🌔 A New Target: Lunar Close-Ups After my first session with the modded Logitech webcam on Mars, one thing became very clear: focusing is hard. Getting a crisp image of a wobbly little disk on a turbulent atmosphere is a challenge — especially with budget gear. That’s when a kind member of an astronomy forum…
🔭 A Night of Firsts This night marked several milestones — my first planetary imaging session using a modded webcam, and my first successful attempt at stacking DSLR shots without guiding. The targets: Mars, the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula (M42), and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). Not exactly “one object per night” — but I couldn’t…
🌌 A New Approach: DSO Imaging by Smartphone It was a clear and freezing evening — the kind that practically demands a session with Orion. But instead of reaching for my usual gear, I decided to try something different: capturing a deep-sky object using just my smartphone. 📷 Acquisition The target was M42, the Orion…
🔭 A Morning Encounter October 13, 2018 This was a quick session — an early-morning attempt to capture Saturn before it dipped below the horizon. I got up before dawn, set up the rig in the fading darkness, and scrambled to get things aligned. By the time everything was ready, Saturn was already low and…
Some targets really make you work for it — and M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, is one of them. I had previously imaged this beautiful but faint spiral with an Olympus E-5II, but after switching to the Olympus E510, I wanted to revisit the same target for a comparison between the two cameras. In the meantime,…
On this particular night, I returned to some familiar celestial faces — the kind you never forget: M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), M13 (Hercules Cluster), and M45 (The Pleiades). The goal was simple: take what I had learned and apply it to targets I’d already photographed, this time aiming for better results. A deeper dive, longer exposures,…
This night was something special: my first truly conscious experience under a genuinely dark sky. Discovering Darkness In northern Germany, there are still a few rare locations where the population thins out enough to offer proper dark skies. I was staying with my family in one such spot — a quiet holiday resort far from…
On the night of September 24, 2018, I set out with a clear goal in mind: to capture M101 — the beautiful, face-on spiral galaxy that had fascinated me ever since I first saw it in Stellarium. This night marked a turning point for me, as it was one of the first times I approached…
This was a special night — my very first field trip with the telescope rig. I had arranged to meet a good friend far away from city lights, deep in what felt like the middle of nowhere. The goal was simple: escape the glow of urban life and capture something meaningful under a darker sky….
A few days before this session, I got my hands on a T2-to-4/3 Olympus adapter ring — a small piece of metal that opened up a whole new world. With it, I could remove the lens from my brother’s old Olympus E-510 DSLR and attach the telescope directly, turning my SkyWatcher 150/750 PDS into a…