6 replies to this topic

[asaint]

Rent-a-Scope - Adventures in Astrophotography

[Jeffrey Bout]

A Nice story, Andrew!

I personally use another way to keep astronomy fun: I don't take pictures at all! No webcames, no CCD cameras and especially: NO LAPTOP! I get iritated by Windows/Linux all day and I'm horrified just by thinking of having to use it at night in the field too.

Just me and my scope... Total relaxation...

Oh, and of course: reading my checklist first before leaving the house which also includes a spare power source.

And nice pictures of the heavens can be found everywhere...

[HfxObserver]

Andrew, first let me say thank you for the review of the rent a scope service. I've seen their ads on a-mart and often wondered how much they'd have to charge to make something like this viable.

Wow, so if I only took one image in two wavelengths a week that would cost me just $6,000 USD for a year of B&W and Ha imaging!

I think the only desire I could ever have for something like this service would be if I was trying to observe a very specific event like a comet or asteroid, or some other transient event. Otherwise I go to the site below and it's FREE! If I did have 6 grand to spend on imaging a year I'd just build my own robotic observatory after saving up for a couple years.

http://heritage.stsc...ry/gallery.html

-Chris

[Psycho_pup]

Thanks for the comments!

Well, I suppose all of us at heart would like to have something to remember our observations by - like keeping a log, sketching, or imaging, or just asking someone else to look through our scopes!

I decided to try astrophotography and thus ended up trying out Rent-a-scope after my miserable attempts to do so alone.

As to the price, if you join as a member of the RASO, you get 120 mins included in the $40 membership fee per month. If you never shoot more than 120 minutes a month, then the costs can be quite low. However, we all know that the low entry ticket is just to hook you so that you will be addicted and buy more imaging time!

Cheers!

[Levi]

Andrew,

Don't give up! You have some fine equipment. Just tonight I setup my scope hours in advance so it would cool down, the laptop with the NexImage plugged in and ready to go, polar aligned it and went in to have dinner and enjoy a movie with my wife. I figured a couple hors and the scope will be cool enough to give it a shot. Just got done tearing everything down and packing it away. I got maybe two minutes of observing before, yep, the clouds rolled in thick and heavy so here I am telling you not to give up... go figure. Anyway I do hope you will continue trying to take some astrophotos. i certainly look forward to seeing them when you do.

[Psycho_pup]

Hi Levi,

Well, I post my pictures in the members gallery here. You can search for 'Psycho_pup'. The pictures labelled 'Epsilon 250', 'Mewlon 300' and 'Sky 90' are all done via Rent-a-scope as I do not have any of these scopes!

Cheers!

[Mizar]

Thanks for the review. I bit the bullet and joined Arnie this week. I found the controls were very intuitive after 10 minutes on a scope. The demonstrations are absolutely needed. There would have been no way for me to process the .fit files without those demo's. This is not a beer and pretzel site and it takes a bit of effort to produce a good image. That being said here's what the first night produced with M101. It's been cut down drastically from the original 1.6M size.

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