Wesley's Tool-Box

In testing the long exposure capabilities of my Canon SX50 HS, I was able to capture the constellation Lyra in its near entirety by accident. Due to cloudy weather and bad light pollution, only the brightest star, Vega was visible to the naked eye. I intended to take a picture of this, but the 1-second exposure revealed the other stars in the constellation as well. I've labeled them in the photo. You can also take a look at the full resolution photo HERE.

Settings: 165mm(6.875x) - ISO 1600 - 1s
Time: 2013-08-07 00:17:01

I've gotten around to fitting Baader AstroSolar safety film onto my Canon SX50 HS. The first round of tests, taking photos of Sun with my daughter, worked pretty well. I forgot to zoom all the way in, but the sunspots are readily visible.

Settings: 864mm (36x) - ISO 80 - 1/100s - 9 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

There's been a lot of fuss (again) about the "Supermoon" that was supposed to come up during the night because the Moon was at the closest distance from the Earth for this year. Well, this is it. It was rather cloudy all day, so I was worried I might not get any good shots. Thankfully, the clouds thinned out from time to time and allowed me to grab enough photos. Remember to click on the photo to see the full-resolution version.

Canon SX50 HS - 2013-06-23 23:11 KST - 1200mm - ISO 80 - 1/60s - 12 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

One of my old-time friend was intrigued with the Saturn photos that I took with Canon SX50 HS, and he wanted to see what Moon would look like with it. This is my answer. The camera takes really big photos of the satellite, so I'm showing just a crop (click the image for the full picture). Even the small craters are easily distinguishable. The power of the superzoom never ceases to amaze me.

For the record, this was taken with my first daughter Celine. She loves looking over the sky with her dad. Half of the photos used for stacking were taken by her.

Settings: 1200mm, ISO 80, 1/60s, 22 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

The superzoom SX50 HS was looking out the window again to shoot Saturn. This time, my three-year old daughter wanted in on the action, so she looked at the viewfinder and took a few shots with my help. She was amazed at how a tiny star in the sky is actually that planet with rings she saw in a book.

The setup was identical to the previous post yesterday except that the shutter speed was slowed down to 1/10s. This made for brighter photos. You can see a hint of Saturn's own shadow on the rings just behind the left side of the planet.

UPDATE: The photos I took tonight shows the shadow that Saturn is casting upon its rings much clearer.

I'm getting better results thanks to finding a more stable tripod configuration, leading to sharper images and less frames thrown away due to blurring.

This seems to be about as good as this camera gets, unless some more optical equipment is thrown in. Cassini division on the rings would not be visible unless much more significantly advanced optics come into play.

UPDATE 2015-04-12: Nearly two years later, I now have that "more optical equipment" and for the first time, I was able to resolve the Cassini Division.