Hello everyone! I have had one of my ‘smaller telescopes’ on display at the Smith’s School of English Franchise in Kotoen (スミス 英会話 甲東園) these past few weeks. While some of the students totally ignore it two students in one of the Tuesday night English Conversation (英会話)classes are particularly interested in optics and astronomy and cannot be kept away from it.
Not long ago I got a planet camera for one of my larger scopes. This camera is interesting because of its extraordinary small pixel size mated with an especially low-light color sensitive CCD chip. This is an astronomy camera dedicated to photographing the planets, satellites and comets, that is objects that are relatively near to us and very colorful.
The curious thing about this picture is how it was made. I rigged a make-shift adapter to allow my cell phone to be used to take pictures through a telescope! Can you believe it? My student is very interested and so we proceeded to experiment further with this proprietary technology. Of course we do this outside his normal English Conversation (英会話) lesson time.
This plant is probably about 180 meters from my school in Kotoen and the magnification achieved to get this picture was around 100x. I pat myself on the back for getting a respectable photo with just my cell phone. Unfortunately the CCD in cell and smart phones are far too coarse in general and are extremely insenstive to low-light, so the new technology invented by yours truly will need to be confined to the daytime. Can someone make a smart phone with an astronomy grade CCD chip in the camera. Well that would be interesting!
Can you see the hidden creature in the photo? I’ve seen it several times, as though this must its favorite hang-out. There’s a little bird in the back somewhere. I know most Smith’s 英会話 teachers have interesting hobbies. This is a great life for a teacher and if you are a student, well, at your next lesson ask your teacher!
Martin Werner Zander
マーティン・ワーナー・ザンダー
Owner Smith’s School Franchise in Kotoen
I can’t see it! But I love what you’re doing. I want to take pictures of stars and planets and the moon. Gotta get me a telescope!
Thanks Ed. The moon is relatively easy to photograph. You need a very high resolution telescope and a 10MegaP camera with tiny tiny pixel size. The planets are much more difficult to photograph – gets pretty intense. Deep sky objects …. don’t go there! You’ll never get any sleep!