Saturday, November 06, 2010

Ahh, Gear!

Wonderful evening, tonight! Clear skies, cold temperatures, scope gear, a good mate and a bottle of Guinness! It doesn't get too much better than that. I took my astrophotography rig out tonight to test out the new D7000 body. I met my friend, Scott, out at an alternative dark sky site we'd found on the outskirts of Austin. I spent several hours out there, messing with the D7000 and taking some test shots. I'll post them on the blog here if they come out decently. For now, here's a shot of my new "office"! The D7000 on my 80mm ED refractor, with my Meade DSI guide camera on my William Optics 66mm refractor - all atop my Celestron CGEM which, as usual, behaved admirably tonight through PHD Guiding. Ahh, bliss!

The nifty thing about the D7000 for astro use is the live view with zoom. When I GOTO an object that I want to image, I can turn on "live view" mode, and then zoom into a star that exists in the field of view. Then, I can achieve very sharp, tight focus in preparation for light frame collection. It's wonderful, much better than trial and error!

While I am still processing the images, I can already see some nice, sharp images coming through...

3 comments:

Jared said...

Live view makes things much better! If you don't already have one pickup a bahtinav mask. They're a great addition to live view and make focus much easier!

Phil said...

Hey Jared!

Yah, that's next!!!! :-)

Cheers,
Phil

Sidewalk Universe said...

Nice set up! Now how do you work that stuff?