Thursday, June 12, 2008

Astronomy during busy days

The moon was hanging outside last night when I arrived my home at around 10pm something, the sky was hazy, and the moon was too bright to do anything. We got cloud, big and small, thick and thin. It's just not the right sky to do astronomy.

Who will try to setup the equipments under this kind of situation? Yes, I'll! To me, setting up my equipments is a very nice experience by itself, I don't have to expect good results, I don't have to wait for the best conditions. Whenever I got chance, I will want to do something. It is especially true when I'm doing all these inside my home. All I will need to do is:

1. power up the LXD55, move it close to the window
2. open the window
3. put the scope there, attach any camera, and done

As most of us will agree, having new gear will be another big motivation. Believe it or not, new stuff even as small as a new memory card, or even a new adapter will bring you joy. Astronomy is quite a complicated hobby, you always have so many adapters to fool around, so it's always nice to try out different combinations before you do something serious. And therefore, those sub-optimal skies are best used to test equipments.

I tried out my Canon 450D + Canon 200mm f2.8L last night, the level of chromatic aberration is very low, less than 1 pixel I would say, and it's contrasty and sharp too. Remember the sky was pretty bad.

Who said auto-exposure and auto-focusing won't work? It works for the moon at least, but yes, it really won't work for anything else except probably only also for the sun.

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