will be much better.

I like the moon as a subject for photography. It's the easiest astronomical body to find in the night sky and it's easy to take pictures of it as well if you remember to expose it as a daylight object instead of a nighttime one. I've been playing around with pictures of it for a while now and I think I've hit the limit of what my lens can do sharpness wise. Time for a bigger zoom I think. Maybe it should be an L series zoom as well. I took some pictures last night with my current 300mm lens, but...

I took some sample images at the weekend using my new wide angle lens and although the pictures aren't great because I didn't put that much effort into them (I didn't even take a tripod with me) and the lighting wasn't as good as it could be they're what I was after in order to give myself an idea as to what I can now attempt, This image was just something I was trying to see how much I could fit in frame while looking through a window. I might try again and see if I can't get the light that's...

Today I developed my killer app. It fits all of the requirements for a killer app: It replaces a function in the OS that isn't good enough and it adds some very useful functionality. It replaces the functionality for copying files from my digital camera to my PC and mimics the way that if you're copying JPGs or the like then WIndows will copy the files to a directory based on the date on which you perform the copy (such as 2005-02-12). This would be really useful except for two minor issues. The first is that it doesn't support the...