Donnie’s Blog

It’s strange but true. The more sophisticated things get, the less you can actually do with them.

I tried setting up my Canon 40D with the new telescope to see how it does with prime-focus astrophotography. “Prime-focus astrophotography” is where the telescope functions as the camera’s lens. There are other ways to connect a camera to a telescope, but that is the simplest one, and best for deep-sky objects. I wanted to see whether there was any vignetting, how sharp the images look, and all that kind of stuff. Instead, all I get is:

    Err 01
    Communications between the camera and lens is faulty.
    Clean the lens contacts.

Um, of course the camera can’t communicate with the lens. The telescope mount certainly doesn’t have any electronics built in.

So, I read the manual to see if there was a way to tell the camera to ignore a “missing” lens. Nope. Search around on the Internet for a way around this? No dice. Call Canon tech support. That was the infuriating one - they acted like this was a silly thing to want. To take a photograph without a lens? Who would want to do something like that??!

Guess what - the 20D can do it! I’m sure glad I still have my 20D…

Yes yes, I just wrote about getting a new Canon 40D camera, but DSLRs aren’t always convenient, so it’s nice to have a point-and-shoot camera for casual use. I was initially looking at a much smaller and simpler P&S camera, but then I remembered that I’m an obsessive-compulsive control freak. Fortunately the G9 just came out, so I thought I would give it a try.

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I have been looking for a portable telescope that I can take on trips that involve air travel. This is no easy task, especially with increased airport security measures. Although there are certainly hard cases that can protect telescope optics from a certain amount of trauma, are they up to the challenge of protecting a telescope through checked baggage? Especially if one of the workers is having a bad day and is being a little rough on things.

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I picked up one of the new Canon 40D cameras yesterday. People have been going nuts about this new model, and they are pretty hard to get a hold of. Fortunately they started showing up at Best Buy and I was able to land one before they were sold out, so lucky me.

I took some photos of the frogs in Baxter pond, with my 100mm macro lens. I also tried out the 28-135mm IS lens that came with the camera - getting the body-only package is going to be nearly impossible for a while - and as expected, I really don’t like the lens. I will have to get a wide-angle EF-S lens later on, and hopefully unload that 28-135mm lens relatively quickly.

Overall I am pretty happy with the camera so far. It has some nice features, and the camera is faster and more responsive than my old 20D. Also, the 40D LCD display is significantly larger than the 20D LCD, which makes it easier to review what you’ve just done. The only thing I am a little concerned about is that the noise becomes noticeable pretty quickly at ISO400 and up, but this seems to be what happens when sensors get larger and larger.

I will have to give this camera a try with the ol’ telescope and see how it goes. The 40D has this new LiveView feature that will hopefully facilitate getting sharp focus. I expect that the camera will work well for photographing the planets. A question in my mind is how it will do with deep-sky objects where you must take multiple long exposures at low ISO settings. If the noise still shows up at ISO100 then it’s going to be annoying, but the beauty of stacking multiple images is that the signal-to-noise ratio improves pretty quickly as you combine more images together, so it isn’t too big a deal.

Of course, the real solution for astrophotography is to get a dedicated CCD imager from a company like SBIG, but the ones I want all cost at least $5000, and I can’t get to dark-sky sites frequently enough to make it worth the price. I think that is one of those “when I retire” things.

I just added a new programming note about a project I have been tinkering with lately. The project is a Buddhabrot image generator. Right now I am still working on generating some images so I will add those tomorrow, but tonight I wrote up a page about some of the interesting things I learned from this little project. So, check it out. Hopefully you will find it interesting too.

Everybody wants to be just a little cooler. Then the power goes out and nobody is cool. I find the irony delicious, for some reason.

I’m glad that I finally got a UPS on the computer at home; it survived this power outage without any problems, and now it’s turned off, waiting for the power to come back.

Of course, for the time being, none of this has affected me since I’m at work! It’s nice working in a lab full of computers - nice and cool.

In the catastrophe vein, there was a minor earthquake this morning at about 10:30am. Magnitude 4.7, it turns out. I guessed 4.2 when I felt it, so that’s not too bad.

Yay California. Last weekend the mountains catch fire close to home. This weekend the power goes out and there’s an earthquake.

I have got to get me a new state.