Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope portrait

The Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope sits for a portrait in the early evening twilight as I opened the telescope for observing tonight.  I was planning to set up for a timelapse. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye on my 70D with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 6400.  The lighting was mostly by my waving an LED flashlight over the scene fairly quickly.

This image was taken shortly after the last one.  In this case, I flashed on the dome lights for less than a second to provide the lighting for the telescope.  This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye and an exposure of 20 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 6400.  I stopped the shot down to improve the depth of field and to help get a better exposure with the dome lights which overexposed an earlier attempt with similarly quick on/off of the lights.

Looking for Santa

I was observing on Kitt Peak the night before x-mas and setup a timelapse outside my dome.  Here the Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope dome is front and center with the winter Milky Way looking like smoke rising from its chimney.  Orion is prominent above and right of the dome as is Taurus near the top of the frame above Orion.  Jupiter is the bright object above and left of the dome.  This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens on my Canon 70D with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Halo around the dome

Another shot from Sunday night, this one shows the lunar halo apparently around the dome of our 1.8-m Spacewatch telescope. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.

Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope

One thing that is hard to photograph with a "normal" lens are telescopes inside of domes. You just can't quite fit the telescope in the frame since you can't get far enough away from the telescope. But a fisheye makes the task easy! This is the Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope on Kitt Peak. We use it to observe asteroids and comets. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 1/15 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.

1.8-m at sunset

The Spacewatch 1.8-m telescopes dome is lit by the setting sun. This image was taken at 70mm focal length with an exposure of 1/40 seconds at f/11, ISO 100.