Last weekend Aravind and I went out for our first astronomy night of the summer. Unfortunately, Aravind's telescope experienced a software glitch and we weren't able to use the tracking mechanism. However, we still managed to see Saturn and Jupiter before the moon came up.

I decided to test a Canon 50mm/1.8 lens that night, to see whether it would be a suitable lens for astrophotography. This picture was taken with my Rebel XT through that lens. The lens actually lets in so much light that I had to stop it down in order to do long exposures, even though it was very dark out! I'm fairly happy with how this picture turned out. You can compare it to a picture that Aravind took of the same scene. As you might notice, the field of view offered by the 50mm is a little limiting for landscape photos, but it will probably be great for telescope-mounted shots.

Info: 9 minute 38 second exposure at f/10, ISO 200, Canon EF 50mm/1.8 Mark II lens. I did not perform any digital adjustment to this picture at all, aside from scaling it down and saving it as a horrible low quality JPEG for display on the internet. :(

Comments

your shot looks great, man... and ya, a little narrow FOV.

but the jpeg
filesize is only 61kb... couldn't you save it with a little higher quality so
the star-streaks don't have ugly artifacts around them?  please..?  for me? :-)

Well, if I gave this picture more quality, all the other pictures would start
demanding more quality as well!  Plus, having horrible encoding on my pictures
helps discourage people from stealing my images... not that I'm expecting
people to steal my images, but still...

If you want, I can email you the full
res 1.7 megabyte JPEG.	;)

While I'm here, I should mention that if anyone
wants higher quality versions of any Picture Of The Week, just email me.

I
will think about changing my encoding scheme so that instead of constant
quality I aim for constant file size....  I also need to find a suitable free
image hosting site so that I can archive my old photos and free up some disk
space... I'm starting to run low here.