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I read the last few pages, and it looks like a common theme for a beginner looking to getting into planetary photography with a DLSR is a good tripod, mount, and maybe something like the Orion Short 80? I'm putting together an early holiday present for my wife. Looking for (relatively) easy setup and shooting in a short amount of time. If the processing is involved she told me that can be my problem. One thing I worry about, while we have decent sky, it is windy AF here. Our camera tripods are all super lights and we've been talking about getting something beefy. I have a giant wooden survey tripod that I haven't co-opted into a camera mount, but I am close.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:01
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Thank you all for the quick insights. The wooden tripod has a 5/8x11 thread so maybe I have to cludge something together. But it already looks like it is beat to hell so no harm there if I trash it. That particular lens I was eyeballing day before yesterday so good to hear another endorsement. Finally, on the mak / c5... I feel kind of super-stupid there. I used to have a c90 spotting scope but I never connected it to a camera. Looking for one again seems they're all backordered.
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Sep 16, 2021 00:34
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Hasselblad posted:First time I saw Saturn through my own scope, my reaction was more along the lines of "that's fake as hell". That perfectly describes my thought! I was at a summer camp, and someone had brought a decent sized reflector. This was probably 30 years ago. I remember thinking "looks so fake" probably because it looked like a textbook image.
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Oct 19, 2021 14:17
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This is on my drive home tomorrow for $80 (bad photo, Celestron Astromaster 130EQ). For very amateur backyard scope (me). Assuming it doesn't come with anything else not in the photo, any tips for things to pick up? New eyepieces, some way to collimate, t-ring for Nikon and T-ring adapter, etc.  Oh! And I bought that Rokinon 135mm lens suggested upthread for my wife's moon photos.
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Oct 19, 2021 23:04
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simble posted:For visual, if you can find them, grab a couple of the GSO eyepieces from Agena Astro. They are amazing for the price. The GSO superview 20mm and 15mm paired with a 2x barlow gives you basically all you'd need for some casual observing of planets and some DSO. And, I think you could get all 3 for ~$100-$150. They are miles better than the 2 included eyepieces. This is great, thanks. I wondered about the weight. I've been looking for a refractor or mak (rear mount) for that reason. For $80 I figured I'll grab it. But thanks for the early notice so I don't get myself worked up about it. Known issue, I'll just use it for backyard viewing and learning how to use an EQ mount. Cheers! E: well that fell through. Maybe for the best. I think I'm back to looking for a more portable kit so I can take it with my on my field travels. Budget $1k without camera (I'll be packing a dslr anyway) too unrealistic? pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 20, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 00:39
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simble posted:For visual, if you can find them, grab a couple of the GSO eyepieces from Agena Astro. They are amazing for the price. The GSO superview 20mm and 15mm paired with a 2x barlow gives you basically all you'd need for some casual observing of planets and some DSO. And, I think you could get all 3 for ~$100-$150. They are miles better than the 2 included eyepieces. I can't find these anywhere. Looking for 1.25in to fit my simple ST80. Any other suggestions for bang for buck eyepieces? And for anyone looking for stray items: Svbony is running 20% off on eBay w/free shipping I think through the weekend. Yesterday I saw conflicting end dates (saw both 9 hours and Nov 8th). 18 Dummy Juice posted:If you had ~$600 to spend, would you upgrade the mount, or just get a new scope + mount combo altogether? How about at ~$1000? Obviously not gonna get anything super well-equipped for astrophotography at either price point, but I do like the option of doing some un-tracked photos. For baby's first try, I bought a like new Star Adventurer 2 for $300 and a KF concepts photo tripod (20# payload cap) for $50. You've got more focal length but I bet similar weight as my st80. The SA counterweight is kind of a joke. I know the ioptron offering sells extension bars and addl counterweights. But I'm pretty sure mine will end up a dslr rig so nbd. pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 6, 2021 |
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Nov 6, 2021 17:40
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duodenum posted:These are also good bang for the buck: This is perfect, thank you.
