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Wow, that's... I'm actually lost for words.  It's heartening to know the data is ok, there's nothing too wrong with my raw subs or integration, it's just my processing that's lacking - which I think I knew, anyway! How did you get rid of the 'cloudiness' in the bottom left around the flame nebula? And the nebula behind the horsehead really pops compared to mine. Just awesome stuff.
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Dec 21, 2017 11:33
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A good DBE after a good sized crop to remove the noisy edges helps a lot. Everything else is mostly Local Histogram Normalization and Curves Transformation to bring out contrast and saturation with various masks and stuff. The background was quite colorful and it was tough to get it to be a neutral gray overall… also need some more experimentation with noise reduction, I feel like this result is not as good as it should be. But it was a rather quick edit.
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Dec 21, 2017 12:16
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Might be of interest for PixInsight users: Also: SubFrameSelector seems to work just fine before calibrating your images as well, no need to use it after calibration. Can save some time calibrating images if you have lots. darkarchon fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Dec 21, 2017 |
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Dec 21, 2017 19:22
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Yeah, I went chasing benchmarks a while ago when I first built the new machine and having parallel swaps helped a huge amount - four on SSD and another four on 8GB of ramdisk. Got some good numbers  These days it's a bit lower but also less like a furnace: 
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Dec 21, 2017 22:04
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Happy holidays everyone, here's Sh2-171 on my badly collimated newton in H-Alpha: 
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Dec 26, 2017 12:28
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Do HA filters help much with light pollution? I have the most open skies available to me to the east and south, which gives a lot of good opportunities to shoot from this latitude but I'm looking right across the city. Anything to help me get longer exposures without as much of the city glow would be wonderful. I did some messing around with shooting M42 last night. It was mostly me working on a more accurate polar alignment, though, and I'll feel silly posting the pics here after the last few...  you guys are awesome at this stuff
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Jan 10, 2018 16:34
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My friend don't let this dissuade you, always  Getting critique and improving yourself is part of the process. Don't try h-alpha filters for DSLRs, it's not a good idea since only 1/4 of all pixels are actually capturing red. And the ir block filter in front of the sensor also blocks a lot of h-alpha. It's great for monochrome cameras since you're virtually unaffected by light pollution aside from led lights. You can try CLS filters though. They block most light pollution while still capturing full red and blue. Most of the green will be gone but that's a non issue for most of the objects in the sky. darkarchon fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Jan 11, 2018 |
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Jan 11, 2018 21:50
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Thanks, I'm glad I asked. The first one didn't turn out too great, anyways, I didn't do enough exposure time and it was a little blurry. It was like 11 minutes @F/15, so not a whole lot of light came through. It's been too drat cold to try again lately, the LCD on my scope's handset is barely readable when it's below 10F outside. I'm hoping to try again tomorrow or the day after, with a better polar alignment this time, so I'll post those results. My other issue is post-processing. I'm playing around with DeepSkyStacker, which seems pretty nice, but what would you recommend for processing the TIFF file that comes out? I usually use GIMP for image editing because I'm a cheap bastard, but it's requiring me to convert the DSS output to 16-bit to even open the file, then it converts that down to 8-bit and the color dithering is just horrible. It's about time I start using something else.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:37
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OK so, multiple things. First of all, f/15 is way, way, way too slow to shoot anything in the sky except planetary. Second: you need guiding for those long exposures, just a mount will not be enough. Invest in a QHY5L-II and use PHD2. With PHD2 and a guidecam you can as well do drift alignment for polar alignment, which is far more precise than doing it by eye only. Regarding post-processing, you don't want to hear it, but PixInsight is the way to go. It's bulky, it's difficult and not trivial to use, but it does everything from stacking to finishing touches on the image. It's expensive, but absolutely worth the money. I don't know where I'd be without PixInsight, I'm pulling so much data out of my images and reducing noise so effectively - for any deep sky images I cannot live without it anymore.
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Jan 16, 2018 22:15
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Hello friends, bad image incoming: Flaming Star Nebula and NGC 1893 
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Jan 19, 2018 13:07
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What is the brightest possible Iridium flare? Wikipedia thinks it’s −9.5, but I was clicking around on Heavens‐Above and found a −10.5. I then discovered that the site has a daily request limit. 
