My First Astro Photos

I feel its fitting to open this blog with some astro photos I took recently.  They are not very good, because I dont believe I have polished my technique as yet.  I have some ideas I want to try, especially on Jupiter, but also the moon.

The first image is one that I took thru the eyepiece of the moon.  I was holding the camera manually, so it could be sharper if I had a camera mount.  I do plan on taking some photos with the webcam on the eyepiece, but for this picture, I used a Kodak Easyshare 330 4 MP camera.

The next photo was a picture of Jupiter.  This photo was taken using a Logitech C-310.  It leaves a lot to be desired.  I have some ideas that may improve on the quality.  Some of this could be caused by horrible seeing during this time of the year here in Ohio.

Although there is not much detail, you can see the northern belt.    I took this as an .avi file.  I'm thinking the resolution could be better if I took a series of snapshots instead.  The next clear night, thats what I'm going to try.

This next photo is one of Jupiter and the 4 Galilean moons.

As you can see, the 4 moons are there, but look at the size of them.  This tells me the camera resolution was not too good, as they were pinpoints on the PC screen when I took these pictures, so a different setting is definitely required.

I was just playing with one of my avi's, and came up with this image of Jupiter.  Still not good, but it shows the dark band and a lighter equitorial band.

Stay tuned to this blog.  While I'm working through these issues, perhaps you can learn from my errors and if youre a seasoned astrophotographer, perhaps you can post a few hints that might help my technique.