Jul 162010
A bit more practice seems to be getting me there. Not a whole lot of luck with the standard lens… the minimum F/3.5 just doesn’t produce photos as good as the F/1.4 with the low-light lens, but the low-light lens is a fixed 55mm, which means it’s zoomed in kinda tight. What I need is an F/1.4 lens with a 35mm or smaller zoom. I saw a zoom lens down to 10mm with an aperture down to F/2.4 (maybe 2.6?), that might make for some interesting shots.
7 Responses to “Milky Way: not too shabby”
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I am so bummed that you can’t see something that looks like that with your naked eyes. That would be cool.
Actually it would promote the desire to travel in space if you could see something like that easily.
Maybe a desire to learn math and travel into space could be promoted by creating giant orbiting banners with mathematical formulas printed on them. Like:
lim
x→x0 ƒ(x) = y0 ↔ (∀ε>0)(∃δ)(∀x)( | x – x0 | < δ → | ƒ(x) – y0 | < ε)
Oops it all ended up in the subscript before.
lim ƒ(x) = y0 ↔ (∀ε>0)(∃δ)(∀x)( | x – x0 | < δ → | ƒ(x) – y0 | < ε)
x→x0
It looks a lot like that through advanced night vision gear.
The thing that looks amazing through that is the Andromeda Galaxy, where you can see this big spiral hanging up in the sky, as large in diameter as the full moon.
That might be a worthwhile target for Scott to photograph also.
> That might be a worthwhile target …
Took a stab at that last year:
http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=3954
Still don’t have the equipment (a functional motorized equatorial mount) to do that justice. I suspect if I had, I might be able to take some interesting shots of M-31. Anyone care to donate such a mount to me?
If all the mount has to carry is the weight of the camera, and not a telescope, it shouldn’t cost that much to make one.
If you are ambitious, how about getting a 24 hour electric clock and figuring out some way to move the camera by using the hour hand attachment? It would take some careful balancing of the camera attachment, but should be doable, as the hour hand’s very slow rotation should give it pretty good torque.
Ideally, it should do one rotation every 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds to match up with the rotation of the sky, but unless you intend to do multi-minute exposures 24 hours should work just fine (the clock may have some sort of fast/slow adjustment that could get it to go the exact right speed)