Moving the mirror on the SkyWatcher 130M

My SkyWatcher 130M telescope needs a little help to reach prime focus with a DSLR camera (see also this great blog post). So I decided to move the primary mirror up the tube to allow my Canon EOS to reach focus when attached directly to the T-ring for prime focus astrophotography. This involved almost completely dis-assemblying it, playing with new nuts and bolts, then putting it back together.

I started by removing the spider and secondary mirror assembly, which are held by four recessed screws and nuts on the inside (which should not be dropped onto the primary mirror):

Four screws hold the SkyWatcher 130M spider

SkyWatcher 130M (SK1309EQ2) secondary mirror

Installing Canon EOS Utility on Mac without the CD

My second hand Canon EOS 1000D has arrived (intended for astrophotography), but without the manual or software CD. Canon provide this stuff to download on their website which is great, except that the software is intended only to update an existing installation originally made from the CD-ROM. That seems stupid on many levels - the only people interested in using this software will have a Canon camera. Practically speaking, I have neither the Canon CD-ROM, nor in fact even a CD-ROM drive. Apple don't believe in them any more ;)

Fortunately enterprising people have worked out how to hack the Canon software to install without the CD-ROM, both on Windows (e.g. here) and on Mac OS X. Canon don't support Linux.

Raspberry Pi motion sensitive Trail-Cam

My Raspberry Pi at the bottom of the garden is now monitoring an unmodified XBox webcam pointing at a fence break, rather than the mice visiting the compost heap. This uses the Motion software to hopefully catch anything walking past - like the pheasants I've seen using this route.

Mr. Pheasant

Mr. Pheasant and two wives in two

Pheasant on a sunny day

Quite a regular visitor

While most of the images so far have been of pheasants, there were a few surprises too.

PS3 Eye Camera for astrophotography

I was inspired to try out the PlayStation 3 Eye camera for astrophotogaphy after seeing this amazing Orion M42 nebula image taken using a PS3 webcam on a SkyWatcher 130P (an hours worth of 4s exposures and a lot of post processing). Here's another nice thread on using the PlayStation 3 Eye camera with a telescope. It's reported to use an OV7725 60fps 6um pixel VGA sensor and image processor from Omnivision.

PS3 Eye webcam with standard lens removed and replaced
with 1.25" telescope nose piece, with threaded IR filter

Actual test images pending - I need a clear night without other commitments.

Trapezium (Orion Nebula) using Xbox Webcam

I first tried imaging the Orion Nebula (M42) with the Xbox webcam on my SkyWatcher 130M telescope last year, and managed to resolve the Trapezium star cluster. Sadly I can't find the original images, so I tried again last night.

No editing other than cropping

Annotated by hand

As you can hopefully see, there are at least five stars here. Top right as show is the Trapezium cluster (Theta1 Orionis, or θ1 Ori for short), of which only the three brightest stars showed up. Centrally is Theta2 Orionis (or θ2 Ori), and another bright star to the left of it. That means I've captured the brightest stars in the centre of M42 nebula, but in the single stills at least there is no hint of the nebula background.