Astrophotography And Data-Analysis Sense Exoplanets

December 1, 2014 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[David Schneider] was reading about recent discoveries of exoplanets. Simply put these are planets orbiting stars other than the sun. The rigs used by the research scientists include massive telescopes, but the fact that they’re using CCD sensors led [David] to wonder if a version of this could be done on the cheap in the backyard. The answer is yes. By capturing and processing data from a barn door tracker he was able to verify a known exoplanet.

Barn Door trackers are devices used to move a camera to compensate for the turning of the earth. This is necessary when taking images throughout the night, as the stars will not remain “stationary” to the camera’s frame without it. The good news is that they’re simple to build, we’ve seen a few over the years.

Other than having to wait until his part of the earth was pointed in the correct direction (on a clear night) at the same time as an exoplanet transit, [David] was ready to harvest all the data he needed. This part gets interesting really quickly. The camera needed to catch the planet passing in between the earth and the star it revolves around (called a transit). The data to prove this happened is really subtle. To uncover it [David] needed to control the data set for atmospheric changes by referencing several other stars. From there he focused on the data for the transit target and compared points across the entire set of captured images. The result is a dip in brightness that matches the specifications of the original discovery.

[David] explains the entire process in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “Astrophotography And Data-Analysis Sense Exoplanets” →

AVR Barn Door Tracker For Astrophotography

January 23, 2014 by Marsh 16 Comments

[ZigZagJoe’s] first foray into astrophotography is this impressive AVR barn door tracker, which steps up his night sky photo game without emptying his bank account. If you’ve never heard of astrophotography, you should skim over its Wikipedia page and/or the subreddit. The idea is to capture images otherwise undetectable by the human eye through longer exposures. Unfortunately, the big ball of rock we all inhabit has a tendency to rotate, which means you need to move the camera to keep the night sky framed up.

Most trackers require precision parts and fabrication, which was out of [ZigZagJoe’s] grasp. Instead, he found a solution with the Cloudbait Observatory model, which as best as we can tell looks vaguely similar to the tracker we featured last year. Unlike last year’s build—which uses an ATmega32u4 breakout board— [ZigZagJoe’s] tracker uses an ATTiny85 for the brains, running a pre-configured table that determines step rate against time.

Continue reading “AVR Barn Door Tracker For Astrophotography” →

Raspi Astrophotography Board Also Does Everything Else

January 17, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

FPGA

A few years ago the folks at Astro Designs put together a board that took off-the-shelf CCD sensors from point and shoot cameras and turned them into respectable astrophotography sensors. Since then, the world has seen an explosion of Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and other microcontroller platforms, making this the perfect time for a hardware revision.

Their PiXi-200, like their previous AstroCam board, is able to take image sensors out of cameras and turn them into telescope mounted cameras. That’s only one of its tricks, though: The PiXi-200 also has accelerometers, gyroscopes, enough UARTs to do just about anything, a four channel ADC and four channel DAC, two dozen GPIO pins, enough LEDs and buttons for any project, and a 200,000 gate FPGA. All this in a board that plugs directly into the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi just like an Arduino shield. Needless to say, there’s a lot you can do with this board.

Right now, the design is still in the prototype stage, but once everything is finalized the basic model of the board will sell for £30 GBP ($50 USD). The high-end “Model C” board, with all the bells and whistles, will sell for £45 GPB ($70 USD).

Canon 300D Mod For Astrophotography And IR Imaging

April 15, 2006 by Eliot 14 Comments

300d

[Jan-Erik Skata] recently had to perform surgery on his Canon 300D since the secondary mirror would not raise up (and if manually locked wouldn’t autofocus). His repair guide is good; you may remember his focus screen replacement. The thing I found really interesting was the site he referenced for his disassembly: Gary Honis’s Canon Digital Rebel (300D) Modification. Gary removes the IR cut glass from inside the camera and replaces it with a piece of clear glass. He then shows how to setup color correction and confirm that autofocus is still working correctly. He’s even got a mockup for how to add peltier cooling to the CMOS chip.

Continue reading “Canon 300D Mod For Astrophotography And IR Imaging” →

A baby blue hatchback with red accents drives down a road with blurry trees and a blue sky in the background.

ICCU Monitor Logs Data In E-GMP EV Failures

July 25, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 21 Comments

EVs are less mechanically complicated than their combustion kin, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to component failure. The Integrated Charge Control Unit (ICCU) has been the main failure point in recent Hyundai/Kia EVs, and ICCU Observer is an attempt to log data from the systems to find the culprit.

