Skip to main content

First steps in astronomy



This post is dedicated to one of my hobbies: astronomy. When i was little kid i was getting inspired from the stars, the planets, and space in general. Later i found my self reading late in night about light speed and time paradoxes. So, last year i said, ok why not looking at the stars using telescopes? Telescopes are not so expensive (small ones) and there is plenty of information on the net to start playing with them.

I decided to go with a Celestron 70AZ Astromaster. I selected refractor because it has less maintenance compared with the reflectror (in reflector telescopes, everything must be aligned properly and the mirror loses its reflectiveness by time). After using the telescope for a couple of nights i realized that i should have selected the eq version, as it has better tripod. Moreover, sometimes i 'm missing... light: the telescope is very small for deep space objects, such as nebulas or nearby galaxies. The 90eq was more proper in this case.

Among with other parts i bought also a small set of filters and eyepieces, but nothing expensive. Later i bought also a 32mm eyepiece because i wanted to have a winder view of the stars. A moon filter is necessary as it hard to see it through the telescope due to high brightness. In one of my next posts i will describe my first set of eyepieces, and to give you an idea what to expect with this telescope.

UpClose G2 10x50 Porro Binocular
Celestron Upclose G2 10X50 Porro

Apart of that i had one more tool to play with astronomy. Telescopes have really small field of view, starting from 2.5* and going down to 0.9* or less. For this reason i bought a chap set of binoculars: the Celestron Upclose G2 10X50 Porro model. 10 goes for the zoom and 50 goes for the diameter (in mm). Going for bigger binoculars requires the usage of tripod. Even with mine mid-powered  set i had problems, just imagine using some monsters of 12x70.


The last, but not least tool i used was the  sky map of google in my smartphone. It is really help full especially in the first days, that i didn't have any idea on what i was looking. Later i started also using star maps and the Stellarium program to identify the star constellations.

What ever you choose as a first equipment at the beginning you will need only your eyes and... a clean dark sky (not so obvious to find...).

Here is a first picture of moon using my point and shoot camera and the Astromaster 70AZ:

A photo taken using point and shoot camera and the Astromaster 70AZ and 20mm eyepiece.
A photo taken using point and shoot camera and the Astromaster 70AZ and 20mm eyepiece.



Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...
Read more

RTL-SDR Blog V3 Arrived

I recently bought a new RTL dongle that supports Direct Sampling that allows frequencies less than 40Mhz. In particular, the model I ordered was the RTL-SDR BLOG V.3. DONGLE that was really cheap compared with other solution. It still can't reach the quality of the other more expensive receivers, but it still a step up. The Dongle comes with a long external antenna. The RTL dongle. So, the question now is how better is from my old SDR. I did a check with the RTL power tool to see what is the difference. My old SDR Dongle (Fitipower FC0013) has coverage from 22 to 1100 MHz. The new Dongle RTL Blog V3 a has Rafael Micro R820T has coverage from 24 - 1766 MHz, but it also contains Direct Sampling that allows for High Frequencies. A word of warning here, the reception using Direct Sampling is very bad, especially if you connect the antenna without a filter band or/and preamplifier. I did experiments using the rtl_power, and the results showed much more gain for the ne...
Read more

Auto - Vectorization with little help from GCC!

This tutorial helps the programmers to benefit the progress of the auto-vectorization algorithms that are implemented in modern compilers, such as gcc. Before you start playing with the vectorization of your code i assume that you don't have any bottleneck in you code (like dynamic memory allocation etc) in the critical path. In this tutorial we will use the gcc 4.4.1, but the same steps can be applied to newer or older versions.  First of all there are two issues with auto vectorization:  1) gcc must know the architecture (eg what SIMD instructions are available)  2) The data structures must by properly aligned in memory The first step is to find the architecture of your processor and point it to gcc using the flags -mtune=... / -march=... you specify the architecture.  For example, my laptop is core2Duo so i put -march=core2. You can find more more information  here .  The next problem we must solve is knowledge of memory alignment. ...
Read more