UPCOMING RENDEZVOUS

There’s nothing to see here in the sky this weekend – clouds all over! But that’s okay, all my hope lies in the next weekend. We’ll have a partial lunar eclipse in Germany on next Saturday (August 16th) at 11:10pm MESZ. I’ll be prepared!

IMPROVEMENTS

By using the gasket and the old film package I improved my telescope / webcam setup today. That should allow me to easily search for a celestial object and as soon as it’s found, fix the webcam and capture pictures. In the meantime I tried open source software to do some finishing on the already taken pictures of the moon. Though I have to admit that I wasn’t able to really improve the quality of the sources, the software came along with some nice features, e.g. you could split an AVI-film into the separate frames. With that you are able to obtain dozens of photos by just taking a few seconds of film.
I’ll be on holiday shortly. I’ll take everything with me and hopefully will be able to provide some more photos afterwards.

NEW EXPERIMENT / RESULT

I spent the last night outside to watch the moon with the SETUP described before. It took me some time to set everything up and I nearly took 300 shots to get 20 more ore less good pictures. But I think they are pretty good for the first try. You’ll find the results below, click the pictures to enlarge them.









Actually I know that what I did is kind of amateurish, so these are the next steps to improve things: there is open source software available that allows you to take a series of pictures or a video and correlate them. This should give excellent results. Furthermore I’ll try to improve the cam housing.

To get an impression how quickly the moon passes the lens watch the video below:

DIRT RIDE

That’s exactly how I like it! We had rain this morning, which isn’t really remarkable because I live in Northern Germany. But I badly wanted to take a ride with my bike. So I put aside my worries and saddled my mountain bike. I took a tour on my favourite trails which had got wet and muddy over the last night. Lovely! So I really enjoyed my ride though I got wet from time to time. Afterwards I myself was covered all over with mud.

NEW EXPERIMENT

I think I’ll try another experiment and get my refraction telescope from the garret this weekend. Furthermore I’ll try to attach my webcam to it and take some digital photos of the moon. That’s what I actually want to test since a long time. I’m more than interested if this would work. I’ll keep you updated on the results…