[Rangy62]

An excellent write up!!! Very informative, passed on this information to my son who likes this and interested in Astro photography. Guess will have to gear up to shell out some big bucks in the near future

[ike]

Originally Posted by graaja

In this case, a good place to start would be a good pair of binoculars. With this you can see details of moon and many other celestial objects like clusters, nebulae etc.

Could you also suggest good binoculars

[graaja]

Originally Posted by ike

Could you also suggest good binoculars

For light weight and good portability a 10x50 binoculars is a good place to start. This has 10x magnification and 50mm diameter. Because of the low magnification, this can be easily hand held while viewing objects.

For viewing still more objects (like moons of jupiter, smaller nebulae, globular clusters etc), a 20x80 would be a good choice. Due to the 20x magnification, it is very difficult to have a steady view of objects by holding these in our hands. So, for a 20x80 binoculars, you also need a good tripod.

Check out the below links for some good options.

https://goscientifics.com/product-category/binoculars/

https://tejraj.com/binoculars.html

For tripod, you need to get a good one with a ball head and also one which has payload weight more than the binocular's weight. I heard Manfrotto and Gitzo are good brands of tripods. These are available in Amazon.

PS: I personally have not used binoculars (though I am planning to get one soon). These are what I learnt from experts in the BAS (Bangalore Astronomy Society) group.

[Hells Bells]

Looking at space has given me goosebumps ever since I recall looking up at sky. Thank you for these photos as they remind me why I get them.

[RGK]

Great thread Ganesh . I need to read at least three to four times to understand better.

I have met a person called Mr Vijay (KK Nagar Chennai) who used to set up a telescope on top of his building on occasions and have been there to watch some constellations. He showed me a few stars using a laser pointer torch and I was so excited to see the power of the beam from that laser torch.

On seeing the gear and the setup, I feel these things really come up due to immense passion. Keep it up. All the best.

OT: There is an optical lens company based out of Pondy which manufactures high precision lenses for satellites/telescopes across the world.

[vredesbyrd]

I absolutely love this thread!

[sunsbhp]

Hi Ganesh,

This is great stuff. Is this the only place you post or do you have any dedicated web sites with high-res images and the detailed stories ? Quite interested to read and understand, both the galaxy and the shooting.

Btw, what’s “integration time of 4 hours”? Do you take numerous photos and layer and stack - similar to focus bracketing /stacking ?

[graaja]

Originally Posted by Hells Bells

Looking at space has given me goosebumps ever since I recall looking up at sky. Thank you for these photos as they remind me why I get them.

True. When you think of how big and far these objects are in the space and how infinite the universe is, it does give goosebumps!

Originally Posted by RGK

Great thread Ganesh ...
OT: There is an optical lens company based out of Pondy which manufactures high precision lenses for satellites/telescopes across the world.

Thank you for the kind words! That is an interesting news that we have a company in Pondicherry that manufactures optics for telescopes across the world! Thank you for sharing this information.

Originally Posted by vredesbyrd

I absolutely love this thread!

Thank you for the kind words!

Originally Posted by sunsbhp

Hi Ganesh,

This is great stuff. Is this the only place you post or do you have any dedicated web sites with high-res images and the detailed stories ? Quite interested to read and understand, both the galaxy and the shooting.

Btw, what’s “integration time of 4 hours”? Do you take numerous photos and layer and stack - similar to focus bracketing /stacking ?

Hi Sunil, thank you for the kind words.

As of now, I post here, on my FB feed and a couple of WA groups related to astrophography. Below are some of the plans in the pipeline.

1. Start writing about my astrophotograpy activities in my personal blog.
2. Start making videos and post in my YouTube channel
3. Create an account in the website called astrobin and post my pictures there. I will do this once the quality of the pictures are a lot more better

I will share these information when I start.

[graaja]

Originally Posted by sunsbhp

Btw, what’s “integration time of 4 hours”? Do you take numerous photos and layer and stack - similar to focus bracketing /stacking ?

Sorry, I missed this question in my previous response.

Yes. You are right. Integration time the total exposure time of all the pictures put together. When I say total integration time of 90 minutes, I usually mention the number of frames and the exposure time of each frame, like 30 x 180 seconds. All these images are then aligned and stacked using software.

[V.Narayan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8

Many of our readers may have seen this video of Carl Sagan and the sagacious words he speaks.

Many years ago a NASA space craft was leaving the solar system when at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned its camera around to take one last photo of mother Earth across the vast expanse.

Carl Sagan's accompanying words spoken 25 years ago are even more relevant today than ever before. Certainly the humility is lost on several leaders of the world today.

[Bomi]

Super thread Grajaa. I did not know there was a subject called astrophotography, before your thread. Learnt something new. The images of the nebulas were super. Makes me wonder how vast our Universe is.

[sunsbhp]

Originally Posted by graaja

Sorry, I missed this question in my previous response...