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Nov 12, 2021 04:13
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Well I guess I'm picking up an old Ha-modded t2i for cheap. Other than the fact that I own Canon nothing, what do I need to know having never shot with filters removed? For now I'm just going to order a T ring and shoot it with the opt 180 f/4.5 I got last month.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:37
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That Rokinon / Samyang lens suggested in this thread several times, and I've since seen is extremely popular for dslr astro-shooters, is on sale for BF, Amazon. This sale isn't the lowest prices per camelcamelcamel, but I couldn't find one on mpb or keh this week for the Fujifilm mount. If anyone had them on a wish list, worth checking it out. I picked up the Samyang version for $382, Fuji X mount (it was $450 ish yesterday). The Rokinon version of same today is on sale for $424, so if you are looking to buy, I'd search both versions out because different name badges are cheaper per mount. Cheapest appears to be the m4/3 mount.
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Nov 26, 2021 04:41
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Enos Cabell posted:Appreciate those of you posting deals in here, gonna jump on one of those before long. Photo Pills (photo planning app w/ AR) is $5 during BF sale. I'd forgotten I had a random $3.74 balance on my app store wallet so score.
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Nov 28, 2021 00:24
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Really dumb question about bahtinov masks: do they need to be square (perpendicular) to the lens exactly to focus properly? I got a 3d printed one that is too tight. I can put it on the very tip of my lens and get it off w/o disturbing focus (so probably not square), or I can sand the inside lip down some.
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Jan 4, 2022 00:18
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AstroZamboni posted:Got out under dark skies (bortle 3) for the first time in ages last night. The transparency was unbelievable. Logged 23 objects on the Herschel 400. Also definitively saw two objects I've been trying unsuccessfully to view for years; the flame nebula in Orion, and the planetary nebula in M46. Killer night. Speaking of flame nebula: I know I'll never get photos like the others in this thread, and I know this target is overdone, but I am pretty happy how this turned out.  I've been practicing my travel setup: no tracker, no guiding. Just a Fuji xt2, Samyang 135, cheap-ish Amazon tripod. Max 1s exposures. This is 400 1s exposures from last night in my backyard. 100 dark, flat, and bias frames. This was my first time trying Siril, and my first time using photoshop in 20 years. I overdid my reduction of star bloat, for sure. And surely other issues. But going from never taking manual shots a couple of months ago to this, I am pretty excited.
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Jan 31, 2022 03:25
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I'm set up at a B2 site tonight. Northern NV desert. It is quite cold! Only 6pm and there's still some sun glow to the west, but still lots of stars. I drove through some B1 places, but I'd be just off the freeway on the middle of nowhere and didn't feel too comfortable there solo. Maybe tomorrow night. I did have a country cop pull over while I was setting up and he was pretty interested. Said he'd be back in a couple of hours to check on me. I think he was just making sure I wasn't drinking. pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Feb 2, 2022 |
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Feb 2, 2022 03:09
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I've been thinking about a proper mount and guide cam for the house, because Polaris is hidden from my backyard. But then I think about the extra gear involved and I just recoil. Mostly because I just want to set up and start shooting in a few minutes. I guess that's something I need to get over.
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Feb 8, 2022 02:10
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And then there's dumb me, who has twice forgotten to take off the Baht mask before taking photos...
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Mar 17, 2022 19:47
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Do you guys think that $ https://reno.craigslist.org/spo/d/dayton-orion-xt10-classic-dobsonian/7486706284.html I'd have to have them meet me somewhere. Figure for a 10" I'd have to drive my truck which gets ~12 mpg. That's like $60 in gas. e: saw this on Cloudy Nights for $350 so I am going to contact him at that price. pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 22:48 on May 27, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 21:16
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Raikyn posted:Been playing around with the astro camera I bought I finally put my camera on my spotting scope the other night. I am overdoing it on the processing, I know. But for first time, the detail is insane. 
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Jun 13, 2022 01:38
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That's awesome. I remember the first time I saw Saturn in a big old newt, scout camp in 1990 or so. Definitely looked fake. I took some milky way shots with a roki 12mm last week while i was there for work. No moon, dark ish site. But every time I remove the green noise I end up with something pretty dull and lifeless. Then to get some pop in it i always overdo it.
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Jul 6, 2022 01:43
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I'd scheduled a work trip out to a Bortle 2 area near an interesting foreground for MW shots (ruins of an old west Army fort). No real moon. Rather than clouds being the "lol you made plans, let's screw that up" villain, the valley is pretty smoky. I was walking the site today for about an hour and trying to convince myself it wouldn't be so bad, and then scratching my eyes and clearing my throat the rest of the afternoon.
