Night Skies Network

This is the coolest thing I have seen for a while: http://www.nightskiesnetwork.com/ - astronomers broadcasting live using a Mallincam (basically a high end integrated video camera attached to a telescope). You get a live feed of whatever the astronomer is observing and you can interact through a chat window. The strangest (and oddly compelling) thing is that the astronomer can broadcast audio - so you can make comments, ask questions etc through the chat window and hear a verbal audio response. Weird but cool at the same time.

I was just watching a stream of M92 (a globular cluster in Hercules) and then M57 (the Ring Nebula) through some guy's C8. Really amazing to see the color and detail in M57. I am going to be adding a Mallincam to my wish list ...

M3 - globular cluster

This is my first DSO (deep sky object) - M3, a globular cluster comprising 500,000 stars. M3 is approximately 30,000 light years from earth and is thought to be 8 billion years old. The picture consists of 10 separate shots, all 15 second exposures at ISO 1600 - stacked using Deep Sky Stacker.

First astrophoto

I recently bought my first dslr camera - the Canon EOS T2i. It is easy to connect the camera to the telescope in prime focus using a T-ring adapter. The camera is controlled using Canon's EOS utility - which makes focusing much easier than trying to focus through the camera's screen (although still not foolproof).

This photo was 1/500 sec at ISO 200, f/6.3 (using a reducer/corrector attached to the telescope, which is usually f/10).

I tried to stack multiple shots using both Registax and Avistack - but encountered memory errors. It could be the PC or it could be the fact that the T2i produces huges files. I am clearly at the beginning of a very steep learning curve here!