Nice work, Patrick. I am wondering if you could get the Schmidt camera to hold a chip instead of film .... Not to put down your film work at all, but it would be so much faster and you wouldn't need to worry about reciprocity failure with color film. Just a thought, Joe --- On Fri, 3/27/09, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote: From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Of photons and film (update) To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Friday, March 27, 2009, 12:34 AM I had the slides at the SLAS meeting but Dave didn't have the projector for his usual slide presentation so I did not show them.  And when I got home and inspected them at high magnification I discovered the stars were all perfectly round donuts.  Grumble. Suspecting (hoping) it might have been a problem with the film holder I modified it and dug out some very old Tri-X (more flashbacks Chuck?) and shot 4 five minute unguided shots of the area around NGC-2683. Using chemistry I'd mixed years ago I processed one of the shots and while the old chemistry didn't work all that great it worked well enough to be encouraging. So I mixed up new chemistry (ah, the smell of stop bath) and tonight developed the other three images. Despite being frozen, the 20+ year old film had degraded a bit but worked well enough to show me the camera is still focused and producing sharp results. So I guess today I'll go buy a fresh roll of film and see what kind of results I get. Here BTW is a 1200 DPI scan of one of the images I developed tonight: http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/ngc2683.jpg Remember that the original is a single frame of 35mm film.  Even blown up to the full size of the monitor the stars are still tiny and well focused. Now if a nice, bright comet would just stop by... patrick On 15 Mar 2009, at 23:03, Patrick Wiggins wrote:

As I enter this I've got the clock turned back 10 years in my observatory and photons from M-42/42 are falling on film in my Schmidt camera.

At least I hope that's the part of the sky I'm imaging.  The camera has no viewfinder so one has to set it up, take a picture, develop the picture and then see where it's pointed.

And I forgot just how big a pain it is to insert the film carrier.

I'll be in SLC tomorrow and will see if I can find some place to process the film (Bill C., Does Inkley's still do E-6?).  If nothing else, it'll be fun to walk into a camera shop and see the clerk's reaction to being presented with a roll of film.  :)

Hopefully I'll find some place and will be able to pick up the finished product in time for Tuesday's SLAS meeting.

For those wanting more info on Schmidt cameras: http://www.robertreeves.com/repair.htm

Carpe Noctem!

patrick

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