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Jul 26, 2022 03:32
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For the last year I've been shooting fuji with samyang 135, mostly untracked in my backyard. Polaris is completely obscured by my or a neighbors house. I have a star adventurer tracker and it is fine for travel, but useless at home (can't polar align traditionally). I'm ready to drop a bit of money and upgrade. I'd like to spend some end of year mad money on something I can use in the backyard and travel. Work keeps me on the road 100-120 days a year, sometimes to some really interesting, dark locations. I'm a bit overwhelmed when I look for what options are available. It seems like what I'm looking for is a touch past entry-level but still pretty basic. I could use some advice cutting through marketing BS and "best thing ever" youtube reviews. I'd like reasonable portability (survive offroading in the back of truck with a bunch of work tools, so fits in a case), ability to platesolve so I can use it at home. I'm fine with my fuji shooting through a samyang 135 (or wide for milky way) because I travel with those anyway. I dont see buying a new scope or dedicated camera this year. Maybe 2023. I do travel with a heavy-duty survey tripod (should manage a smaller mount ok) and a pretty good toughbook so I'm not opposed to a laptop-based guiding system. But less complications would be better. After a 12-16 hr field day, I know I wont bother fighting cables and connectivity issues for very long. Get the kinks worked out at home, fine. But for travel streamlined workflow is a must have. If that's unrealistic I'll stick to Milky Way photography and a small tracker for travel, rethink a setup for home. The skywatcher gti looks good for the travel setup but wouldn't work at home. Or am I overthinking it and adding a small guidecam and pc would eliminate the requirement to see polaris for PA? Just put an L bracket on my camera, get a cheap guidecam and scope attached, and run that? Thats probably under $1k. But that would probably be near the weight limit of the gti and any eventual glass upgrades will render it obsolete. Triple the price (quadruple?) and i could get something like the zwo am5 with a guide cam and asiair. But is that overkill? Seems like it. But maybe thats the box I'm in for what I want vs. whats required. And it would upgrade well. The benro polaris looks like they went outside the box and jumped the ladder a few rungs for my camera-style photography, but I can't believe it is really ready for primetime. I'm worried it will be a $1300, unsupported paperweight in a year. But I see them inspiring other makers for small go-to systems. Apologies for the wall of text.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:24
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Cheers! Thank you both. I just got a forgotten $600 Amazon credit from a rental car promo, so adding that to my mental calculus of "Well, if I buy X from amzn instead of Agena Astro/Adorama, I can spend a bit more" . None of these items are available there yet, but eventually a reseller will show up.
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Nov 10, 2022 02:58
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I got a little tracing board last year to do flats-and I'm still too lazy. Partly because the cheap one I bought only turns on/off 25% of the time and just annoys me, and its usb power cable is very very short.
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Dec 31, 2022 23:29
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Dmitri-9 posted:I've heard SIRIL is very greedy with disk space and RAM. At this point it is really just familiarity with DSS. I just deleted a project this morning where I ran both. It was bad data so junked, but would've been an interesting comparison. Siril is indeed a storage hog, though.
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Jan 21, 2023 00:52
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Enos Cabell posted:I got a Pelican knockoff at Harbor Freight for all my different eyepieces and smaller bits of gear. Cheap and very customizable. Just random aside, for a few bucks cheaper, similar size: https://www.fieldsupply.com/pelican-storm-im2050-9-5-x7-5-x4-25-camo-hard-case-w-foam-black.html $35 with code FSPELICAN3. Worked a couple of days ago. If you buy use a good spam filter email or immediately unsubscribe, they spam a lot and it is a lot of guns, hunting, "tactical" stuff. I use them for small battery (LiFePO) boxes. Also great for the "little bits" you mention like eyepieces, single camera lenses, etc.
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Jan 21, 2023 17:42
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Does the thread have a suggestion for an all-rounder color ZWO camera that is (a) available on Amazon US and (b) under $1k ? I see the 533 and 183 are similar price, but don't know much about them otherwise. I'd been avoiding dedicated cameras, and for now still will avoid the mono+filter route, but I have a $1k amazon credit I'd like to use, then quit buying from them for a while. So rather 1 larger purchase than death by a thousand cuts.
