Astronomy is a fascinating hobby for the beginner and doesn't necessarily require complicated or expensive equipment to get started. Equipped with nothing more than the naked eye, a map of the stars and an inquisitive mind it is possible to observe many fascinating features of the night sky. Once you are ready to take the next step, a good pair of binoculars is
often a much better investment than a similarly priced telescope.
Binoculars are simple to use and readily available and will provide you with an excellent view of the moon and planets; constellations; meteor showers and even the odd deep space object. In fact, this is probably the best way to start - it allows you to learn the night sky and navigate easily to points of interest.
A view of Orion from my suburban, light-polluted, garden
There are plenty of books and magazines that you can use to help you find your way around; 'Philip's Stargazing 2013' or a 'Philip's Planisphere' are both popular choices, however, I would particularly recommend 'Turn Left At Orion' by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis. Written specifically for beginners, it is the perfect reference book for the amateur astronomer, providing easy to follow instructions on how to find the most common celestial objects as well as illustrating how they will appear through low and high powered scopes.
For the more technically minded, there are some excellent interactive planetarium applications available for the home computer, providing a 3D view of the night sky based on the date, time and location. Stellarium is a free application for Windows, Mac and Linux and is extremely popular due to its ease of use and the number of advanced features it boasts, including telescope control, large object databases and detailed information about the objects you may wish to view.
A screenshot from Stellarium
As most people probably don't want to be setting up their home computer out in the garden, there are a number of excellent mobile planetarium Apps available for smartphone and tablet devices, that provide a highly portable interactive sky map. The more advanced of these Apps provide a similar level of features to the free desktop applications, making them a useful tool when trying to find a particular object in the night sky.
Remember, learning your way around the constellations is a fascinating way to start observing the night sky and does not require anything more complicated than a map of the stars and a pair of binoculars. If you do decide to take things further, learning to navigate the stars from the beginning will help you out immensely when you eventually decide to take the plunge and buy your first scope.
The weather has been a little unpredictable over the past few nights, so rather than spending ages setting up the scope and camera, I decided to stick to my Nikon J1 compact camera and do some experimenting with capturing star trails and time lapse video.
Firstly I mounted the camera on a standard photography tripod in the garden, facing Polaris. I then set the camera to manual and setup the interval timer to capture 180 x 15s exposures. It was then a case of popping back inside and watching a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad on TV whilst the camera did its job. Once complete, I then put the lens cap back on and took another 100 x 15s 'dark' exposures - the reason for doing this is so that I can capture the noise signals created on the CCD within the camera - these can then be extracted from the main images - 'lights' - in order to get a cleaner image. I can discuss this process in more detail in a later post.
Processing was fairly straight forward. I use Craig Starks' Nebulosity 3, which is available for both Mac OS X and Windows, to combine the 'darks' to create the 'master dark'. This is then subtracted from each of the 180 lights to create the processed images, which are then saved in JPEG format.
In order to create a star trail image I used a freeware program for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux called StarStaX. It is a very simple program to use - you simply select the processed images you wish to stack and select the Blending Mode as 'Gap Filling'. You can then watch the image build gradually in the preview window. Once complete, 'Save As' and that's it - you're done! Here is one I made earlier..
Star Trails - 180 x 15s exposures
Next I used the same processed images I used to create the star trails, to create a time lapse video of the stars' movement across the sky. I use Time Lapse Assembler, which is for Mac OS X, but Windows users can use a similar program called VirtualDub - both are freeware and very simple to use. Just select the folder containing your processed images and then press encode. The resulting movie file is quite large, so I used Quicktime Player to compress the file for the web. You can see the results here..
I think the star trails turned out really well considering the conditions - bright moon and light polluted skies. The time lapse worked, but I think much darker skies are required in order to pick out more stars and increase the visual impact.
