This Guy Took Pictures of Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera and an Old Telescope
‘2bit Astrophotography.’ Continue reading This Guy Took Pictures of Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera and an Old Telescope
Tag Archives: Telescope
This Guy Took Pictures of Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera and an Old Telescope
‘2bit Astrophotography.’ Continue reading This Guy Took Pictures of Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera and an Old Telescope
Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope
The Hackaday Prize is more than just giving tens of thousands of dollars to hardware hackers. It’s also about funding the next batch of Open Source hardware products. Alongside The Hackaday Prize — the contest where we’re funding hardware that will change the world, — we’re also giving away $30,000 to the project that will best become a product. It’s almost like we’re funding hardware startups here.
[Dessislav Gouzgounov] wanted to build a small piece of hardware — a GoTo for his telescope. This handheld controller would allow him to use software to align the telescope with whatever celestial …read more
Continue reading Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope
Budget Astrophotography With A Raspberry Pi
New to astrophotography, [Jason Bowling] had heard that the Raspberry Pi’s camera module could be used as a low-cost entry into the hobby. Having a Raspberry Pi B+ and camera module on hand from an old project, he dove right in, detailing the process for any other newcomers.
Gingerly removing the camera’s lens, the module fit snugly into a 3D printed case — courtesy of a friend — and connected it to a separate case for the Pi. [Bowling] then mounted he camera directly on the telescope — a technique known as prime-focus photography, which treats the telescope like an …read more
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Keep an Eye on the Sky With rDuinoScope
We’ve all enjoyed looking up at a clear night sky and marveled at the majesty of the stars. Some of us have even pointed telescopes at particular celestial objects to get a closer view. Anyone who’s ever looked at anything beyond Jupiter knows the hassle involved. It is most unfortunate that the planet we reside on happens to rotate about a fixed axis, which makes it somewhat difficult to keep a celestial object in the view of your scope.
It doesn’t take much to strap a few steppers and some silicon brains to a scope to counter the rotation of …read more
The Megapixel Race and its Clear Winner
Like any Moore’s Law-inspired race, the megapixel race in digital cameras in the late 1990s and into the 2000s was a harsh battleground for every manufacturer. With the development of the smartphone, it became a war on two fronts, with Samsung eventually cramming twenty megapixels into a handheld. Although no clear winner of consumer-grade cameras was ever announced (and Samsung ended up reducing their flagship phone’s cameras to sixteen megapixels for reasons we’ll discuss) it seems as though this race is over, fizzling out into a void where even marketing and advertising groups don’t readily venture. What happened?
The Technology
The Megapixel Race and its Clear Winner
Like any Moore’s Law-inspired race, the megapixel race in digital cameras in the late 1990s and into the 2000s was a harsh battleground for every manufacturer. With the development of the smartphone, it became a war on two fronts, with Samsung eventually cramming twenty megapixels into a handheld. Although no clear winner of consumer-grade cameras was ever announced (and Samsung ended up reducing their flagship phone’s cameras to sixteen megapixels for reasons we’ll discuss) it seems as though this race is over, fizzling out into a void where even marketing and advertising groups don’t readily venture. What happened?
The Technology
CNC-Telescope With Semi-Nasmyth Mount
[GregO29] had a 10″ GoTo telescope but at 70lbs, it wasn’t really portable. And so he did what any self-respecting CNC enthusiast would do, he put his CNC skills to work to make an 8″ Newtonian reflector, semi-Nasmyth mount telescope of his own design. It also gave him a chance to try out his new Chinese 6040 router/engraver with 800W water-cooled spindle.
What’s all that fancy terminology, you say? “Newtonian reflector” simply means that there’s a large concave mirror at one end that reflects a correspondingly large amount of light from the sky to a smaller mirror which then reflects …read more
CNC-Telescope With Semi-Nasmyth Mount
[GregO29] had a 10″ GoTo telescope but at 70lbs, it wasn’t really portable. And so he did what any self-respecting CNC enthusiast would do, he put his CNC skills to work to make an 8″ Newtonian reflector, semi-Nasmyth mount telescope of his own design. It also gave him a chance to try out his new Chinese 6040 router/engraver with 800W water-cooled spindle.
What’s all that fancy terminology, you say? “Newtonian reflector” simply means that there’s a large concave mirror at one end that reflects a correspondingly large amount of light from the sky to a smaller mirror which then reflects …read more
Modified Servo Adds Focus Control to Telescope
Scanning the heavens with a telescope is a great way to spend long, clear winter nights, but using a manual telescope can get to be a drag. A motorized mount with altitude and azimuth control is basic equipment for the serious observer, but adding a servo to control the focus of your telescope is one step beyond your average off-the-shelf instrument.
Having already motorized the two axes of the equatorial mount of his modest telescope as a senior project, [Eric Seifert] decided to motorize the focus rack as well. His first inclination was to use a stepper motor like he …read more
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