10 days old moon through 72 year old telescope

A late friend of mine owned a Zeiss AS 63mm lens, it took me a while to figure out all the details, as it is not mounted in the original cell, but in a custom machined one, and the tube loooks like it is self-built too.

In the process of establishing the quality of the lens I took these images with a QHY5L-IIc camera in prime focus configuration. As the conditions were very changeable because of passing clouds, the brightness of the images had to be adjusted individually, color saturation has been enhanced.

The first quarter moon, Zeiss AS 63mm f:840mm from 1948, QHY5L-IIc
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The Moon 2019-05-10

The Moon 2019-05-10, the bright side is stacked from 24 exposures of 1/20s, the dark side is a single 20s exposure. Processed with PIPP, Autostakkert, Photoshop and Lightroom.

I used the 127mm f/8 refractor together with a Nikon TC20EIII teleconverter on the Nikon D750, resulting in a focal length of about 2m. The picture is a combination of 24 exposures of 1/20s. First I aligned the pictures using PIPP to be able to stack them in AutoStakkert 3. Sharpening was done in Registax 6. In Photoshop I followed Dylan O’Donnell’s process for HDR moon images by combining the stack with a single 20s exposure using a layer mask in Photoshop, some final touches were added in Lightroom.

Moon – Jupiter conjunction 03.01.2019

Moon Jupiter Conjunction – 03.01.2019, Takahashi FS-60CB, Nikon D750, 1s at f/6, 6:14UT

When my wife noticed the beautiful thin crescent moon in a gap in the clouds I rushed to the deck on our roof, to take a picture of the conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter. At first I went bare-footed, but after a few seconds I couldn’t stand the snow under my bare soles, and put on some slippers. But I was still only wearing my sleeping attire, boxer shorts and a worn-out T-shirt. Temperature was -5°C.

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Lunar Eclipse from Corsica

The longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century took place during our vacation in Corsica, here are some shots taken from the beach:

Since this was a camping vacation I only had minimal gear with me, a Sony RX100 IV compact camera, and my wife’s Olympus E-PL5 with the kit zoom lenses. The 40-150mm is equivalent to 300mm on full-frame cameras, so the close-ups are cropped heavily.

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