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Harry Potter on Ice posted:I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere in the UP for the perseid meteor shower in about the darkest place I could find, hope the smoke from canada isnt too bad :/ Smoke was really nasty in the past few days, seems better today. This weekend looks kind of lovely for cloud cover. On the plus side the mosquitos have been pretty chill this year.
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Aug 5, 2021 14:17
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| # ? May 18, 2024 00:30 |
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Yea if it's not the one it's the other. I was near some Mississippi backwaters a month ago and no mosquitos there either  maybe too early in the year? Lol I like the username relevance.. have you ever seen yooperlite?!duodenum posted:Which morning do you think will be better? I'm as amateur as it gets but the 12th maybe? Advice is always appreciated
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Aug 5, 2021 14:34
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Lol I like the username relevance.. have you ever seen yooperlite?! I have, if you are near Grand Marais I can point you to where you'll find it. There's agates too, but they tend to be pretty small in that area.
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Aug 5, 2021 14:40
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That's rad as hell. Going up to the UP to hunt yooperlights is on my bucket list. I had one sent to my mom for her birthday a couple months ago because she's building a UV curio cabinet for uranium glass and fluorescent minerals. I'll be driving to a secluded recreation area an hour East of town Wednesday night if it's clear and taking my zero gravity chair. If it's cloudy I'll be watching the season premiere of Lower Decks, but I'm really loving hoping it's not cloudy. It's been a few years since the last time I was able to get out to watch the Perseids under dark skies and it's just such a reliably good show. AstroZamboni fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Aug 5, 2021 15:43
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Thanks everyone for the compliments on the North America shot. Last nights target was the Cygnus Loop. I processed it in SHO and HOO just for shits and gigs. SHO:  HOO:  I definitely see why this is most often processed in HOO. It looks cool as hell. I do like the SHO one too just to get an idea of where the SII lives (hint: there isn't much). I also think my processing went better on the HOO version as well. Having the APS-C sensor paired with my ~380mm focal length makes for a really cool and useful FOV and this picture takes almost all of that FOV. I don't dare breathe on my flattener as I think it's about as close to correctly spaced as I could possibly hope for (certainly good enough for me). This camera with a pixel size of 3.76 microns is just about a perfect scale for my seeing also (right at 2 arcsec/px). Overall I'm really pleased with my current setup for what I like to shoot. Next upgrade for me is going to be a lifepo4 battery that I can hook up to my power box. My father in law owns an old mine about 1.5 hours from town and it's quite a bit darker than here (bortle 4 vs my bortle 1 million) and I want to start making some field trips and doing some LRGB stuff. I put a meter that can measure watt hours on my power box and it looks like I can get away with a 50-75AH battery which is significantly cheaper than the 100AH battery I thought I was going to need.
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Aug 5, 2021 21:45
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I'm really jealous of all you guys, I just started getting back into stargazing again after years of not doing it. Before last weekend think the last time I looked through a telescope was about 20 years ago. Even just using a manual 70mm telescope built in the 90s in a suburban area getting to see the moons of Jupiter and the Milky Way was pretty neat. I'm moving out west in a couple months so maybe by then I'll buy a nicer setup.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:30
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere in the UP for the perseid meteor shower in about the darkest place I could find, hope the smoke from canada isnt too bad :/ Where in the UP you going to be? I've got a list of four spots to drive to (from Chicago) depending on the HRRR smoke forecast on the 9th. Au Sable lighthouse is one of those spots. Just curious if there's some kickass foregrounds that away that I don't know of yet (which I'm sure there are, I've only been up there once). I got this plan to do two nights worth of meteors composited together with a cool terrestrial silhouette and it's been a tough search. BWCA or Nebraska sand hills are two other options. If the forecast looks super grim I'll just be pissed off and head to a class 2 spot in SW Wisconsin with nasty city glow, at least then I can be mad and only have to drive three hours.
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Aug 7, 2021 03:20
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Hey folks, what are the phone apps du jour for “I wonder what the hell that is?” in the night sky? I’ve been using Sky Guide for a while now and it’s pretty good, but I’ll occasionally see some rocket body or something passing by and it’s aggravating as hell to try and sort out what it is. That could very well be user error, but I wish I could just filter the “Brightest” tab to stuff that’s currently overhead.
