While I have started posting a little more often, I don’t think I have mentioned lately that I recently took up astrophotography as one of my main hobbies.  While the night skies have largely been clouds here this summer, there has been the very rare night that they haven’t been too bad so when we get a good night, you can bet I’m out out with my telescope trying to see what I can get some photos of.  In this case, a week ago (8/14/2016), the skies were clear so I got some pretty decent pictures of the Moon and Saturn that I thought you guys would enjoy seeing!

I’m still very new to this hobby so I’m learning new things that improve my images all the time so while these are my best shots to date, I’m sure I will get much better images in the future.  Lately I have been focusing on planetary objects but I plan on giving things a shot with deep sky very soon if the skies ever decide to start cooperating.  For being as new as I am, I have to admit I’m pretty impressed that I got a little cloud detail on Saturn and some great detailed shots of craters on the Moon!

For those that are interested in the technical details of how I got these shots, I used my Celestron 9.25″ schmidt-cassegrain telescope on an AVX mount with my (modified) Canon T1i DSLR camera.  I’d have to go back and look at how many frames I used for each but I know I started with 10,000 frames for the Saturn picture and one of the Moon photos with the other moon photos being 1,000 frames.  I then stacked and processed them using AutoStakkert 2 and Registax.  I’m still a n00b with both programs but I’m getting the hang of them pretty quickly.

If you think these shots are pretty cool, share them with any space enthusiasts you know!  Make sure to like Global Geek News on Facebook too!

Also, if you are into astrophotography, feel free to share some of your images in the comments below!  I’d love to see them and I know others would too!