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Equipment

Meade LX200GPS, 8"
Meade 700mm FL guide scope
Meade DSI-c & DSI-II Pro cameras
Philips SPC900NC webcam
Nikon 995 and Canon D-60 cameras
Wireless remote control
Dell D830 computer

 
Telescope set up in back yard in Bandera (golf course in background!).  The equipment is powered by two gel-cell batteries, and is remote controlled from the house desktop computer using a Radmin server over the home WiFi network.  The guide scope is only used for planetary photography to keep the image in the field of view at high magnification.

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Latest Photographs

North American Nebula:

Taken August, 2010.  This image was taken with a Canon T2i digital camera (18 M pixels!) set to 6400 ASA.  A Tamron 70-210mm f/2.8 lens was used and set to about 72mm.  The camera was mounted on an inexpensive equitorial mount, and the exposure was 20 seconds.  This is a great combination for very wide field astrophotography (see below).

Also taken in August 2010 with the Canon T2i, this wide field image was taken with an 18mm f/3.5 lens.  Exposure time was 30 seconds at 6400 ASA.  The Andromeda nebula (M-31) is clearly visable as marked.

NGC-7293, the Helix Nebula.  Imaged near Ft. Davis, TX - August 2009. 

This image and the image below were taken with a Meade DSI-II for L and DSI-c for the RGB.  A f/3.3 focal reducer was also used.

NGC7293 

M-16, the Eagle Nebula.   Imaged near Ft. Davis, TX - August 2009.  

Eagle Nebula 

Close up of the central portion of M16.  This was taken using the f/6.3 focal reducer.

Pillars of creation

Jupiter with moons Europa, Ganymede and Io.  Imaged near Ft. Davis, TX - August 15, 2009. 

Imaged with Philips SPC900NC webcam and processed with Registax and Photoshop CS3.

Jupiter


Jupiter 8-16-098-16-2009 - red spots

Neptune and its' moon Triton, imaged near Ft. Davis, TX - August 2009.  Imaged with Philips SPC900NC webcam and processed with Registax and Photoshop CS3.  This was my first image of the blue planet Neptune!

Neptune 2009

Uranus was also imaged, but its' moons were too dim to see.  Not very exciting, but also the first image of this planet. 

Seeing was not good enough to use a Barlow lens for any of these shots (Jupiter, Neptune or Uranus).  The webcam was used with the Meade 8" LX200.

Uranus 2009

M-64 ("Black Eye nebula") photographed on 5/18/2009 using DSI-2 pro for "L" and DSI-c for color.  Twenty six 20 second "L" images were captured, preprocessed and stacked using Nebulosity-2.  Final image processing was with PhotoShop CS3.

M64

 

 

Horsehead with DSI-II pro camera on 2-22-09.

horsehead DSI-II 2/2009 


 

 

Slideshow of selected Astrophotographs

These were taken from various Texas locations including Bandera, Lake Whitney and the Davis Mountains State Park.

Click here to see the COMET page.


 
Iridium Flare photographed at the Davis Mountains on June 4, 2005.  The flare is a reflection from Iridium satellite antennas (the sat-phone satellites).  To find flare schedules for your location, visit http://www.heavens-above.com/.

Other pictures from that trip here.

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On June 27,2005 a German amateur astronomer discovered a 14 magnitude supernova in M-51.  A photo I took on June 1, 2005 is shown here.  Mouse over that image to see the published image with the supernova (at the end of the arrow).