Other Destinations

Main Page
Hobby Electronics
The Webcam!

The Orion Skyview Pro 8 EQ Reflector Telescope This page is intended to be both a review of the Orion Skyview Pro 8 EQ telescope as well as a place to put any decent pictures I take through it.

Contents: Skyview Pro 8 EQ First Impressions The Glamour of the Moon Planetary Wonders Toucam Pro Madness! *Telescopic Microscopy??? (* Denotes work in progress.)

Planetary Wonders

---

I began my long love of astronomy at the tender age of twelve. My grandfather had a pair of binoculars, and they were old and made of a brittle plastic that was state of the art in perhaps 1960. One winter, I took them adventuring in the snow covered wilds of Michigan. I slipped on some ice, and went down hard. I survived, they did not; to my horror, they had broken into two small telescopes. I confessed my accident to him, and he forgave me instantly as was his way. The pieces became mine to do with as I pleased. Around this same time, I had a Tasco microscope, and I was all the time doing unusual things with it. I had already unscrewed the eyepiece many times, and I got to wondering what would happen if I replaced one of the now monoculars' eyepieces with it. To my delight, I found that it fit like a glove in the hole normally taken by the normal binocular eyepiece. Looking through this new combo took my breath; now things were not just 4x closer, dude, things were at least 20x closer with the zoom microscope eyepiece turned all the way down. With it all the way up, who knows, it may have been as much as 60x. I fashioned a crude focusing tube from rolled up paper, taped it together, and had my first telescope. I saw mars and saturn as more than points of light for the very first time this way, and I was hooked for life. The view through my Pro 8 EQ of these things is obviously far superior, but that first look is like that first love; you never forget it, not ever. When we got the Pro 8 EQ, one of my first tasks was planet Mars. I knew it was already losing it's marvelous detail and size as it left it's famous close approach of fall 2003, but I also knew it was still plenty close enough to amaze me with an as yet never before had experience. I was not dissapointed! I could easily make out a polar ice cap and some surface markings. Having gotten my fill, I then turned the scope toward Saturn. Great God himself, what a sight! Even with the Celestron 4 1/2 inch newt I'd had years ago, I had never seen such detail. The ring was clearly split by the Cassini division, and the planet itself was a pure jewel striped by cloud bands.

Amazing! I even saw some of Saturn's moons for the first confirmed time. I was awestruck, just like those far gone days with my first crude hand hewn telescope. On that first planetary viewing, 12-11-03, I took a few pictures of Saturn with the Kodak, then on 12-20-03 I went out again and took several more and used a new technique I had learned about from QCUIAG called "stacking" to produce the grainy yet much improved image below. I did this same thing on 12-27-03 with Jupiter, and then again on 12-30-03 with Mars, again seen below. On or around the 11th of January, 2004, we received our Philips Toucam Pro II webcam. I had been reading great things about this camera, namely that it had good image quality and light sensitivity, and that it could be modified to do long exposures up to 2 minutes in length. This, sadly, requires the madcap effort of trucking out not only the telescope, but a complete computer system as well, since it is a tethered camera. No prob, real astronomers know no such thing as common sense let alone when to quit. With the Toucam mounted to the scope and Saturn shimmering at extreme high power on a computer monitor, I took a 45 second 30fps movie. I processed this movie file through Registax. My jaw about hit the concrete when I saw the astonishing, nearly research grade image that resulted, see below. On 1-22-04 I did this again but backed up by improved techniques and a little more experience. The result was even better, and shows quite well how even a budget minded person can walk away pretty proud of his/her efforts. About this time, I started to come down with a sort of Cold Phobia, where I just didn't want to take the scope out into the frigid Tennessee winter nights anymore, and so I took a long, well deserved break. When the weather began to warm up in April, I again began doing some astrophotography work, and used the Toucam stacking method to produce the below image of Jupiter. Two nights later, I used the Kodak to capture Venus in a nice crescent phase. I'm still hunting Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury, and when I got something good to show of those, they will join the others below :-)

Click an image below to see it at full size!


More to follow,
NightRunner!