Schierer Space

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. This has been developing over the last two weeks, but I never got around to posting it. So consider this all of last week’s posts in one installment.

So the other day I broke down and walked into my local camera store, Johnson Camera (aside: they have a really crappy website). I had decided it was time to attempt to use my telescope, a Meade 127NT as a really long lens for my camera, a Canon 20D. My telescope, in camera lingo, would be a 1020mm f/8 “lens”. Technically, it’s not a lens at all, because it is a Newtonian reflector and has only mirrors.
To attach a camera body to a telescope, one needs a T-ring and a T-adapter. The T-ring has the correct flanges and features to connect to the camera body and is specific to the lens mount style (Canon EOS in my case). On the other side of the T-ring is a thread which allows it to attach to the T-adapter. The T-adapter is essentially a tube which mounts in the eyepiece holder of the telescope with threads on the other end to accept the T-ring. Sounds simple, right? And it should be… people have been attaching their cameras to telescopes pretty much since camera were invented. But it wasn’t.
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Two nice passes of the ISS and space shuttle Atlantis tonight. The first was in twilight and the pictures didn’t come out. This later pass was low in the sky but allowed me to get this picture with several other interesting objects… including Earth’s natural satellite. The two tracks nearly blend together in the resulting image. Atlantis is scheduled to land tomorrow, so there will probably not be another opportunity to snag a picture of them for a while.

If you haven’t been out to see the space station lately, I encourage you to do so. It’s brighter than ever. This particular image doesn’t do it justice, but it’s easily as bright as Jupiter under most conditions and can rival Venus in some circumstances. The easiest way to find out when the ISS will be visible is to find a nearby city on NASA’s page. I use the Syracuse info even though that’s 25 miles away. It’s close enough to get me outside at the right time. You can also run an applet for your exact location.

This is quite possibly the most beautiful astronomy picture that I have seen in a very long time. Bad Astronomy queued me to Dr. Travis Rector’s Astrophotography Digital site. Dr. Rector has several phenomenal images in his gallery. He captures most of them with the MOSAIC instrument at the The National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. (I had a chance to visit Kitt Peak while living in Tucson, AZ. Unfortunately, it was cloudy the night we went up and we never got back up for an observing session.) The MOSAIC-I CCD camera is 8192 x 8192 pixels by 16 bits. This image had an exposure time of 25 minutes in each of 3 filters. That would be a whopping 402 MB for the raw image (and 75 minutes of exposure time!) If you are similarly inspired, you can download a 113 MB TIFF image from Dr. Rector’s site on the NOAO space.

T.A.Rector and B.A.Wolpa/NOAO/AURA/NSF

K found this and sent me the link to this What’s Up - 365 Days of Skywatching calendar. For those of you (like me) who like the idea of the one page per day calendar, but hate the thought of all of those disposable pages it’s downloadable fully electronically (100% recycled electrons).