midnight
18-06-2011, 03:26 AM
Greetings All!
There have been some fantastic photos of this event.
I tried prime photography with the 40D into my LXD55 8"SN. In a rush and still half asleep & woke up 45min later than I planned, I got the mount out, scope on and turned on Autostar. rushing, I just did a 1 star alignment and off it went then I heard the motor pitch up higher and yeak!! :eyepop: no counterweight and the OTA is now at nearly 45 deg and just about to topple over. I cut the power, tripod tethering on falling, tripped over the dog, on the ground with the OTA still dangly but a lot of noise as I landed nicely into a table which had 2 sheets of 1.8m sheet steel and you can imagine the noise at 4:30AM. Ohh dear!
Anyway, scope and tripod were fine and off I went (+ counterweights + many dogs barking in the neighbourhood).
1st two are 40D prime into the 8"SN. 3 Sec ISO800 and then 11 sec ISO 400. final is my 1st attempt at animated Gif after seeing some nice animations in this forum as I had some shots albeit some different in exposure - I was not planning on doing an anim. Interesting to see the movement of the moon w.r.t the stars. In hindsight I would have loved to do an animation of the moon against the stars.
Hope you like.
Cheers,
Darrin...
PS - REMEMBER to put your counterweights on :D
There have been some fantastic photos of this event.
I tried prime photography with the 40D into my LXD55 8"SN. In a rush and still half asleep & woke up 45min later than I planned, I got the mount out, scope on and turned on Autostar. rushing, I just did a 1 star alignment and off it went then I heard the motor pitch up higher and yeak!! :eyepop: no counterweight and the OTA is now at nearly 45 deg and just about to topple over. I cut the power, tripod tethering on falling, tripped over the dog, on the ground with the OTA still dangly but a lot of noise as I landed nicely into a table which had 2 sheets of 1.8m sheet steel and you can imagine the noise at 4:30AM. Ohh dear!
Anyway, scope and tripod were fine and off I went (+ counterweights + many dogs barking in the neighbourhood).
1st two are 40D prime into the 8"SN. 3 Sec ISO800 and then 11 sec ISO 400. final is my 1st attempt at animated Gif after seeing some nice animations in this forum as I had some shots albeit some different in exposure - I was not planning on doing an anim. Interesting to see the movement of the moon w.r.t the stars. In hindsight I would have loved to do an animation of the moon against the stars.
Hope you like.
Cheers,
Darrin...
PS - REMEMBER to put your counterweights on :D