I remember that few years ago, the Sky & Telescope site provided some ‘How To’ articles and I think I put few links in my personal page at that time. When I started to repair the clean up the links, the Sky & Telescopes links were among the broken links that need to be repaired. It took me a while to find all the original articles I referred to. They are still there in the Sky & Telescope site, but their locations have been rearranged.
Actually I was looking on how to get a COSPAR station number tonight, but beside two old postings dated back to 1997 in Seasat-L archives by Alan Pickup and Bram Dorreman, I could not find any info on where to go to get the station number. I remember recently I just read it somewhere, but again, I didn’t bookmark it. My search however took me to the Sky & Telescope site and instead of looking for COSPAR registration, I then scanned the site and read the following articles:
1. A Guide to Choosing a Telescope. Beside explaining the three different classes of Telescopes, i.e., refractors, reflectors and catadioptrics, their advantage and disadvantages, it also providing some practical considerations in selecting telescopes. However, for visual satellite observing, particularly for the brighter satellites, our eyes or a pair of binoculars would be sufficient, so I just added the link here. In case we need a quick reference, we can always click the link of this article and go back to the S&T site.
2. The next article that caught my attention was Deep-Sky Imaging with Digital Camera. I like the explanation about the electronic noise, which could simply be reduced for example by turning off the camera after the exposures. Sometime we may neglect this step that ended up with a noisy photograph. However, as far as Astrophotography is concern, I think Jerry Lodriguess’ book on Astrophotography
3. The third article that caught my attention was Photographing Iridium Flares. While I have had a link in my Tutorial page to Photographing Satellite site, I thought the S&T article gives a good introduction to capture the Iridium Flares. Out of curiosity, I then took my old MAFICA-95 and checked its aperture setting. It turned out I could only go as far as 8 sec for my shutter at f/2.8, slightly less than the 15 – 20 sec mentioned in the text. However, I took the following picture at 8 seconds using a tripod and I didn’t expect this result. I think may be there is a chance for me to take an Iridium flare using this old camera. However, 8 sec is about 1/3th of the time Tom Wagner took this picture, let see what would happen if I have a chance.
Popularity: 7% [?]
