Took the telescope out last night, it was a very clear evening. I was able to snap a few shots of M57, The Ring Nebula. I was pretty suprised they came out like they did, this was the first time I’ve used the 15 second exposure option on my digital camera – I had the mount aligned pretty good so there aren’t very long “star trails” from the long exposure.

M57, The Ring Nebula, is a Planetary Nebula 2300 light-years (which google tells us is 1.35205496 × 10^16 miles) away from us. A Planetary Nebula is a “shell” of gas and plasma that is left when some types of stars die/explode. At the center of this is that star, a white dwarf now. Unfortunately you can’t see it in my picture.

The Ring Nebula is the small doughnut looking shape in the center.

My anniversary gift from Ana, a new Solar Filter for the new telescope, arrived today. I had to go to FedEx and pick it up after work but tried it out when I got home. It’s amazing what this telescope can do compared to my old one. I didn’t think it would make much difference on the sun, but it surely does.

A neighbor came down to see what I was looking at, but just when he did the sun went behind a think blanket of clouds. Maybe it’ll be clear tomorrow and he’ll get to see it then. I also plan on taking some pictures with the new setup.

My first sighting of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was tonight!

It was clear outside last night, so I spent some time trying to get a better picture of Jupiter. The results are decent:

I also got an image of M37, a cluster in Auriga. It looks way too dark on my CRT but ok on my laptop’s LCD. So be forewarned that it may be appear black

I took quite a few pictures of the moon, they can be seen here. All pictures taken with my old scope have been moved into a sub-album.
Here’s one of them.

This is made up of some 150 images, then the brightness adjusted in photoshop. Let me know what you think! Be sure to check out the full size image.

So that’s my first attempt of using my new telescope with a webcam. That image is made up of 20+ ‘stacked’ frames of recorded video. There are a couple more like it of Saturn here but they aren’t much to look at since I just used default values in the stacking software for all the features I didn’t understand.