This site exists because I want to share my astrophotography with friends, family, coworkers, and the folks who walk by while I'm in the park taking long exposures. The list keeps growing, and my list of best pictures keeps growing. I also want to have a quick blurb about each time I set up for astrophotography, since there is always something interesting or challenging to mention. I'm showing all the photos here, and not just the best ones, as a way to show the effort that goes into getting a good shot.
Most of the raw pictures are best viewed on a monitor that boosts dark colors or is set at a high brightness. This is because the raw pictures are often faint, even when they're long exposures. It usually takes playing with Gimp's brightness/contrast sliders to get the pictures really looking cool.
I usually setup in my tiny back yard in Long Beach, CA, which adds some difficulty because the house blocks my view of the north star and I have to align the mount by assuming the concrete patio slabs run perfectly north/south, which is actually pretty close to true. The house also blocks pretty much anything else in the northern sky, so I don't get many pictures of things in the north, like the Andromeda Galaxy. Since I have a decent view to the south, I end up taking pictures of seasonal things, like the Orion Nebula - a winter/spring constellation. The light pollution in Long Beach is also a big difficulty.
The domain name for this site "arcsin.io" is just a domain name I'd been sitting on for a few years and hadn't done anything with. However, it's retroactively a reference to the inverse sine function used in the angular diameter formula:
This is a hobby, so I'm releasing all pictures under a Creative Commons 0 license.
To the extent possible under law,
Cody
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Cody's Astrophotography.
This work is published from:
United States.
About me:
I grew up with my dad having a telescope, and he enjoyed being a sidewalk astronomer. We would go to the boardwalk at the beach and setup to look at an eclipse or conjunction or something, and my dad would offer the telescope eyepiece to anyone who walked by. You can see my dad's astronomy webpage here. I enjoy being a sidewalk astronomer just as much.
I had been wanting my own telescope for a while, and finally decided to do it for the 2020 Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. My dad's advice for getting a telescope is #1 - "Get a telescope you'll use, nothing too heavy or hard to setup" and #2 - "Put the money in the optics, not in fancy goto systems or fancy mounts". I knew I wanted a William Optics Apochromatic telescope and TeleVue eyepieces from my dad's experience and advice. Those are also the cream-of-the-crop brands of telescope optics. And I knew I wanted a telescope with a slightly bigger aperture than my dad's 90mm. So I researched William Optics telescopes and TeleVue eyepieces and found a good configuration. I didn't do lot of research on the mount. The person at the telescope store helped me pick the used Losmandy mount I have. I just needed a mount that was rated to hold the telescope and had the right kind of attachment for the Losmandy-style dovetail that the telescope attaches with. Turns out my telescope is pretty heavy and needs a beefier mount than I expected. The Losmandy is actually not quite rated for the telescope and counterweights, but the employee told me that and I was okay with it. I think it might be the reason for the mount not tracking right sometimes. I wasn't attempting to get a motorized mount, but I'm so glad I did - it's super convenient.
My telescope's first light was the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in December 2020. I setup at a nearby park, which was packed with people trying to see the conjunction - the headlines were calling it "the christmas star". I didn't have the battery yet, so I had to aim the telescope completely by hand and correct for the earth's rotation after every third person. I also only had the ~25x and ~100x eyepieces - the rest hadn't come in yet. I did not take any pictures, partly because I didn't have the equipment to attach the camera, but also because I can't take pictures and be a sidewalk astronomer at the same time. Also Jupiter would have been a tiny, ~50 pixel circle in a 24MP image with my camera.