Mall Astrophotography

November 1, 1999

Another transparent but unsteady night. I took my ETX finder apart and put the objective in a tube that fits snugly inside the barrel of my QuickCam. Free focal reducer! F/6, as it turns out.

Using this contraption I took another series of NGC457, the Owl Cluster. I'm still limited to about 2 seconds by the quickcam software and thermal noise, but it actually turned out kinda nice.

ngc457

Also took a pretty good shot of Jupiter and an OK one of Saturn. I'll have to admit, I'm not sure I'm going to be getting much more from Saturn with the ETX and QuickCam.

jupiter saturn