Curragh Observing Session

Sean Morris, David Brannigan, David Power and myself headed over to the Curragh after Seanie's excellent talk to KAS on Friday night.

Me being an absolute beginner several attempts were made to align the telescope but after a few false starts I got going with Seanie's and Dave Powers help.

We kept mostly to Jupiter and Moon with an occanisally glimipse towards Saturn. I tried several attempts at some astrophotography and these are some of my more succesful attempts.

(To view large size click on them )

Jupiter

Moon with David Brannigan's LX-90 with a 26mm eye-piece

Top-right hand quadrant to the moon, again with the LX-90 and the 26-mm eyepiece

David Power and David Brannigan talking while finishing up

Wow Darragh, you really got a nice shot of Jupiter there! Was that at projection through the eyepiece? What exposure time is it? Your second Moon shot has a 3D efect due to the aberration on it!

Seanie,

Jupiter shot was using prime focus, I couldn't get the eyepiece projection working on my ETX-125, the exposure was 2/5sec on ISO100.

The exposure and colour temperature were corrected in Rawshooter then the image was cropped and scaled down in Photoshop while runnning an unsharpen mask to sharpen it up.

I didn't think it was aberration, but I think it adds to the image

A great first attempt Darragh! The Jupiter one is great!

Bart.

I'm really impressed with the amount of detail that came out on the Jupiter shot! Pit you can't see the moons hovering around it though.
Was a good night! Hopefully we can organise another observing session soon enough.

Thanks for the lovely shots Darragh!

Dave P

Looks like you had a good evening in it, keep up the photography, it can be rewarding and challenging.