i've had an interest in astrophotography for well over 20 years now, but i'd never had any equipment i could really try any shots with until this year. below are some experiments i did with an Olympus D-360L set to SHQ resolution (photos which are 1280 x 960 and about 600kb JPEGs). there was a particularly beautiful alignment of (from left to right, and generally upward) Jupiter, the Moon, Venus, Saturn and Aldebaran on the morning of July 18, and i wondered if the camera could capture anything without aid of a telescope.

the above image is a composite of five exposures. i mounted the camera on a mini-tripod and set that on a ladder. i was careful on each exposure to click and move my hand away, as i've got a wicked tremor that dooms handheld long-exposures for me. the camera takes a moment to auto-focus and then records the image, thus allowing time to damp out the harmful effects of my touch. even with these precautions, the five images don't overlap pixel for pixel, and the drift between them cannot be accounted for by the Earth's rotation. i used GIMP 1.1.25 on my Linux box (kernel 2.4.5 on a Duron 800 MHz/256 MB RAM) to align the images properly. i also adjusted the curves on each image to flatten the response of the bright objects and try to bring out the dimmer ones (Saturn and Aldebaran). for a lens that's about a centimeter in diameter, and a 5.5mm aperture, i didn't think the results were too bad. you can see the crescent shape of the moon among its glow. Jupiter was less than five degrees off the horizon, so its yellowish appearance comes from the haze it is viewed through. Aldebaran -- the rightmost point in the triangle at top -- was not even visible in two of the five images, so the little bit of processing i did certainly helped. i'm curious as to how this kind of system can be used in tandem with a telescope. if anyone out there knows of image processing software that extends the 0-255 range so that multiple images can be combined and then later normalized to the usual output, please email me info on them.