Recent star party

[hellothere123]

I was at a star party and the instructor used a green laser. Pretty awesome. I want one. What power or what do I look for so I get the right one. I live in canada

 

Also he used a cAmera with delayed exposure  we could see more nebulas and such with the camera than with the human eyeball. Any ideas on a basic setup do I can do this too? Do I need A special camera aNd is it Attached to its own telescope? What power of telescope do I need  thanks to u all

 

[ronin]

I suspect that Canada has a legal limit of 5mW for a laser pointer, so that will be the maximum you can have. There will also be strict rules about where it can be pointed - do not even think of showing someone that those flashing light are from a plane not a star. People can go a bit "loopy" with a GLP, had the nicely explain to one person that they would need a hospital visit to extract one if they kept messing around.

A delayed exposure is simply a way of reducing camera shake, you can do similar by setting the timer to 2 or 10 seconds, press the buttton and wait for the timer to expire and the vibration die down before the camera takes an image.

I actually presume that you mean a long exposure. For a night shot you would need to set everything to manual, So you set the exposure length (20 seconds), the ISO (800), set the lens to as wide as it will go (guess f/4), focal length to around 30-40mm, and you fucus it to infinity (not the setting on the lens). Put it all on a tripod and take an image, it should show up a few things if pointed at the right area. But none will be big.

There is the option that they used a webcam type camera and simply took a video, would the gain up and displayed the output on a laptop, that also shows up quite a bit.

Finally there is simply "imaging". Just not so simple, you track the sky, take several images by camera and stack and process the set of obtained images by stacking and processing. Lots of sat in front of PC.

[Ricochet]

I know nothing about it but have a look in the Video Astronomy section of the forum. At a quick glance this thread may be of particular interest: