A Hobby!

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.