The ICCU handles all charging and voltage conversion duties from 800 V down to 12 V in the E-GMP platform EVs from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. The main failure mode appears to be when the circuit charging the 12 V fails, eventually rendering the vehicle inoperable. While the rate of failure is relatively low, the exact numbers are unknown, and Hyundai has remained quiet on if they know what’s causing it.

Unsurprisingly, speculation is rampant with owners experiencing failures relaying similarities and differences to others with the same problem. In an effort to bring actual data to the process, [broadwall] has started working on an open data set of information collected over the vehicle’s OBD II port in an effort to pinpoint similarities between the vehicles that have experienced failures.

Hyundai is currently replacing the failed units under warranty, which have been recently expanded to 15 years in most markets, but that’s little comfort when you’re sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow. These failures stand out in an otherwise easy to maintain platform, so hopefully this effort will lead to a permanent fix instead of merely swapping out for a new unit.

If you’d like to explore data analysis a little further, how about using astrophotography to detect exoplanets or learning more from Stanford?

What Isaac Roberts Saw Without A Space Telescope

January 20, 2026 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Space telescopes are all the rage, and rightfully so. The images they take are spectacular, and they’ve greatly increased what we know about the universe. Surely, any picture taken of, say, the Andromeda galaxy before space telescopes would be little more than a smudge compared to modern photos, right? Maybe not.

One of the most famous pictures of our galactic neighbor was taken in — no kidding — 1888. The astronomer/photographer was Isaac Roberts, a Welsh engineer with a keen interest in astrophotography. Around 1878, he began using a 180 mm refracting telescope for observations, and in 1883, he began taking photographs.

He was so pleased with the results that he ordered a reflecting telescope with a 510 mm first-surface mirror and built an observatory around it in 1885. Photography and optics back then weren’t what they are now, so adding more mirrors to the setup made it more challenging to take pictures. Roberts instead mounted the photographic plates directly at the prime focus of the mirror.

Andromeda

Because it took hours to capture good images, he developed techniques to keep the camera moving in sync with the telescope to track objects in the night sky. On December 29th, 1888 he used his 510 mm scope to take a long exposure of Andromeda (or M31, if you prefer). His photos showed the galaxy had a spiral structure, which was news in 1888.

Of course, it’s not as good as the Hubble’s shots. In all fairness, though, the Hubble’s is hard to appreciate without the interactive zoom tool. And 100 years of technological progress separate the two.

Roberts also invented a machine that could engrave stellar positions on copper plates. The Science Museum in London has the telescope in its collection.

Your Turn

Roberts did a great job with very modest equipment. These days, at least half of astrophotography is in post-processing, which you can learn. Want time on a big telescope? Consider taking an online class. You might not match the James Webb or the Hubble, but neither did Roberts, yet we still look at his plates with admiration.

Raytracing makes the design easier, but the building is still as tricky as ever.

A 10″ Telescope, Because You Only Live Once

September 16, 2025 by Tyler August 21 Comments

Why build a telescope? YOLO, as the kids say. Having decided that, one must decide what type of far-seer one will construct. For his 10″ reflector, [Carl Anderson] once again said “Yolo”— this time not as a slogan, but in reference to a little-known type of reflecting telescope.

Telescope or sci-fi laser gun? YOLO, just try it.

The Yolo-pattern telescope was proposed by [Art Leonard] back in the 1960s, and was apparently named for a county in California. It differs from the standard Newtonian reflector in that it uses two concave spherical mirrors of very long radius to produce a light path with no obstructions. (This differs from the similar Schiefspiegler that uses a convex secondary.) The Yolo never caught on, in part because of the need to stretch the primary mirror in a warping rig to correct for coma and astigmatism.

[Carl] doesn’t bother with that, instead using modern techniques to precisely calculate and grind the required toric profile into the mirror. Grinding and polishing was done on motorized jigs [Carl] built, save for the very final polishing. (A quick demo video of the polishing machine is embedded below.)

The body of the telescope is a wooden truss, sheathed in plywood. Three-point mirror mounts alowed for the final adjustment. [Carl] seems to prefer observing by eye to astrophotography, as there are no photos through the telescope. Of course, an astrophotographer probably would not have built an F/15 (yes, fifteen) telescope to begin with. The view through the eyepiece on the rear end must be astounding.

If you’re inspired to spend your one life scratch-building a telescope, but want something more conventional, check out this comprehensive guide. You can go bit more modern with 3D printed parts, but you probably don’t want to try spin-casting resin mirrors. Or maybe you do: YOLO!

Continue reading “A 10″ Telescope, Because You Only Live Once” →