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Apr 9, 2023 22:16
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duodenum posted:
I don't HAVE to buy from amzn, I'm just trying to burn some credit and it was a bigger-ticket item I saw I could buy there. I'll sleep on it. At least the 533 is shipped and sold by Agena, I do like them. Thank you both!
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Apr 10, 2023 02:11
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Light pollution has to have had an impact. I know growing up we could see the Milky Way in my parents' backyard. I was there a month ago and fat lot of nothing.
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May 26, 2023 01:33
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Jewmanji posted:
I live in a relatively dark area, and didn't point a camera up until a few years ago. I legit thought my camera was hosed up, showing so many stars. Now if I go 30 minutes I can be in a dark B2. Boring landscape but dark. That has spoiled me these last couple of years. Wife wants to move back to the coast and I'm hung up on grey skies.
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Jun 5, 2023 22:02
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puncturewound78 posted:Those pictures are magnificent and for $500 thats dang incredible The Stellina was what, $2500 at its launch and $4k now? That $500 machine is showing what I've been watching the last couple of years: the available tech has easily lapped the commercial offerings. ZWO is willing to pack these ideas into a working product and make a little money off it, instead of shooting for Megabucks from a very small market place. I know there are severe disparities in workplace/supply-chain details between China and France, to pick on those two, but that's just crazy.
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Nov 10, 2023 21:54
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II downloaded Pixinsight because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and understood there to be a generous free trial. This looks a LOT like processing software I was using for work in the late 90s / early 2000s. Like, whiplash nostalgia hit. So I guess I am in love. I'm weird in that Photoshop & GIMP are pretty foreign to me. I can follow a recipe but never really took to them. Anyway, started playing around with PI last night and hit a wall against color calibrations. This is a great reminder: If I go down a path that seems to make initial sense, my color calibration makes the HH and Flame both very similar shades of red, but my stars are colors I like.  ). I tried another route and I got some more yellows and orange in my Flame but my stars ended up extremely blue.  With my Siril-> photoshop routine I'd start with Photometric in Siril. But trying that in PI as a starting point, I'm failing my platesolve. That's another issue. I think mainly what I need to do is to adjust my flowchart / way of thinking from the Siril->photoshop approach.
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Dec 15, 2023 20:18
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QuarkJets posted:The tl;dr of what I'd want to tell an amateur astronomer is that longer exposure is not always better, you can get a better image by simply stacking a bunch of short exposures. But YMMV! If you're imaging something very faint for your system then you may be better off with a long exposure! And don't be afraid of exploring some of these algorithms, image stacking is a tried-and-true decades-old technique that you can probably implement yourself with just a bit of python code So before I finally get off my rear end and tell myself "No this is the year for real I code again" (I'd been more admin than technical for a long time), the thing that I keep giving the sideeye is: quote:Image Stacking at first glance the stacking algos I've seen look like simple summation (after registration). I had to write code to do that my sophomore year in school, super basic. And back then in the 90s that was still old hat. Has diversity stacking made it out of my niche world (geophysics) to other processing yet? I honestly don't think it will make any improvement given the amount of sub frames are involved, but at least it'd be different.
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Dec 18, 2023 02:46
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Interest check - I've got a Star Adventurer 2i Pro I found buried in my closet. It hasn't been used all year. I got a MSM for the camera-based stuff and a ZWO mount for scope. Anyone want this weird in-between, or have a friend getting into the hobby who might benefit? I'd much rather keep it friendly than go to eBay. I think most of the bits and bobbins are there but I will go through it thoroughly if there's interest. It'd be BYO tripod. There's no way I'd get it out before Christmas.
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Dec 21, 2023 22:57
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Jewmanji posted:I have no idea what I’m doing but would be interested. Ok. Sometime next week I'll get it all together and pm you when I am ready to put it on SA Mart. Give you first dibs.
