Glenn Graham's Hobby Stuff
Amateur Astronomy and Astrophotography
Beaverton Chamber Symphony
Latest Astro images
(June 16, 01) Third attempt to video the International Space Station. Getting closer to what I'm hoping for. Tonight everything went well except that the International Space Station was low in the sky where turbulence fuzzed up the image, it wasn't as bright as the previous night and turned out underexposed, and the image size is still too small. I've been using a focal reducer so I'll go without it next time to increase its size. Tracking will be more difficult however. (June 30, 01) Combined 4 sets of 10 frames from video for single, clearer, animated image.
(May 26, 01) Near pass of asteroid 1999 KW4 - The asteroid was at a distance of about 3,000,000 miles which is about 13 times farther away than the Moon. It is at least 1.4 km in size and appears to be a binary system with a seperation of at least 2km between them and whose sizes differ by a factor of at least 3.
(May 21, 01) While STV isn't the camera of choice for producing exquisite, leading edge ccd images (great guider though), it makes getting mediocre images fun and easy. I attended our local astronomy club's monthly meeting and was bummed that I wasn't able to attend our dark site star party the weekend before. When I arrived home, the scope was sitting in the driveway (under the terrible Beaverton city lights) still polar aligned from the night before. I decided to try a few
favorites and a few objects I hadn't tried before. I managed to get four
galaxies, three planetaries, and a star cluster. I also took four images of the
asteroid Pallas during the 2 hour session. New objects, for me, were Pallas,
the Cat's Eye nebula (loved it ever since I saw the Space Telescope photo), the
Sunflower Galaxy, and the Owl nebula. I think the ease of capturing recognizable images will make the camera fun for presentations at public star parties.
 Pallas Asteroid - 22:37 |
 Sombrero Galaxy - M104 |
 Needle Galaxy - NGC4565 |
 Pallas Asteroid - 23:15 |
 Sunflower Galaxy - M63 |
 Whirlpool Galaxy - M51 |
 Pallas Asteroid - 23:54 |
 Owl Planetary Nebula - M97 |
 Cat's Eye Planetary Nebula - NGC 6543 |
 Pallas Asteroid - 08:53 |
 Ring Planetary Nebula - M57 |
 Great Cluster in Hercules - M13 |