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Aug 9, 2021 02:47
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fyi https://twitter.com/superasassn/status/1424542482377945091?s=21
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Aug 9, 2021 03:25
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So Orion's customer service has plummeted SPECTACULARLY into the deepest depths of the shitter. I've been beating my head against a wall for three months with them over a set of binoculars that arrived profoundly defective. I know everything's backordered to hell, but erroneously telling a customer three times in three months that a replacement order had been cancelled and refunded when no such thing had taken place is just unnecessarily causing chaos. And what's worst, I think it's the same alcoholic CSR rep who keeps screwing things up. *HEAVY BELEAGUERED SIGH*
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Aug 9, 2021 18:03
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I'm still waiting on the IEXOS-100 to come back in stock. Explore Scientific's website still has a restock estimate of July 2021 which has kinda come and gone 
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Aug 10, 2021 02:50
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Well for the last three months, dealing with Orion customer service has been a lovely part time job that I'm not getting paid for with the vague assurance that I'd have some Ultraview binoculars at the end of it. On Monday they said in no uncertain terms that my binoculars would ship on Wednesday, overnight, no ifs ands or buts, for guaranteed arrival today. That didn't happen and now they're saying they'll *probably* ship next week sometime. They've been doing the "next week, no next week, no next week" shuffle for three months. I was originally told the binoculars would arrive no later than 6/28. And these are warranty replacements for a unit that arrived so shockingly defective I was amazed they left the factory (right objective lens housing cocked inwards by five degrees and exit pupils with bites taken out of them, due to prism misalignment to unsuccessfully compensate for the lens misalignment. Images wouldn't merge and neither side focused sharply) When I requested replacements, they said it wouldn't be longer than three weeks. Today I was told "well when things are backordered it can be up to three to four months." I said "I should have been told that right upfront when I requested the replacements because if I had known that, I would have requested a refund instead. As it was, I was just told no later than 6/28" I mean, I get everything is backordered, but I've literally cancelled plans five times over the last three months to be home to receive a package they told me would be arriving that day that never came because they never notify me when the shipping date changes and the online order status checker doesn't work with my order for some loving reason. It turns out their email servers connected to shipping delay notifications are busted and I was the first person to realize there was a problem. Spent twenty loving minutes this morning on the phone with them helping them troubleshoot their loving email servers. Like I said, dealing with Orion CS has become an unpaid part-time job. And all that's not to mention early July when a rep told me that I wouldn't receive the replacement binoculars because a refund I never requested nor received had been issued. Hung up on me when I kept asking "well then where's my money?!?" Called my bank to begin the dispute process, had to call back and talk to another Orion rep to find out when the alleged refund was issued, and they told me that the previous rep just didn't know how to read the information in her computer system. I spent six hours on the phone that day dealing with the fallout from that initial bad information. Ugh. I feel like such a Karen bitching so much about this, but my God, this has been ridiculous. I've tallied up how many hours I've spent dealing with this over the last three months and it's over 24 as of today. Edit: forgot to mention the letters I kept getting in the mail telling me the order would be automatically cancelled if the order was delayed again unless I directly intervened. Or that when I first received the faulty binoculars, the rep who answered the phone transferred me to tech support by mistake leading to a 40 minute wait on hold. When tech support answered, the guy got snippy with me because this was clearly a return/exchange issue so why was I talking to HIM when I should have been talking to the drunk dumbfuck who answered the phone? If I was being paid minimum wage to deal with this poo poo I'd be able to afford some loving Fujinons by now. AstroZamboni fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 02:30
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Setting up for some new gear tonight: new scope (Redcat51) and an ASIAIR to control the thing instead of using a laptop. It's very red. Kind of hilarious to put such a small scope on an EQ6-R. I've been itching to do a wide view of the whole Cygnus loop, so cross your fingers that this works out for me...
