I always seem to miss once-in-a-lifetime celestial events such as these, due to cloud, illness or just pure laziness, and therefore made a gargantuan effort to haul myself out of my comfy bed at 7 AM. Ewwwww. It turned out to be a tad pointless, as the Sun doesn't come round to my garden until 8ish. Bunghole.
Aquired the piccies using a run-o-the-mill digi cam, 10mm Plossl and telescope with lashings of insulating tape, a bit of cardboard and my limbs to steady it all. At one point I nearly fell in the pond.
All in all, a magnificently amateur attempt at getting pics of Venus transiting the Sun, and probably most amusing for my neighbours to bear witness to, especially the pond bit.
Mar Bars Are Nice posted by Missus Boot at 14:22
Still can't get the camera to pick up as much colour as it did the other day. This is not helped by my constantly losing the camera settings; maybe I should get them tattooed, or something. Starting to get the hang of K3CCDTools and Registax (software used for capturing, stacking and processing).
A Mars A Day posted by Missus Boot at 14:19
Mars pictures came out a bit better this time, probably due to a combination of different telescope positioning, less haze, less light, Mars being in a more interesting position and borrowing Edd's eyes for focusing.
Mars posted by Missus Boot at 14:15
These are my first attempts at capturing some pictures of Mars, with and without a Barlow. They didn't look too clever to start with, but after stacking with Registax they came out better than I thought they would.
More Moon posted by Missus Boot at 14:12
Mostly sorted out the mirrors and got these pictures of various craters of the Moon, including Atlas, Hercules, Posidonius, Fabricius and Metuis. These unstacked pictures were taken using 2x Barlow and processed in Photoshop. The edge craters came out nicely, but the middle of the Moon was a blurred mess.
Moon posted by Missus Boot at 14:04
My first attempt at using an unmodified Toucam 740K and a Tal 150P to image the Moon, and its craters Copernicus, Tycho and Plato. These unprocessed (excluding a quick Photoshop fiddle) pictures didn't come out too badly really, considering that the telescope's mirrors were dusty, loose and in desperate need of a good seeing-to.
