Some of you know that I picked up a hobby last summer – backyard astronomy. A couple years ago I came up with an idea for an automated sextant (“celestial navigation system”) using a digital camera, a wide field lens, and little box of electronics – something Raspberry-Pi-like – to process the images. No takers for my proposal but it got me looking at the sky. With that as an intro, here are a few images I created using pictures shot from the backyard.
Mars last weekend…
The picture above was created using the best 10% of about 8500 frames from a 60 second video sequence followed by some processing to pull out details.
Here’s Jupiter from a little earlier that night…
Again, best 10% of the frames from a 60 second video sequence plus some processing to pull out details. Not bad for a 6-inch diameter telescope. Honestly, the quality of consumer-grade telescopes boggles my mind.