Wesley's Tool-Box

Lots of planetary photos from amateur astronomers seem to be derived from a small video camera attached to the telescope. I do have lots of smartphones that could serve a similar purpose, so decided to make use of them instead. Holding it steady in front of the eyepiece was a problem, as evidenced by my earlier attempt, so some sort of an adapter was needed.


This is where Snapzoom digiscoping adapter came in. I originally bought this several months ago to photograph stars using binoculars, but it could be made to work with telescopes by attaching an included weight. After lots of paddings here and there, my iPhone 6 Plus was able to fit into the adapter and work with the eyepieces that I owned.

Once my NexStar 6SE telescope was aligned with the stars so that I could track any celestial objects, I slid the phone-adapter-eyepiece assembly into the telescope and began looking at Jupiter and the Moon, the biggest targets.


And this is how Jupiter showed up on the screen. The bands and the Great Red Spot were faintly visible, just as I saw with my naked eyes. The shakiness due to the atmospheric turbulence was also quite apparent. I recorded the sight for two minutes and processed the resulting video through PIPP. Finally, the processed video was stacked and sharpened with RegiStax. The final result, as you saw at the beginning, has a more "natural" feel than the ones from SX50 HS for some reason.

Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + 5mm eyepiece
Device: iPhone 6 Plus (afocal)
Settings: 29mm - 1920x1080 - 30fps - f/2.2
Filters: None
Time: 2015-04-27 21:57-59 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
300 frames stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

Yesterday evening presented a rare opportunity of viewing the sun-lit ISS whizzing by the Moon from where I live. Luckily, the weather cooperated and the sky was mostly clear of clouds. I initially set up a telescope to see it, but the apartment window was too limited for it to calibrate in time, so I fell back to using my SX50 HS's zoom capability instead.

A few minutes before the crossing, the space station started to appear on the western sky. So I told my daughter Celine to come over and see the phenomenon together; we watched it gracefully travel eastward. When I saw that the ISS was about to transit the Moon, I let the burst mode of the camera snap 10 photos in rapid succession at 13fps. Then, we kept watching the ISS until it disappeared into the eastern sky.

Checking the photos, I noticed that the dot the ISS was supposed to be was smaller than what was expected according to CalSky, which predicted the transit. Then I looked at the first photo where the Moon got behind the ISS, which showed a "shadow" much longer than the dot. This is when I realized that the dot was the central area of the space station and the shadow was its solar panels. The size mystery was solved.

For those of you who would like to see a full resolution composite of the ISS-Moon transit, [click here] to load the image. It's a bit sad I can't adjust the ISO setting while shooting in burst mode with the camera - I would've like to have it lowered for less coarse images.

Device: Canon SX50 HS
Settings: 1200mm - ISO 800 - 1/1000s - f/6.5
Filters: None
Time: 2015-04-24 19:56:49 KST
Location: Naju, Korea

Hoping to get a bigger look at the planets, I bought a 5mm LE series eyepiece from e.Frantis. It would supposedly get twice the magnification of the 25mm eyepiece & 2.5x barlow lens combination. After waiting for more than a week for the weather to clear up, I observed the planet Saturn through the brand new eyepiece. It certainly showed the planet nicely, in spite of being a bit dark due to the high magnification.

Not to miss the opportunity to capture this on camera, I got my SX50 HS camera out and placed it over the eyepiece by hand. After several hundred shots, I was able to recover a handful of good photos. Putting them together, I was able to finally have the Cassini Division on the rings of Saturn properly show up. This fulfilled one of the main expectations I had of the Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope.

As for the actual magnification of the eyepiece, my calculations showed that the photos had a 0.22 arc second / pixel resolution, which is about 6.65 times better than the 50x zoom provided by SX50 HS's integrated lens. This is equivalent to having a 8000mm zoom lens. Also, this is 2.4 times the magnification given by the aforementioned eyepiece-barlow lens combo. This is somewhat higher than expected.

Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + 5mm eyepiece
Device: Canon SX50 HS (afocal)
Settings: 24mm - ISO 200 - 1/5s - f/3.4
Filters: None
Time: 2015-04-27 03:16-03:29 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
23 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8