Above picture was taken during my observation sessions during the last week of Dec 2008. I remember my 2008 new year party with stars from Bangalore. This year I have been to my native place Lakshmisagara, a small village in Tarikere, Karnataka. An absolutely delight place for night sky.
My objective was to photograph
1.Conjunction of Moon, Jupiter and Mercury.
2.Star Trails with Polestar.
3. Orion Constellation with Nebula
4.Crecent Moon.
5.Photo to identify star colors.
The experience was very nice, I was alone and didn't get the cable release for my camera to operate in bulb mode. I decided to use my laptop to start and stop the camera. while I connected the camera and laptop, I realised the delay in switching from laptop to telescope to manually guide I would get a trail. I thought for a while and found my mobile free., why not connect my mobile to my laptop. so that I press the key on my mobile, it would press the key on camera remote software from Canon. thus giving me a freedom to stay away from my laptop.
the story was not over at this point., Some of the problems were still not solved, there was no one to tell me how much time has passed for each exposure, how much is pending. So I decided to use my mobile with a alarm for every 10 min. so i would start and stop between the alarm beeps !
Thus I managed to track manually and the experience was fantastic ! I'm sure you can understand how I did this :)
I experimented with exposure times of 3 min, 5 min and 10 min with manual tracking. I used 5.5 inch newtonian reflector with equ mount for tracking.
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