Venus ...

[Greg Beetham]

I thought you might be interested to see a not very successful attempt to use eyepiece projection or eyepiece image acquisition, the eyepiece was a 2” Nagler Panoptic 35mm and the lens was a KM17-35 (I think) on the A100, the telescope (16” f4.5 truss frame dobsonian) didn’t have the compensating drive operational at the time so the sun was moving in the view while trying to get the camera lined up axially, centred and focussed before it disappeared from view again. Ah well it’s all good fun…sort of.
Greg

A100 KM17-35

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And a prime focus one from the KM5D KM18-200

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[sury]

Great shots Greg. So how does your set up looks like and works? Just curious.

With best regards,
Sury

[Greg Beetham]

Hi Sury, in the end it wasn’t anything special as I didn’t have any way of mounting the camera on my friend’s scope, I couldn’t access prime focus directly with the sensor in the camera because it was set up for viewing with eyepieces. It would be a big job to move the large mirror forward a few inches (not even possible actually) to get the focus further out so the camera could be used on the focuser itself, so what I did was pre-aim the scope with a bit of guesswork allowing for the sun to move (earth rotation) into position by the time I got a camera ready to try to focus it down the empty barrel of the focuser, I had the best success with the camera mounted on a tripod then I was quite often able to focus the camera on the focus plane (prime focus) of the telescope, some lenses were useless and some were ok for that as it turned out. Sorry I didn’t take any photos of the scope and camera in use but I think you get the idea.
Greg

A more general view of the 2” focuser with the sun living down in there.

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I knew I had a previous photo of the telescope…somewhere; we were trying out Murray’s newly invented compensating drive one night.

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[KevinBarrett]

Greg, I love your through-the-eye-piece photos. I think the difficult circumstances of an astronomical photo make it more interesting because all the people that had perfect seeing that day all could have gotten the very same shot. Yours has good seeing and the wonderful context of the tools and technologies which allowed you to see it. Gorgeous telescope, by the way; home-made I'm sure.

[Greg Beetham]

Hi KB long time no see, and thanks. Yes we had clear sky here in Townsville for the event but not appreciated by some, there was a column in the local paper about how overrated it was and how totally uninteresting and boring it was to see a black spot. I contemplated writing in to the paper too explain to her it’s not so much about watching a black spot event itself but the mathematical prediction and timing of the event, the exact moment of ingress and egress etc. and whether the plane through the sun followed the predicted path, but in the end I didn’t bother.
Murray spent about four years building that telescope, it’s a work of art, I used to go over and help quite often, mainly drink all his beer and give bad advice (just kidding). It being a 16” f4.5 (mirror from the US) is better by quite a bit than my 10” f6 for seeing faint things like galaxies and nebular but mine is ok for bright things like the planets. I remember once before the 16” was finished we saw a cyclone on Mars near the polar ice cap with my scope, (the one most visible from Earth, I forget if it’s the North or South ice cap) it looked a small white circle of cloud with a hole in the middle.
Jupiter gets black spots from its own moons as well and I’ve seen those quite often, sometimes the shadow starts going across the face of the planet but the moon casting the shadow is not yet in front of the planet and sometime a moon will disappear when it’s nowhere near Jupiter, (is going behind into the shadow of Jupiter) and that’s all to do with the angle of view from Earth at that time. Saturn has seven moons that I can see with my telescope, I struggle with Mimas (the smallest) it tends to fade and reappear in the eyepiece, it’s just the tiniest speck of light next to the rings.
But Murray’s telescope is the best of course when it comes to looking at things like the Tarantula nebula or even the giant slowly exploding star η Carina.
Greg

[KevinBarrett]

I have an 8" (f/8, I think?) that I made with my brother when we were kids. We sold fertilizer through a boy scouts fundraiser and hit pay-dirt (pardon my pun) when we sold several hundred bags to our father's employer. With our commission we went nuts and ordered the most ambitious mirror we could afford and built an awful-looking telescope around it. My nephews found it about fifteen years later and virtually destroyed it by throwing trash down the barrel and detaching the secondary mirror. I was unreasonably angry at them at the time, but I had to admit that I'd let it fall into disrepair on my own for the prior decade anyway. I'd love to get back into astronomy again, though--if I didn't already have enough expensive hobbies.

[Juanito200]

Greg- I have to second the thoughts of KB, he is far more eloquent than I. The level of craftsmanship in Murray's telescope is wonderful. The eyepiece pictures have a 3D effect absent in my shots...
Please pass on this bit of high praise from my wife Dannelle she said that his telescope is "absolutely gorgeous"! And trust me, Greg, that is high praise indeed!

Of course, I really want a new telescope now!hiccup! John

[Greg Beetham]

Thanks John I appreciate the kind comments, (tell the wife I will certainly pass on her & yours and Kevin’s comments to Murray about the telescope). When it comes to telescopes you will get the most aperture (bang for the buck) and functionality (but no motion cancelling drive) with a large mirror Dobsonian (alt az) style ‘push pull’ fitted with a Telrad or green laser or similar aiming sight, (you won’t have ‘go too’ functionality so one has to learn the night sky with a good sky atlas or use a laptop with an astronomy program showing what’s up in the sky from your location at the time) I would stay right away from any el-cheapo equatorial mounted scopes, they will drive you nuts….not kidding.
In America you have a huge selection of astronomical gear too choose from at really good prices, in fact it’s probably daunting searching through the sheer amount of things that are available. If you win the lotto there are some wonderful Schmidt-cassegrain scopes put out by Meade and Celestron that have all the mod cons, I have seen them in action and they are as good as their brochures claim.
Greg

[Birma]

Hi Greg - the telescope is a great piece of work - I think we've seen a picture of it before? I'm quite amazed by the attitude of your local paper . Such an important event for the further study of astronomy.

[aster]

Hi Greg, : )

I do remember being amazed at the telescope the first time I saw it a long time ago. Probably during one of the ecclipses that we experienced as a planet.

A heartful dedication it is by your friend but it certainly pays off by delivering wonderful images.


Thanks for sharing,

Yildiz

[Greg Beetham]

Thanks Birma and Yildiz, that shows how good my memory is, I can usually remember having posted a photo before…mostly.
Greg