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Aug 14, 2021 00:04
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Golden-i posted:Kind of hilarious to put such a small scope on an EQ6-R. I've been itching to do a wide view of the whole Cygnus loop, so cross your fingers that this works out for me... S'up EQ6-R with a tiny scope bro. Thursday night was clear and imaging went great. I went to log in last night and could not get RDP to connect. I can see the mount PC on the network, but RDP won't do anything. lovely as last night was cool, crisp, and clear. I'm kicking myself for not having a little portable screen to be able to plug in and troubleshoot.
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Aug 14, 2021 14:27
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simble posted:
These are so gorgeous. I'm still looking forward to getting a mono camera and getting into HOO/SHO shooting one of these years, but I still really like shooting in the visible RBG spectrum. The idea of "if it were just brighter, this is what I'd see when I look up" is still really neat to me. Here's my Cygnus Loop from last night. 40x180sec using the rig from my last post, in Bortle 8, which I think really cost me a lot of detail but it still came out kinda nice.  In what is 100% a coincidence, simble and I framed ours almost identically. It's a really cool comparison, in my opinion. Golden-i fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 18:20
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LibCrusher posted:I’ve been interested in amateur astronomy for a long time, and most recently went on a stargazing trip on Mauna Kea that really impressed me. they were manually pointing an 11” telescope and we were able to see some really cool clusters and nebulas. I was just hoping to be able to replicate that experience without having to buy a dozen different products and bring a laptop with me. From a while back but how high up Mauna Kea did you go? Presumably not the summit. But anyway, Mauna Kea is the single best observing site on the planet so unless you can get to Chile or the Canaries, everywhere else will pale by comparison.
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Aug 14, 2021 18:59
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Golden-i posted:These are so gorgeous. I'm still looking forward to getting a mono camera and getting into HOO/SHO shooting one of these years, but I still really like shooting in the visible RBG spectrum. The idea of "if it were just brighter, this is what I'd see when I look up" is still really neat to me. Thanks  Dang that cygnus star cloud is legit though. Real existential dread from that one. I really love the parts of the sky and in your shot especially where the stars almost look like noise. With the NB I lose all of that and I haven't quite worked out my LRGB+NB strategy yet.
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Aug 14, 2021 21:02
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simble posted:Thanks I love the existential dread; We are all very small. It's really the best part of this whole hobby to me. If you work out your LRGB+NB process, please post it here. I'm going that direction eventually and am very curious about how everyone else does it.
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Aug 15, 2021 00:23
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 Small scope on a big mount. This was two nights ago. About 3 hours on each target. M33  Wizard Nebula 
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Aug 15, 2021 01:03
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Since it's near a full moon and I didn't get out last night, I took my last set of data and re-processed it, this time including the Starnet process in Pixinsight in an attempt to reduce the existential dread of my previous version  Just an experiment. I think given the huge number of stars that it ended up being very noisy, and masking it so I could clear the more aggressive background noise while not affecting the softer bits of the nebula proved... challenging. I'll have to give this a try with a target that isn't directly along the Milky Way at some point.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:52
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Well my Ultraviews finally came in and they're good. First light went swimmingly last night. They play VERY nice with eyeglasses. Now I'm waiting on another gear delivery today. Decided I really needed an illuminated reticle eyepiece to assist with the position angle measurements on double stars. Also got a rechargeable red LED headlamp. Got sick of holding my Rigel flashlight in my mouth while doing plots and sketches.
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Aug 21, 2021 20:29
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I had a 5 day stretch of clear weather, so I've got twenty hours of subs on IC1805. Pixinsight is now 27 hours into the stacking script. 
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Aug 22, 2021 02:26
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The illuminator on the reticle eyepiece was defective. Now to wait on a replacement. Heavy beleagured sigh... At least the red headlamp seems ok. Bit on the bright side but ok.
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Aug 22, 2021 04:43
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AstroZamboni posted:At least the red headlamp seems ok. Bit on the bright side but ok. I bought a $25 Costco 2 pack that seems to work well so far.
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Aug 22, 2021 16:27
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AstroZamboni posted:The illuminator on the reticle eyepiece was defective. Now to wait on a replacement. Illuminated reticle eyepieces are notoriously poo poo.