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Feb 14, 2018 09:39
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Platystemon posted:What is the brightest possible Iridium flare? Anecdotal, but my pop and I chased nearby Iridium flares when they were a new thing, and we caught one in a low light pollution area that looked like an oncoming car headlight. It was startlingly bright, like something that didn't belong in the sky. I don't know if "HOLY poo poo" translates directly to magnitude, but that was the measurement we took.
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Feb 14, 2018 17:16
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Now I’m thinking it might be a mistake in the Heavens‐Above database. One particular satellite is supposed to be responsible for all of the upcoming super bright flares H‐A is predicting in my area. Meanwhile, Cal Sky isn’t showing me any flares from that satellite. But it is one of the lower altitude members of the constellation. Angular separation from the Sun for the −10.5 flare is given as 90.4°, with the Sun 0.3° over the horizon. It’s seeming plausible that this is the perfect storm and it may really be that bright, but I would like to know why Cal Sky doesn’t see it coming. Unfortunately, it’s a morning flare. I’m not sure I want to drive an hour to the site in predawn darkness for a light show that might not be happening. e: Maybe I will see if I can find a more convenient (but less spectacular) pass from that satellite between now and then to temper my expectations. e2: someone on Reddit posted:Iridium 40 has had its orbit lowered to ensure rapid decay. Also known as 1997-69C or #25041, its height varies between 275 and 596 km. It is tumbling with a period of about 4 seconds. Since flare prediction requires stabilised orientation of the target, it is no longer possible to observe 'classic' Iridium flares from this satellite. Mine isn’t Iridium 40, but I believe that is  .If the satellite were maintaining attitude, I might get a magnificent flare, but it isn’t. Also, because it is in a decaying orbit, predictions will be wrong anyway. e3: Heavens‐Above also disagrees with other Cal Sky and other applications about whether to predict flares for on‐orbit spares. Theoretically these have uncontrolled attitude, but I just saw one make a good flare. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Feb 16, 2018 |
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Feb 15, 2018 10:00
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Hello friends I have finally something to share again with you guys. Finally got another channel on this data 😄
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Feb 15, 2018 23:42
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It's been forever since I've posted here, and about as long since I've done much photography. However, I picked up a new guide camera at Astrofest (Starlight Xpress Loadstar X2) which fixed all my camera timeout / disconnect issues and had two clear nights while I happened to be off work for a week. On top of that I worked through the collimation issues with my RC (most of them anyway) and spent some time adjusting my CEM60 mount and had my QSI583WS camera fixed so it could actually select filters. Net result was this :  M81 and M82 by Tim Powell, on FlickrA solid uninteruppted night of imaging, with sub arc-second guiding (around 0.5) and no issues. SG Pro managed the slewing, centering and pier flip without complaint. Some complaints with red fringing on the stars, which probably indicates poor focus on the red filter or one of my remaining collimation problems. Hopefully a return to me being more productive, and time to get everything working before I spend a week at the MONS telescope on Tenerife later in the year.
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Feb 19, 2018 16:55
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Stunning
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Feb 19, 2018 18:23
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Can an equatorial mount be used to effectively track satellites? My thinking is take the elevation at the satellite’s highest point and subtract from 90°. Set that as the latitude. Take azimuth of the highest point, add 180°, modulo 360. Set that as the pole. I know that it won’t be perfect, but the idea is that I could unlock the ascension axis and muscle the scope across the sky while using the fine declination adjustment control to correct the deviation on that axis. This all makes sense in my head, but I haven’t tried it yet and I’m not about to work out the trigonometry.  It’s a lovely Moon picture, but it’s my lovely Moon picture. I’ve gone down the photography rabbit hole and the astronomy rabbit hole. I dare not approach the singularity that results when the streams cross. e: I would just like to say that finderscopes are unreasonably expensive. I might be purchasing a 200 mm OTA I don’t need because it comes with a decent finder. e2: I am indeed now the owner of a brand new 8″ scope that cost me $15 more than I would have paid for a 9×50 finder alone. I got a screaming deal on it, but still. Now to plan a mount. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 12:11
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The question is here if you can mount a guidecam properly in that finder, if it has enough backfocus and so on. Guidescopes for guidecams aren't expensive just for shits n giggles
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Feb 23, 2018 11:39
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Platystemon posted:It’s a lovely Moon picture, but it’s my lovely Moon picture. That's the same logic that led me to driving hundreds of miles to photograph the total eclipse. Totally worth it. edit: I might as well share while I'm here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0hwxo4tylo8iueu/AAC2adtSUujH87pRFp2i-1kda?dl=0 Splashy Gravy fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 19:00
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Someone on Reddit made a cool eyepiece chart thing.