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Dec 22, 2023 07:27
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QuarkJets posted:Image stacking is not going to do anything miraculous - a long exposure is image stacking without registration, and with only 1 realization of read noise (instead of 1 per image), so that's often what your result is going to look like if your mount and object are stable. Some users remove the worst images from the stack (they estimate the coherence length in each image and throw away the worst ones - this is easy to automate) but even that is going to be hard to see unless you are using a lot of images Whereas a vertical stack is just a summation, for a diversity stack you scale your data by the inverse of its average power prior to a stack. You take that composite and divide it by the sum of its scalar for a new normalized value. I'm usually thinking of data as samples, or binned samples. I think the imagery analogue would be binned pixels. Diversity stacks would do zero for a traditional bad image: shake, mis-alignment, tracking error, etc. But what it would do is allow part of an image to be used when you have a noise burst – like partial occlusion in an otherwise clean piece of data. A different way to filter satellite trails beyond simple stacking, or rolling cloud coverage. For people taking 100s or 1000s of images, when you get a noisy subframe you just throw it out and forget about it. In my world we’re using it when we may only collect 2, maybe 3 sub “frames” before stack, it allows us to retrieve a bit more data. The Div stack is pretty useful when you don't have as much luxury of data collection time.
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Dec 22, 2023 20:33
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I bought a Seestar S50 last week and had a very short break in clouds a few nights ago. I think I have the same impressions as most: more impressive than it ought to be, unfortunate sensor dimensions at that focal length, fun simple. Since I only saw about an hour of clearing, & the moon was so bright I started there. Definitely at phone-size scale viewing these are amazing. I do want to play with the subframes of the avi, though I didn't save these to the internal memory. I guess went to phone only.  6 minutes under that moon, left straight out of device; right 6 minutes in PI. I need to figure out how to blend 2 different processed images (like layers in photoshop) and start over so I can reduce the blowout of the core.  I also did 10 minutes of pacman and 5 of NGC891, but that last was way blown out by the moon, really strong banding/gradient as the clouds started scattering all that white light.  Yesterday morning the dog woke me up stupid early in the AM and we had a great "moon-dog" halo. I was too fuzzy-headed to grab a camera w/ wide lens. Kind of mad at myself about that. It was very well-defined.
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Dec 25, 2023 17:26
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Jewmanji posted:How are the folks in this thread who have been in the hobby for a long time and who have amassed these very complicated, expensive rigs feeling about these telescopes? As arbitrary as it is, it seems like making it tooeasy would take the fun out of it, in a way. Though I don't know any serious or professional photographers who bemoan the advent of smartphone cameras. I haven't been in this hobby for any length of time but I'll chime in saying I think we're "living in interesting times." Just wrt the speed of tech advancements from other disciplines mixing and comingling. I do have several full-time professional photographer friends. And they'll all use their phone if that's the right/available tool at hand. But we've had exactly that conversation, and they'll admit there was lots of whining, bitching and moaning, and gatekeeping when (good) phone cameras really started to be A Thing. Now it is just acceptance. Their current grumbling is how the software is getting too mobile-focused. And the standby complaint of "now everyone thinks they're a photographer." Aside - My wife used to work in an old print newspaper doing graphic design and layout. Small town paper so she also split time in the darkroom. When I ask her about those days it is very much a "uphill in the snow both ways" laugh.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:54
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Jewmanji posted:
That's an amazing lens for the price.
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Feb 20, 2024 00:59
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Jewmanji posted:Is there any reason not to get my camera astro-modified if I'm eager to capture some more reddish nebulas like the horsehead or rosette? Is your Rokinon a Canon EF mount? pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 01:22
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Jewmanji posted:No, I got a Sony E-Mount for my A7r. I was a bit torn about it because I understand that Sony isn’t the most reputable brand in this space but it was in the family so I couldn’t really justify buying a new Canon. That's a great camera but aw shucks. I have a Canon T2i that is modified but I can't use it (no glass, switched to all Fuji) so I was just going to send it to you, see if you thought a mod would be worth it.
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Mar 10, 2024 02:43
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If you can find an E-mount to EF body adapter let me know and I'll ship this body to you. I know there's easy EF to E- adapters, but this would be the opposite, "backward" configuration. New lens to old body. Personally I'm not sure about adaptive lenses and astro. I'd think it would be ok. Sometimes you lose a stop of light, but you can take longer exposures. You have to manually focus (not a problem here). You'll get some color aberration, but if you're processing your files you'll probably be able to correct this.
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Mar 10, 2024 19:13
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