The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • TGIF

    It’s been one hell of a week at work and I’m utterly exhausted. So much so that it’s clear outside and I’ve decided to stay in and head to bed early; now that’s tired. I have more work to do this weekend but will just do that Sunday so I can get a day of rest in.

  • Another night out

    It was clear outside last night, so I spent some time trying to get a better picture of Jupiter. The results are decent:

    Jupiter

    I also got an image of M37, a cluster in Auriga. It looks way too dark on my CRT but ok on my laptop’s LCD. So be forewarned that it may be appear black 🙂
    M37

  • NBC

    My suspicions are correct. 42.85% of NBC’s Prime Time lineup consists of Law and Order shows of some form (9 hours out of 7 days * 3 hours per day). And they are adding a new series to the lineup.. when does it end!

  • Fourth up: Jupiter

    Jupiter came out pretty crappy because of air turbulance, hopefully I’ll get some better shots in the future.

  • Third up: Orion Nebula

    This is my first attempt at any “deep space objects”. It didn’t turn out great but it’s something.

  • Second up: Moon

    I took quite a few pictures of the moon, they can be seen here. All pictures taken with my old scope have been moved into a sub-album.
    Here’s one of them.

  • First up: Saturn

    This is made up of some 150 images, then the brightness adjusted in photoshop. Let me know what you think! Be sure to check out the full size image.

  • Pictures Coming Up

    I spent 4 hours tonight using my new camera and telescope. I have roughly 1000 images to go through and begin processing; at first glance I have some amazing pictures. I’ll try and get a few online in the next day or so… stay tuned!

  • Powershot A510

    I bought a new camera today, the Cannon Powershot A510. Its sole purpose will be to use in conjunction with my telescope – the reason I bought it is that it allows me to manually set the exposure length (up to 15 seconds) which my Sony doesn’t.

    Provided it gets clear in the next few nights, I plan on trying it out.

  • Webcam Image

    first webcam image

    So that’s my first attempt of using my new telescope with a webcam. That image is made up of 20+ ‘stacked’ frames of recorded video. There are a couple more like it of Saturn here but they aren’t much to look at since I just used default values in the stacking software for all the features I didn’t understand.