New Camera, new pics...

[Lomitus]

Howdy Folks,
Gonna keep this short, but here's the first official astropics I've taken with the new camera. Was having trouble sleeping tonight and just before I tried to crawl back in bed, I looked outsite and saw some stars....just had to try the new camera!

I'm pretty sure that's the Pleades up there in the one and the second picture is the morning sunrise with Venus (I -think- it's Venus...will check later when I get up).

Anyways, just wanted to share!
Bright Blessings,
Jim

[Lomitus]

Heres the second one...

[damienpaul]

very nice pics lomitus1, I'd be interested to know the exact stars/planets visible.

[astronomy2004]

what kind of camera did you use.?

[Lomitus]

Thanks for the great comments...here's another that I had shot this morning! I was falling asleep as I posted those this morning so sorry I didn't include a lot of info in that first post...To answer a couple of questions here, first yes, that bright star in the horizon shots is Venus :). I was just blown away by how bright it was (I've never really seen "The Morning Star" in the morning before! LOL!). You can actually pretty much see that Venus is in Gemini...thats Castor and Pollox to the right I believe. Now on the over head shot, that is definatly M45, "The Pleades" in the center of the shot and that would be Taurus lower in the picture...although I'm having trouble seeing that.

Now, the camera was an Olympus C 4000 digital I just got of Ebay for my birthday :-) The camera is a 4.0 mega pixel and was a refurb that I got for $224 (included quite a few extra's...extra 64 meg smart media card, rechargable batteries and charger, etc..). This camera, for the $200 price range is incredible! I shot all of these pics using ISO 400 equivilant, F2.8 with a 16 second shutter speed (basically all the max settings on it). Now please note....the really great thing here is I just tossed the camera on a basic photo tripod, took it out in the backyard, aimed and shot...I wasn't really trying to get anything specific (other then the -really- bright star I was seeing). I just wanted to see if this camera was sensative enough to capture any stars at all (my old Polaroid digital wasn't). I should also add, these photos, except for reducting the file size to upload them here are completely untouched/unprocessed...thats the way these pics came off the camera! I am really blown away by these pics and I really can't wait to get out to the near by state park (pretty decent skys) in the next evening or two with some clear skys to really put this new camera thru it's paces! It's going to be at least a couple of weeks, but I really can't wait to try some prime focus stuff thru my Orion Mak as well...I think I may have a pretty decent little rig here now! :D

I will be posting a couple of these images sometime in the next day or two at my gallery at BytePhoto.com in full size, full resolution after I've had a chance to tweak them a little...if you think these look good, you should see the high res versions! :)

Anyways, thanks again for the encouragment!
Bright Blessings,
Jim

[slotdrag]

real nice. keep it up.

[astronomy2004]

excelleent :D

[afterburn]

The C-4000 is a great camera, I have one myself I just $tepped up to the C-8080. There is nothing quite like the Olympus quality!

http://home.wavecable.com/~medell/medell/space.html

[xXxDarkSkyNitexzxXx]

ncie photos another shot of The Pleades cool love it