Through 40mm and 20mm lenses, you could kind of get towards making the
rings out, but it wasn't clear whether it was aberration or not.
Through the 12.5mm lens, with good focus, the rings were clearly
visible. Because the locking gear was stuffed, there was no way that I
could take a photo of it with the D80, and I don't think I'd be able
to get good photos just through the lens without an adaptor anyway.

Although Saturn is close, this isn't the best year to view the rings:

http://www.areavoices.com/astrobob/images/Saturnoppositions_Tom_Ruen_large_1.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Saturnoppositions.jpg

Through the telescope, the rings looked just like they do in
Saturnoppositions.jpg, though quite a bit smaller and with Saturn flat
against the horizontal plane of view. Perhaps I should get a better
telescope, though the cost for a really good one with motorised
tracking gear and so on is somewhat offputting. Stupid spellchecker
doesn't think that offputting is a word, but it so is:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/offputting

They probably want me to spell it with a hyphen. Just recently I was
telling people that I try to avoid all forms of punctuation now except
for the comma and the full stop. Dashes, hyphens, semi-colons, colons,
exclamation marks, and question marks, are generally to be avoided in
my current style guide. The typographical simplicity seems a better
deal.

http://groups.google.com/group/whits/t/6ee23be37dccf25a
Photographing Saturn, 3rd April, 1:42 pm

On 11 Apr 2010, at 12:28, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> Although Saturn is close, this isn't the best year to view the rings:
>
> http://www.areavoices.com/astrobob/images/Saturnoppositions_Tom_Ruen_large_1.jpg
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Saturnoppositions.jpg

Wow, I'm surprised you saw them at all.

I wonder how much adapters cost? Seeing your photos would be tremendous!

> They probably want me to spell it with a hyphen. Just recently I was
> telling people that I try to avoid all forms of punctuation now except
> for the comma and the full stop. Dashes, hyphens, semi-colons, colons,
> exclamation marks, and question marks, are generally to be avoided in
> my current style guide. The typographical simplicity seems a better
> deal.

Funny how opposite this is from myself, at the moment.

I'm starting to view style guides as dangerous, unless being applied post-hoc to existing work. They've only done me a disservice so far, in so much as trying to figure out what does and doesn't make sense for something — before the fact — generally prevents me from getting anywhere close to after the fact! Having no rules, and no concern is one of the biggest creative releases I have found.

> I wonder how much adapters cost?

The adapters themselves don't seem to cost much money, but it's the
telescope that I'm worried about. At no point could I get Saturn in
view with the camera stable. Whenever I found it, moving my hand away
from the telescope would move the telescope so far that it would take
me like five minutes to find it again.

Even if I had been able to get Saturn central without actually
touching the telescope, I'm not sure how long an exposure I could get
at such magnification without there being extensive trailing.

Basically there's no way that I can get a good astronomy photo with my
current telescope, probably even of the moon though I might try that
at some point. Going to be a week or two before the moon waxes into
something easy to photograph:

$ ./moonphase.py
Waning Crescent (0.921)

> I'm starting to view style guides as dangerous

For me it's not such of a problem because I'm used to them more on an
intuitive level now. If they don't make you pause at all then it's
only as difficult as selecting which word should come next, something
which you can't pull out of the process of writing.

Also I manage to embed such style guides into a sea of not being
constrained, so I might be extremely fussy about minute details and
then not worry about glaring errors of composition such as run on
sentences or what have you.