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pynipple In reply to farriderphotos [2008-05-04 11:32:48 +0000 UTC]

thanks a lot for the great comment ... your GALLERY is great!

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pynipple In reply to milkyway3 [2008-02-07 10:08:25 +0000 UTC]

well, I started out with 300mm or a 400mm lens on my DSLR camera body along with a 2X teleconverter - that's how most of my moon shots were made - check out the rest of my gallery for the shots without the telescope

I've had this 10" Meade LX200GPS Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for a while, but I only recently got a much nicer set of eyepieces and an adapter so I can mount my DSLR directly onto the scope ... now it's harder to set everything up, but once I do it's a lot easier to get these photos ... and of course I have much, much more light gathering power because of the sheer size of my telescope so I'm able to get much clearer and closer photos out of it all

if your sister is interested in taking shots like, and if she has an SLR or DSLR camera I would be happy to give you a little tutorial on how to do it ... you don't have to spend a fortune on equipment at all and you can take photos like this even if you're just starting out in photography

have fun and if you have a camera, just GO TRY IT! ... you might be surprised by the results that you get - just keep the camera really still and work like mad to get the focus as perfect as you can

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milkyway3 In reply to pynipple [2008-02-07 15:29:07 +0000 UTC]

Okay thanks so much.

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pynipple In reply to Chrissyo [2008-02-07 12:05:54 +0000 UTC]

Thanks! ... but are you sure this is Plato ? ... I would love to say that it was, but I can't be certain until I hopefully find a wider version of this photo in the ones I took ... I'm desperately looking for other good quality photos of Plato but they aren't that easy to come by and it isn't what I would consider to be a major crater so there aren't a whole lot of them out there

As you can see, the Wikipedia article has a couple photos and even a written map of where it is, but the photos don’t really match up with each other, let alone with my photo

It was a really big crater in my opinion, just not anything like Tycho, Copernicus, Huggins, Schiller, Clavius, Lexell, Bailly, Ptolemaeus, Hecataeus, or the South Pole-Aitken basin … to be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get photos that were good enough to post on my first time out with the telescope/DSLR combination so I wasn’t aiming for anything fantastic or photogenic

As much as I pretend, I'm no astronomer ... I'm just a guy with a telescope and a camera that's super interested in astronomy and I've always loved photography ... I so wish I knew the features of our moon by name (and I'm working on it, but it’s just slow going so far) ... I'm very sure you would know a lot more about which one this is than I would … too bad we’re so far away or I'd invite you over for a star party some time

I'm looking through all of the photos I took that day to see if I got a shot of this crater with a larger eyepiece so you can see more of the area around this crater and hopefully pinpoint which one it is ... I posted the clearest ones, so if I find it, it will probably be less sharp or out of focus, but it would be great if I could name all of the maria, catena, rilles, craters and everything else on there

Thanks for the nice comments, I frequently look at your GALLERY for encouragement … you really do have a lot of amazing astrophotography in there and I hope to see more as time goes on – thanks again for sharing all that you do

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Chrissyo In reply to pynipple [2008-02-07 12:41:38 +0000 UTC]

Yup, that's definitely Plato. Compare it to this image by Damian Peach: [link] Look at the smaller craters on the inside, they're flipped horizontally and vertically (due to telescope/camera design most likely), but they match up perfectly.

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