Whilst waiting for Venus to appear out of the deepening twilight yesterday evening, I thought it would be a good opportunity to have a little play with the mount I got many months back for my compact digital camera. It was all a bit hasty; the camera is a Canon Power Shot A560, 7.1 Mega Pixels and, like some many cameras of this compact format, uses just 2 AA batteries, and uses them very quickly, so the first thing to do was get some batteries on charge in case those already in the camera died, which usually takes no more than about 20 shots if taken in a short space of time. The camera wasn’t too difficult to set in the mount ready to be put on the ‘scope once I had something worth shooting.

I went through the alignment process on the ‘scope, using the Solar System object method which just requires the usual time, date and location data and then centre a specified object, in this case the moon, and the job’s done. As I said earlier, things were done a little in haste and when I came to look for Venus in the available objects that the ‘scope believed should be visible, it wasn’t listed?! I did the alignment again and had entered the date in UK format, dd mm yyyy instead of US, mm dd yyyy, so the ‘scope thought it was looking at the sky in June, by which time Venus will be gone at that time of day.

So I’m set up and still no Venus appearing through the twilight so it seems like a chance to set things up with the camera and fire off a few test shots of the Moon before tackling Venus, which is still not certain to appear as there is some cloud about. I also find something in the menu, and I’m still not too sure how I got there, called ‘Sync’ and offers the option to ‘sync’ with the Moon, which I did and it seemed to track very nicely, so how is this different to Lunar rate mode? Another look in the manual required I think. I’ve got the 25mm eyepiece in and have a little length on the barrel that I can use for the camera mount and I’m all set up. Switch on the camera and the lens extends and smacks up against the eyepiece, so I have to back it off a little and that’s pretty much it, I’m ready to shoot. I take a few shots and realise that it’s difficult to tell if the shot is in focus as the viewfinder screen on the camera doesn’t look that crisp, though when the shot is taken and being saved to the memory card it is displayed on viewfinder screen and they look better than the image whilst setting it up, it also crossed my mind that I focussed the ‘scope without my glasses on, specs are such a pain doing this stuff, so it may not be that good a focus for the camera anyway? So I bracket a few shots making small adjustments on the focuser each time hoping to get something useable and these are some of the ones I got.

From 6th March Venus Moon
From 6th March Venus Moon

The black circular outline is the eyepiece, so it’s clear that I could have changed the position of the camera on the mount but there was enough useable image there anyway. These are the best ones out of about eight bracketed shots and a couple of others where I played with the zoom on the camera; waste of time. After working on it in Photoshop, crop, contrast, sharpen and blue adjustment the finished product is below, which I will put on the masthead in due course.

From 6th March Venus Moon