Guerrilla Astronomy – Nehar Haesh

Astrophotography, Evergreen, Nehar Haesh

Nehar Haesh Overview

This series will cover my dive into astronomy and astrophotography. It will serve as a more real time companion to the astrophotography pages. These wont be the only astrophotography blog posts but will be the ones where I want to talk about a concept, technique, or skill. It will be an irregular series of indefinite length.

Guerrilla Astronomy

In Buffalo, the weather often doesn’t like to cooperate for astrophotography, so I’ve begun doing what I call guerrilla sessions. These are usually less than an hour long, and only involve looking at bright objects like the moon. While not ideal, it increases the number of times that I can break out the telescope from twice a month to twice a week. I’ll often go from deciding I want to run a session to setup in under half an hour. The flow for it is usually

  1. Check to see if clouds are obscuring the moon from inside my apartment
  2. Look up the wind direction  (I usually go here)
  3. Check to see how the clouds in that direction look from outside my apartment
  4. Drive to where the equipment is stored.
  5. Load up my car and drive to where I setup

I’ll drive to different places based on whether or not I feel like doing outreach or want more time for astrophotography. If I’m feeling in the mood for outreach, I’ll setup near a building and point the telescope at the moon. I’ve found that 80x magnification will fill up the moon in the eye piece, and really impress most people. With the eyepieces I currently have, I can go up to 140x magnification, but most people seem more impressed when starting with the 80x. After they’ve looked through the 80x eyepiece I then move up to the 140x eyepiece and aim towards an impressive crater (like the Copernicus crater if visible).

Because refocusing the telescope from an eyepiece to a camera is a longer process I generally try to keep the number of times I have to switch low.  When I want to do more imaging I’ll drive to a slightly more secluded area like an empty parking lot.

Optical Equipment and Support

The telescope that I use for the guerrilla sessions is an 8in Schmidt Cassegrain by Celestron. It has a 2000mm focal length The tripo/mountd is an Advanced VX, also by Celestron. I’ll generally bring out 3 eyepieces, a 25mm, a 20mm and a 14mm eyepiece. These give a few different magnification levels to choose from.

Camera Equipment and Support

The camera that was used in this session was a Nikon D3300. The ISO was set to 800, and the exposure time was set to 1/500th of a second. The D3300 has an APS-C sensor on it meaning that the total magnification of the setup was around 40x. To connect the camera to the telescope I used a Nikon T-mount adapter ring and a Celstron universal 1.25′ T-mount. When you connect the camera to the telescope I suggest switching to live view while you are dialing in the focus. It’s easier to see fine detailed images on a larger screen than on the viewfinder.

Setup 2018.01.28

Photo Of the Moon

Moon Photo

Quick stats about this photo

  • Telescope/Lens: Celestron Schmidt – Casigran
  • Focal lenght: 2000
  • Magnification: 40x
  • Outside Temperature: Cold (about -2 C)
  • Camera: Nikon D3300
  • Mount: Prime
  • Exp: 1/500th of a second
  • White balance: Sun
  • ISO 800