Well, I just got back from Bonny Doon where the Santa Cruz club had their monthly star party... The haze cleared up by the time it got truly dark. The sky was nice and dark, but the seeing was fair-to-crappy (Sirius looked like a rainbow ;/) We all had morning engagements, so everyone was starting to pack it in by 11:30pm when I left.
When I got up to the SCAC site at twilight last night, I realized I'd gone and forgotten my Celestron's tripod... So I spent the evening mostly bumming views from other folks scopes and chatting about this that and the other. In a moment of mental wandering, I decided to try my new 2X teleconverter for my Nikon Coolpix out on Orion... The CoolPix 950 can be forced to ISO320 equivalent at the expense of some noise, and can do 8 second time exposures, so I figured what the heck... I took a few 1600x1200 tiff's of the general vicinity of Orion.. Unluckily, I moofed the dark slide (I think it was a 1 second exposure instead of 8) so I can't remove the color twinkles... anyways, here's a bad attempt at mangling the dark slide and differencing it from the star pix...
http://hogranch.com/CoolPix/01Apr00a/Orion.gif
I giffed it due to the lack of more than a few shades, I think this works better than JPG for point art like this. Also I dinked with the contrast and gamma curves quite a bit so the slight chromatic aberation of the CoolPix's zoom lens got rather exaggerated on the belt stars... If you are a brave soul (or have a fast link), the 5MB TIFF files are in the same directory, http://hogranch.com/CoolPix/01Apr00a (the last one is the moofed dark slide, and the '4008' is probably the best framing of the 4 or so orion pix...
Oh. The camera's zoom lens combined with the teleconverter gives an effective 35mm lens equivalent of 230mm f/4.
