Nick's Astronomy Observing Log

I tried to get out Saturday evening after sunset to get a look at the very young crescent moon, but missed it. Between getting kids to bed and everything, I think it had just gotten down below the neighboring houses. :( Bummer.

So I made sure I got out last night to take a look before it sank down again. Thankfully I had a lot more time as the kids were pretty tuckered out and the moon wasn't supposed to set until after 9pm anyway. I came out around 8 and set up. Loved the views of the moon along the terminator. I have no clue what I was looking at yet, and didn't have my map handy, but it was breathtaking to say the least.

I grabbed the point & shoot to try and get some quick shots, but quickly realized that it wasn't gonna work. At least not quickly without more practice. Even in manual mode it was blowing the highlights (which is all I cared about anyway) really bad. So I grabbed the dslr and gave that a shot. Focusing took me a while to get used to. Thankfully after about 20 minutes of trying to figure out why it was so blurry when set to focus on infinity, I remembered reading that I would also have to refocus the eyepiece. Then it came into perfect focus.

I tried setting up the tripod for the dslr, but quickly found that that was a major pain in the ass. If the lens wasn't set just right on the eyepiece, I didn't get any image at all. So I decided to handhold it and took some shots. Here's the best of the group:



This is after some post in Lightroom to bring up the exposure a little, and then some unsharp mask applied in cs3. Turned out pretty good considering.

I'd really like to figure out how to best set up for these afocal shots. I want to really work on this technique before I step up to doing some serious prime focus work.