My first Astro image.

For an amateur astronomer, it’s an Amazing feeling to take my first astro image! I have been trying to take a picture of the moon for quite some time now. Finally I have some success. Believe me guys it’s a treat.

It took me a few months to figure out what the problem was. It was a focal length issue and the webcam image sensor was not able to reach the focal point of my Zhumell 10 inch. I took out the image sensor from the webcam and placed it half way into the eyepiece hole. Luckily, the hole was big enough to accommodate the image circuitry. I taped this arrangement inside the eyepiece to avoid any disturbances. With little adjustments to the eyepiece focusing...BAM! I had the image of the moon.

So for guys who are trying to take a picture of the moon with a webcam and you see that your image is blurry no matter what you do.. You know it’s a focal length issue. Just try to do what I did above and you should be able to get a view. I used wxAstrocapture to record an AVI file and then used Registax 6 to process the image. I know that there are tons of images of the moon out there... but for me this image will always be special.

My first astro image! A processed file.



Specifications of the instruments used:

A Zhumell 10 inch dobsonian (No equitorial mount)

A logitech webcam (CCD sensor, non moded)

and A laptop :)

Many more images to follow...

Meteor Lights Up Georgia Sky

A Man-Size Meteor From Comet Lit Up Georgia Sky yesterday...
The 6-foot-wide (1.8-meter) space rock barrelled into Earth's atmosphere at 10:47 p.m. EDT on May 20 (0247 GMT on May 21), about 66 miles (106 kilometers) above the city of Macon, Ga. Two NASA all-sky cameras, both located in northwest Georgia, tracked the resulting meteor and captured it on video.

Just a thought though!

All of this is cool.. But we have advanced so much in space technology that NASA should be able to build a "go getter" space shuttle that goes outside of earths atmosphere, breaks down the meteor and gets a part of the meteor safely down to earth. I am sure that there would have been an era of space history lost when the meteor burned down to ashes, when it entered earths atmosphere.

Yesh.
Posted through my Iphone.