Remember those horrible prickles in summer lawns? They’re often caused by Bindii, which have vicious spikes that stick a seed to your foot. The plant spreads itself using you as transport. Bill took a macrophoto of the Bindii using a WeMacro Rail and a reversed lens. You can see how nasty this creature is.
An infinity corrected objective is a lens used for macrophotography. It looks very much like a microscope lens, and when you pair it with a tube lens it has quite a few advantages over more traditional macro lenses.
Macrophotography is the art of getting images of tiny subjects onto a camera sensor. I’ve been asked about getting started in macrophotography, and specifically the least expensive way of getting your first image with the WeMacro Rail. This blog shows you how to go out and get your first image, so I’m going to get down to basics.
One of the things we like about getting images is they can tell stories so well. In the case of astrophotography you can literally see the development of a solar system or the birth (or the death) of a star. At the Australian Photographic Prize, I talked about macrophotography with other photographers, and it’s remarkably similar.
Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
