Please keep posting them. I love these things. I watch anything on the History channel when it relates to space. This stuff just amazes me in general.

Many thanks for the link, fascinating stuff.

A great read as well.

Tomcat, next time the Moon is up while it is still light I will give it a try. You need the Moon as a focus aid (there is nothing on the ground here that is distant enough for me to use as I live in a wooded, hilly area. I tried some test shots last night but they were all out of focus.

Vorcatx, I haven't tried for Markarian's Chain yet. Seeing as this is the right time of year I really should give it a try. I hope you get your scope out soon!

I meant in the daytime Paul, but wow, what a shot a night time contrail would make!

Here you go Tomcat. I shot this one a few hours ago. I think it is a B767 and the livery was certainly that of American Airlines. Not sure of it's altitude but it was putting out contrails...

Very cool Paul! Now, how did you do that?

Piper, I did that in exactly the same way I do the ISS shots. I set the focus using the Moon and then aimed the scope manually while looking through a smaller 'guide scope' that sits on top of my main scope. I have both the main and guide scope aligned to be looking at exactly the same point. The camera takes an AVI movie at 60 frames per second, so I pull the still shot from the movie file.

That is awesome. Thanks so much for thinking of doing that Paul, much appreciated. That's the whole frame, right, not a crop? If so, that's some magnification, wow.

Thanks again!



Speaking of focus, after a certain distance, infinity focus works right? That's what I try and do with my camera but I've always wondered if I should be just setting it to infinity when I'm shooting distant stuff.

Tomcat, no, that is not a crop or resized. The camera used only has a 640x480 pixel array. All I did was tweak the contrast and run a sharpening filter.

As for focusing on infinity, I think you are right. With my scope though, you have to be looking at something some way out before you could use infinity. Even that airliner wasn't perfectly in focus. Some of that can be put down to poor 'seeing' (ie temperature variations in the atmosphere that make the view 'boil' and move about)..

Ahh, same as my BBQ burgers I just made distorting the air while they cooked perfectly.

I figure anything beyond maybe 100 feet or so is infinity for my camera, the reason I mentioned it was because I have a memory manual mode that allows you to pre configure a given zoom, focus, etc setup and quickly jump to it. I've been setting the focus to infinity for this to shoot planes quickly since the autofocus has a hard time getting small objects against a solid colour background.

Again, just an amazing shot Paul, thanks for that. Makes me wanna huuuuge lens once I get a new camera. Right now I have a 2004 Canon S1IS that I love, but 3.2MP doesn't really cut it these days.