brainwagon

So, in an effort to get back to blogging about things that may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but which provide some measure of joy to me, I present something that I have not blogged about, but which might be of interest to others: my astrophotography tinking using a nifty gadget: the […]

Got home around 11:00PM, and while there was a lot of high clouds, there was a break that revealed the stars of Cassiopeia and Andromeda which I snapped using NightCap Pro on my iPhone 6. The clouds did scatter a lot of light around, I mangled the image a bit using Gimp to make the […]

While I was dinking around with my binoculars during the eclipse last night, I decided to try to hunt for an application which would allow me to have better control over the exposures etc. on my iPhone. I found the program Manual, which gives SLR like controls (more on that some other time) but I […]

Tonight was a total lunar eclipse… Lunar eclipses are pretty, but not super rare. Tonight’s started before moonrise, and by the time I got out to snap a picture or two, totality was already over. More interesting perhaps than the eclipse was the optical gadget that I pulled out to have a look. Over the […]

Since I stopped actively working on building telescopes, there have been numerous bits of technology that are now widely and cheaply available, and that can be used to implement new, interesting functionality. In particular I hadn’t considered that the same kind of sensors which are used to control quadcopters could be used to determine the […]

At the Chabot Telescope Maker’s workshop, we make a lot of use of the Ronchi test. It’s great for figuring out gross defects and problems with your mirror. Back in the day, I wrote a simple program to generate Ronchi patterns for a given parabolic mirror. Here are six Ronchi patterns generated by my code […]

I forgot to mention my chat with Gert, another telescope making regular up at the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. He’s a skilled astrophotographer and all around interesting guy, and has embarked on a campaign to do some high quality imaging of Jupiter. You can see some of his results here. Pretty nifty stuff. I copied […]

Tom pointed me at this awesome article about an experiment run as part of the BBC programming Stargazing Live. Basically, they asked their viewers to go outside with their cell phones and take a picture of the night sky with their cell phones and upload the (almost entirely black) images to a website. They then […]

Earlier this week, I snapped a couple of iPhone photos of the partial solar eclipse with my iPhone, through coworker Eric’s mighty spiffy little Questar, equipped with a filter. Despite the glare, I was shocked at how much detail was actually available, especially for sunspot group 2192, which has been busy kicking off solar flares […]

Last night, I took the scope out again and tried to get a few quick images of Saturn. My focus was really soft, but this was what I came up with after processing the video with Registax. It’s actually pretty comparable to the level of detail that I could see through the Meade ETX 90 […]

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I had gotten a Microsoft Cinema HD webcam to convert for use in astrophotography. Today, I got my Meade ETX-90 out, and decided to give it a test on the daytime moon. Sadly, my mount’s tracking capabilities seem to be pretty glitchy: the autostar seems to be […]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been a bit more intrigued by one of my old interests: telescopes and astrophotography. During the transit of Venus, I hooked up an old black and white video camera, and tried to take some snapshots, but wasn’t really pleased with the results. So, I decided to try to adapt […]

I did try to take some video of the transit, but the higher magnification created by the rather small imager in the video camera, combined with too much AGC and a lot of wind buffeting didn’t make for very interesting imagery compared to the surprisingly excellent iphone snaps I had before. But just to give […]

Yesterday, I setup my Meade ETX-90 outside with a solar filter in the courtyard between buildings at work so that my coworkers could have a glimpse of this rather rare astronomical event. I had a pretty steady stream of people coming out to have a peek throughout the day. I managed to shoot some video […]

I thought I’d give my video camera a test. I considered Saturn, but by the time I got outside the weather was getting colder and blustery, and I wasn’t feeling very good, so I just managed to snap some quick video of the moon. The wind was buffeting the telescope, and I was impatient, but […]