I've been meaning to post an explanation on the night shot of me and the telescope. Sunday was science day. I wrote some groovy code at the office, worked on a homemade electric lawnmower, built new water rockets (THZ article coming soon!), tweaked a new launch-pad invention, made ginger beer, and experimented with the telescope. Many daylight and nighttime hours were spent messing with the telescope.

Last week, after some fuzz ball shots of Comet Near, I searched the web and discovered the Digital Astro group on Yahoo. Looks like a great group and when you sign up they email an excellent introductory guide (FAQ). Buoyed by new-found knowledge I got out the telescope, camera, computer, usb cables and hubs, and set out to figure out how to take reliable time-lapse telescope photographs BEFORE it got dark.

Here's how the song goes: the Mac-bone is connected to the usb hub-bone, the usb hub-bone is connected to the camera-bone, the camera-bone is connected to lens-adaptor-reducer-bone, the lens-adaptor-reducer-bone is connected to the 40mm-lens-bone, and the 40mm-lens-bone is connected to the telescope-bone. Catchy, eh?

Canon makes an app called Remote Capture which is a free download and works on many of their models. It works on PCs and Macs (OSX), allowing the computer to control the camera remotely (remote being defined by the length of your USB cable I guess). It also lets you set up a sequence for automatically capturing photos over time. I used it last year for this fun bird shoot.

Unfortunately the preview window is low-rez and not the silver bullet I need to help focus the camera on dim astronomical objects. That stands to reason, since the connection is lowly USB 1.0 speed (I see they've added a firewire option...top of the line models?). I played with the settings, practiced the comet setup and put it away until nightfall.

Did I mention the toads? Those cute toads with their singing and jumping and croaking? Well, just like rock-n-roll, toad singing leads to the back seat of your parent's sedan and next thing you know there are babies on the way. Or, in this case, the shallow end of the pond with big, egg-filled Mrs. Toad. Do you realize how many eggs a pair of toads lay? A zillion and one. They lay them in long string-like strands. Everywhere!

After this weekend the pond looked like someone's sweater got unraveled or the pond is being wired for surround sound. Click the image, if you dare, for more detail.

Back to the telescope. By this time it's getting late and the stars are quite bright. Maybe that smudge over there is Comet Neat? Or maybe that one? Hmm, how about this one? It took a while but I finally found it. As a bonus we could see a tail this time and it wasn't as fuzzy.

Out comes the rest of the gear...I won't sing the song again. Telescope is hooked into the electro-gizmos, laptop is fired up, Canon software tweaked and adjusted. Since I'd only done this in the bright of day I experimented with a few of the manual aperture settings to get an optimal picture. Figured out the best one, configured the timer option to take a fifteen second exposure every minute for the next hour, check, and double checked...go!

At which point I sat back with a sigh, looked to the sky, and saw that it had filled with clouds. End of the line.

So I took a photo of another fuzz ball...me.

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