This will be a list of objects, i hope.

M31

M34

The observing conditions have been less than stellar the past month which has made astrophotography difficult. Not only have I been trying to get out to the observatory for class-work, I've also been waiting patiently for some good evenings to get my new scope out. However, I have found that time-lapse videos are a good alternative when the skies are clouded over. Here are some of my recent shots.

20091108 - Time Lapse of Eastern Sky

20091031 - Halloween Skies

20091027 - Time-Lapse at Standeford Observatory

20091026 - Moon and Jupiter Time-Lapse

My last trip out to South Dakato with Chris inspired me to do some longer time-lapse shots. Pretty easy, set the exposure duration and interval, press start, and go back inside where it is warm!

Time-Lapse at Standeford Observatory from Jeff Henline on Vimeo.

Well, the night sky at the moment is plum full of action! Saturn's reign is coming to an end as it is setting around midnight. However, as it leaves us for quite some time, it has brought in just about all the rest. Jupiter is rising along with Neptune around 12:15 and shortly behind them, about an hour later, Uranus. Mars, Venus, and the moon complete the picture at 3:15am. What a party!

Ricardo and I were out from 11pm to 4am friday night (and saturday morning) and caught a lot of the action. Neptune was the only planet that proved too elusive for imaging with the relatively small 5" aperture of the telescope. No worries though, at almost 4.5 trillon km (2.7 miles), 30 times further from the sun than earth, i'm sure you'll all forgive me. As for the others, enjoy! We'll work our way, in ascending order of coolness.

I'm pretty psyched that I've now caught a glimpse of all the planets but Mercury. In addition to seeing so many planets, we also got visits from three different police officers scoping the area! Two were interested enough to sneak a peak of Jupiter.

Uranus

(~3 trillion km away!)

Link to video

Venus

Link to video

Mars

Link to video

Jupiter

Link to video...read more

Last night, after resetting the Autostar controller to faculty defaults, my scope can now track objects in the sky automatically! This has made using more powerful eyepieces a possibility. Tracking Saturn by manually controlling the motors has been difficult. As soon as you take your eye off the planet to swap out an eyepiece, the planet disappears and finding it again is challenging, especially when decreasing the field of view dramatically with more powerful eyepieces.

Here is a picture of Saturn with using a 2x barlow lens in front of the webcam. Image has been adjusted for exposure.

(click here for source video)