Thanks and got more details from the intro details at the beginning of this thread. I had missed to read them.

One last q: do you use adaptors to connect the glass / telescope to a DSLR body ? And what alternate options do we have - if I can’t connect for whatever reasons ?

[graaja]

Originally Posted by sunsbhp

One last q: do you use adaptors to connect the glass / telescope to a DSLR body ? And what alternate options do we have - if I can’t connect for whatever reasons ?

Yes. To attach DSLRs to the telescope we need T-ring adapters meant for the particular DSLR and telescope. Once you connect the T-ring adapter to the telescope, it becomes like a lens and attaches to the DSLR. If you do not have this adapter, then connecting a DSLR is not possible. Next possibility is doing eye piece projection photography. There are simple cell phone adapters that can be used to place a cell phone camera over the eyepiece of the telescope and take pictures.

Search for the phrase "cell phone telescope adapter" and there are lots of options available in Amazon. The very first picture I took of Saturn was with such an adapter that I had 3D printed.

[graaja]

Setting up the Celestron 6SE

The refractor telescope setup with the William Optics GT81 with the effective focal length of 384mm is good for shooting large objects like large nebulae, large galaxies etc. But it falls short when it comes to shooting smaller objects. Most of the galaxies are too small for this setup. For example, below is the uncropped images of the Whirlpool galaxy and Sombrero galaxy that I shot with this setup.


See how small the targets are in the frame. The images have to be heavily cropped to be able to see the objects in detail. This also means lack of resolution on the target and it is difficult to bring out the minute details in the target.

The solution is to shoot these objects with a longer focal length. The other scope I have is a Celestron 6SE Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. This scope has a focal length of 1500mm. When I add a 0.63x field flattener / focal reducer, the focal length reduces to 945mm. But this is still more than twice the foal length of the refractor. So I decided to set up the Celestron 6SE for photography. Below were the problems I had to solve for this.

1. Need a mechanism to fix the guide scope to the telescope
2. Need an adapter to connect the telescope to the camera

For #1, I needed a dovetail on the top of the telescope and a vixen base to hold my guide scope. Got these from Vorion Scientific from Ahmedabad. Below picture shows the guide scope mounted on the telescope.




For #2, Celestron makes an adapter that has matching thread that fixes to the telescope on one side and thread matching the camera and spacers on the other side. However, this item on Amazon had a lead time of 3 to 4 weeks. As I had only a week at the most before monsoon sets in, and I wanted to capture some targets before monsoon, I decided to make this adapter myself. The adapter has a 2" 24TPI (24 threads per inch, 1.05mm pitch) on one side and 42x0.75mm (42mm diameter, 0.75mm pitch) on the other side. Made this model using FreeCAD an open source CAD modeling software and 3D printed it, and assembled the system.

The 3D model design.


3D printing.




Camera fixed to the telescope.




The full gear in action.

[graaja]

Leo Triplet, Hercules Globular Cluster and IC 4617

Once the setup was ready, got a couple of clear nights and managed to shoot a couple of targets.

The Leo Triplet:



The Leo Triplet, or the M66 Group, is a group of interacting spiral galaxies located in the northern constellation Leo. The group consists of the galaxies M65, M66 and NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy. The Leo Triplet lies at an approximate distance of 35 million light years from Earth. The NGC3628 is visible edge on, while M65 and M66 are inclined enough to reveal their spiral arms.

M65 has a diameter of 90,000 light years
M66 has a diameter of 95,000 light years
NGC3628 has a radius of 100,000 light years

This picture is an integration of 68 images each with an exposure time of 3 minutes. That makes it a total exposure time of 3 hours 24 minutes.

M13 - Hercules Globular Cluster:



Hercules globular cluster a.k.a M13 is a dense cluster of stars packed with several hundreds of thousands of stars in a very small area with a radius of just 72 light years. This cluster is situated at 22,180 light years away from the earth. The age of this cluster is 11.66 billion years.

This picture is an integration of 41 images each with an exposure time of 3 minutes. That makes it a total exposure time of 2 hours 3 minutes. I had posted a picture of this cluster a few posts before. But that was with the smaller focal length and smaller integration time.

Now comes the most exciting part. When I was closely looking at the image of M13, I found two galaxies had photo-bombed the picture. Both these galaxies are on the top right quadrant. One of them is prominently visible and is named NGC6207 and is situated some 36 million light years away from earth.

But the most interesting one is the smaller one closer to the cluster. This one is named IC 4617 and is situated a whopping 500 million light years away from earth. Yes. That is half a billion light years away from earth. When the light that we see today left that galaxy, the first vertebrates were forming in earth's oceans! How humbling can this be!



A close crop of the galaxy. It is just about 100 pixels wide in the frame.



Officially, this is the farthest object I have photographed

Thats all folks, for now. Monsoon has set in. I may not get clear skies for another two or three months. Will come back with more pictures once clear skies are back.