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Mar 6, 2018 12:18
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I made an image! Markarians Chain in the Virgo supercluster. Atik 383L+ | TS Optics 70mm f/6 APO Triplet | SkyWatcher EQ6-R | 36×300s L 1×1, 15×120s R/G/B 2×2  Have some annotations, too:  
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Mar 15, 2018 22:29
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Very nice. Since it's Galaxy Season I've been working on some DSOs. Actually doing things like taking flats and autoguiding is helping a lot. (I even got my OAG working, although it was a pain and I highly prefer normal guidescopes) Leo Triplet - I like how this one came out.  Whirlpool Galaxy, again - came out quite green, I need to reprocess it I think.  Orion in H-Alpha - not a galaxy, but my first attempt at something in h-alpha.  The Bode and Cigar Galaxies  Whirlpool Galaxy - first try at this one
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Mar 24, 2018 08:19
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Hey friends. My nephew is really interested in space/astronomy stuff and I wanted to go do some star gazing with a nice but cheap telescope. Are there any good starter scopes I should look for? Sorry if this is in the OP, it was a little hard to parse on a phone when the image links are dead.
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Mar 25, 2018 21:15
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The general advice is that there's no such thing as a cheap starter telescope and that you should put that money towards binoculars instead. With that said, the definition of cheap is different for everyone, but if you're thinking of $100-$400 you're probably not going to find anything good.
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Mar 25, 2018 22:16
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There's definitely decent starter telescopes to be had around the $200-$300 mark, but I would not buy a telescope cheaper than $100, especially not the kind of telescope you find in Walmart or any other department store. These scopes are generally awful: bad image quality, cheap eyepieces, lovely mounts. They're often profoundly disappointing for looking at anything other than the Moon. I'm personally not a binocular person, but they're generally the best way to view the night sky on the cheap. Note that if you have shaky hands, though, they might be almost unusable, and may require a decent tripod. Give us a general budget you're looking for and we can probably suggest more specifically from there.
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Mar 25, 2018 23:13
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Agree with all of the above, a decent set of 10x50 binoculars or so are the usual recommendation. Binoculars can be hard to hold though (as mentioned) so you can get a binocular mount and put them on a camera tripod. If you do have a decent budget you can go with a tabletop scope. The AWB OneSky is a popular suggestion. I've never used a OneSky but I have used a Meade ETX80 and it was a nice, easy to use scope for looking at the Moon, planets and such. In general you want something with a wide view that's easy to point. It's sad to see people buy long refractors without diagonals and then struggle to try to see anything through them. I definitely would not worry about goto, automation, motorized/computerized scopes unless you're really ready to get into the hobby. (The ETX80 is a goto scope but the older one I used was a little clunky. I just like the form factor) edit: also, reddit r/telescopes has a decent guide. hannibal fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 05:32
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EngineerJoe posted:The general advice is that there's no such thing as a cheap starter telescope and that you should put that money towards binoculars instead. With that said, the definition of cheap is different for everyone, but if you're thinking of $100-$400 you're probably not going to find anything good. Four hundred dollars gets a Dobsonian with 200 mm of aperture. That’s pretty good.
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Mar 26, 2018 06:03
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Platystemon posted:Four hundred dollars gets a Dobsonian with 200 mm of aperture. That’s pretty good. If you're within a couple hours of a largish city, trolling Craigslist for dobsonians can net you a decent scope for a good price. There are regularly 10" dobs in my area in the $300 range. Don't do why my wife did for me and end up getting a cheap Bird-Jones scope that just ends up making your nephew hate the hobby. It's become somewhat serviceable with a serious amount of work and lots of cursing, but out of the box with the included tripod was good for the moon and nothing else.
