The Dead Pixel Journals

By 0xFF

Perpetual Motion

Not been many clear nights over the last few months, and any nights that have been clear, I've usually been working!!! Tonight was an exception, very very cold outside, not a cloud in the sky, a good night to practice this elusive hobby called astrophotography. Unfortunatley, there was too much moisture in the air, and before long all the equipment was iced over - in other words "Game Over". I could use a hair dryer to melt the ice from the mirror/lenses, but as most of us know, water and electricity are not a good combination!
Managed to clean most of it off with my trusty lens pen, but eventually it got too cold for me (with my two wooly hats on), and I gave up, for the chance of a nice warm cuppa.

This image is a set of 4- 2 minute images centred around Polaris, I had to do a bit of work in Photoshoppe to remove the overhead power cables (I really hate them!), and to reduce the red hue, so as to lessen the light pollution from Glasgow (26 miles away...)
It shows that the Earth rotates, causing the stars to trail. This is where I know I'm stumbling with my setup. I NEED to spend a lot more time aligning the mount properly, if I want to take some serious images. Next time it's clear, I might just spend the night doing that, before I do any more images.

My camera will be back home in the next day or two, with it's new mono CCD, thats suited to astronomical imaging, it has cooling, and it won't have its amplifier (used to create high ISO images in digital imaging), which means there should be very little noise over a long exposure... There's only one problem... the operator - Me!!!!

Bedtime...
Good night

[edit]
Exif shows wrong exposure time (due to other images stacked as layers)
Should be 8-minutes

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