The Drinking Bird

Way back when I was into amateur astronomy and astrophotography. You can see some of my previous work here. Fiscal realities at the time (college student) forced me to get rid of my equipment and go on a hiatus from the skies.

Recently, I've been itching to pick up where I left off, but even though I make just a tad bit more money now, I want to ease my way back in. So, I've been trying some simple astrophotos using a couple of different methods.

The first image at the left is my first attempt at using a digital SLR and just a tripod. I think it turned out fairly well. This was taken using my Canon Rebel XSi, with a 28-105mm lens set at 28mm (~45mm effective). I took a series of twenty 30 second exposures at f/5.6 and registered and stacked them using DeepSkyStacker. This image was saved as a .JPEG at the cameras highest setting. Besides the stacking, the images is otherwise unprocessed.

I've always wanted to try a barn door sky tracker, so after reading up on and checking out a few designs, I cobbled together the contraption you see on the right here.

The link above has a bunch of links that details how these work, so I won't go into detail here. I threw this one together in about an hour with about $20 worth of materials (not including the ball mount and tripod) and decided to try and give it a try tonight. I'm glad I did because the skies ended up being excellent. The Milky Way's Great Rift was clearly evident even during twilight and Sagittarius had that cloudy look that you get on nights of exceptional seeing. Since I already had gotten a shot of that area, I decided to give Cygnus a try. The image below is the result.

I had to cut things short because it was a weeknight (I have to work at 7am) and my lens filter acquired some condensation on account I have no dew shield for it. Gonna have to fix that.

There's not nearly as much detail in this show because I was only able to get six 1 minute exposures before my lens fogged up. That's ok, since I just wanted to test out the barn door and see if it was worth the effort (until I can get a proper equatorial mount). This was, again, taken with my 20-105mm set at 28mm (45mm effective), 800 ISO, with automatic noise reduction (dark frame) turned on. DeepSkyStacker picked the 4 best then registered and stacked them (no further processing was done). Making this effectively a 4 minute exposure. Even with the very rough polar alignment and only advancing the screw a quarter turn every 15 seconds, I don't see an evidence of stars trailing. All in all an encouraging test result. I'm hoping to get out over the weekend when I can stay later, and fabricate a dew shield for my lens. I'm also interested to try taking some shots using a longer focal length and seeing how well the barn door does once I properly align it with the pole.