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Mar 26, 2018 15:13
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While dobs are great value for money, if you’re a newbie in a city having a big rear end telescope that you wind up never wanting to take out because it’s an ordeal can wind up souring people. I have a 127 Mak as my starter scope and I use it a lot more than I would something bigger.
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Mar 26, 2018 15:28
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Yeah, Dobs are cool and all but I think they're more a second scope than a starter one. That's another reason I like to recommend the tabletop scopes, you may not even need a tripod if you have a good place to set it up.
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Mar 28, 2018 02:01
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It's hard to comprehend that all of this stuff is up there if you just look in the right place with the right equipment.  
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Mar 28, 2018 02:13
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hannibal posted:Yeah, Dobs are cool and all but I think they're more a second scope than a starter one. That's another reason I like to recommend the tabletop scopes, you may not even need a tripod if you have a good place to set it up. I think it’s pretty rare to have a tabletop in a good position to observe, and if you have to haul the table around that’s worse than carrying a telescope mount and not as stable once it’s there. A 200 mm Newtonian and base is not bad at all to carry in two trips and can pull in whole classes of objects that a smaller telescope just won’t reveal. It can see things under moderate light pollution that a smaller telescope can only see at a truly dark site. Travelling to avoid light pollution is a great idea, but it will always be more of a hassle than moving a larger telescope just out the door. There is nothing more frustrating than reading about that cool object and setting up the telescope and consulting the start charts and realising that while you have the telescope pointed at the right spot—the surrounding stars are right—the object you sought is just too faint for your telescope to show you tonight. But if the nephew is too young to carry a big telescope and there is a picnic table in a big field on the back forty behind the family home, by all means get a tabletop telescope. Dick Trauma posted:It's hard to comprehend that all of this stuff is up there if you just look in the right place with the right equipment. It blows my mind when I think about how tiny my telescope is on a cosmic scale, yet every fifth of a second it’s hit by enough photons to form an image of these incredibly distant objects.
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Mar 28, 2018 04:25
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If you're lucky enough to have access to suitably dark skies, a lot of the brightest "deep-sky" objects are visible to the naked eye too. You can spot some pretty cool stuff with no telescopes at all!
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Mar 28, 2018 06:07
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I am in Los Angeles. 
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Mar 28, 2018 20:22
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Dick Trauma posted:I am in Los Angeles. On especially clear nights you can see the moon.
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Mar 28, 2018 20:27
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My most used stargazing kit at the moment is a set of old west german army field glasses (Hedler, 8x40mm) excellent quality lenses, solid construction yet lightweight enough to not need a tripod. I don't often get much time to observe at the moment so next to zero prep time is great, and even 8x40 is enough to provide a lot more to look at. I have some larger ones too that work very well with a tripod- but by the time I'm lugging out a tripod too I might as well do it "properly" and use my little modded newtonian reflector.
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Mar 28, 2018 21:32
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Work is flying me out to Oregon for a week to run a project in Corvallis next month. We have another site in Newport that I'd like to visit to just put faces to the voices on the phone, and from there it's ~30 minute drive south to Searose Beach, which DarkSiteFinder shows as 1 step below middle-of-the-ocean dark. My only decent Milky Way timelapse was taken at my parent's campground in a bright yellow area, and the Cincinnati Astronomical Society has an 18-acre dark sky site about a 90 minute drive from my house, and it's only in a dark green area, so I am excited as hell to haul just my camera and tripod out there with me.
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Mar 29, 2018 15:54
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CommanderApaul posted:Work is flying me out to Oregon for a week to run a project in Corvallis next month. We have another site in Newport that I'd like to visit to just put faces to the voices on the phone, and from there it's ~30 minute drive south to Searose Beach, which DarkSiteFinder shows as 1 step below middle-of-the-ocean dark. Hopefully it's not the darkest PacNW fog you've ever been in!
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Mar 30, 2018 02:13
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Anyone going to be at NEAIC or NEAF in a few weeks?
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Mar 30, 2018 05:26
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I forgot I asked this question here, sorry. I was hoping to spend around 100$ on a telescope, and I do have shaky hand syndrome. I was looking for something to get an eight year old kid excited about astronomy and whatnot.
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Mar 30, 2018 21:11
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