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Aug 22, 2021 16:34
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Hasselblad posted:Illuminated reticle eyepieces are notoriously poo poo. Yeah. Kinda getting that. I'm pretty sure the SVBONY I ordered is the exact same unit sold by Agena, Orion and Celestron, and the reviews of all three mention the same QC issues. If the replacement illuminator fails I'll just eventually get one of the Rigel pulsguide illuminators. Luckily the svbony is literally less than half as expensive as what Orion and Celestron charge and Amazon has easy returns so I can just keep exchanging until I get a working eyepiece. What I've done is made paper degree dials that go over the 2"-1.25" adapter and are going to be held on by the reticle eyepiece. The reticle crosshairs will line up with the 0, 90, 180 and 270 marks, and I'll rotate the eyepiece adapter until the drift direction follows the line to the 270 mark. Then it'll be a snap reading out an estimation of the position angle of the double star I'm observing. It'll be a lot more accurate than sketch plotting and eyeballing it because my P.A. estimations so far have been poo poo, and I'm fully intending to move on to the multiple star program after the double star program.
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Aug 22, 2021 17:22
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AstroZamboni posted:Yeah. Kinda getting that. I'm pretty sure the SVBONY I ordered is the exact same unit sold by Agena, Orion and Celestron, and the reviews of all three mention the same QC issues. If the replacement illuminator fails I'll just eventually get one of the Rigel pulsguide illuminators. Luckily the svbony is literally less than half as expensive as what Orion and Celestron charge and Amazon has easy returns so I can just keep exchanging until I get a working eyepiece. The sad thing is, there are bow sights that have units that are fanTASTIC, and are nicely adjustable. The diameter of the threaded part is unfortunately different.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:17
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I use a streamlight bandit on low light setting with a bunch of tape put over it to further reduce brightness. Need it that way to take notes and read instructions between targets.
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Aug 23, 2021 02:32
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The headlamp I got is gonna work out fine. I was able to darken the lens with sharpie and block out the central white LED with electrical tape. It's perfect now. Luckily it also has a memory function so I don't have to cycle through the settings to get it back on red. I wish there was a good, variable brightness red-only headlamp that worked like the Rigel starlight flashlights with the fully variable potentiometer. Being a visual only guy, I'm anal as gently caress about maintaining night vision and it almost can't get dim enough for me.
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Aug 23, 2021 03:10
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B&H has another dob, 10” collapsible goto for $1k, good deal. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/802358611-USE/sky_watcher_s11810_flextube_250p_synscan_10.html
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Aug 23, 2021 03:24
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Here's the first pass through Pixinsight. 1100 frames, 60 seconds each. Took far too long to stack, but it turned out pretty well. Probably won't get clear skies for another month...
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Aug 25, 2021 02:38
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Yooper posted:Here's the first pass through Pixinsight. Just curious, why so short on the exposure times? What filter were you using (if any)? What kind of seeing and light pollution are you dealing with?
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Aug 26, 2021 17:24
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simble posted:Just curious, why so short on the exposure times? What filter were you using (if any)? What kind of seeing and light pollution are you dealing with? UV/IR cut filter, Bortle 2-3, seeing was variable over the days. I could have went longer, but I had concerns with the moon. By day 3 the moon brightness was such I had to toss those subs anyways so it was kind of a moot point.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:37
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Last night I discovered a hazard of observing with parallelogram mounted binoculars while reclined in a zero gravity chair; it's so relaxing you run the risk of falling asleep. I was looking at M13 with my 4" binos in the backyard last night, and just zonked right out. Was rudely awakened by my dog licking my ear. To be fair I was exhausted because I had been moving furniture all day, but I had really wanted to do more observing last night. Had all my equipment set up to go hard until at least midnight. Then I went and fell asleep on the first target. Falling asleep at the eyepiece is definitely a first for me. My replacement reticle eyepiece arrives tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be too turdly.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:39
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AstroZamboni posted:My replacement reticle eyepiece arrives tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be too turdly. The replacement isn't turdly at all. Works great and I think it'll help my double star PA measurements immensely.
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Aug 28, 2021 03:39
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Thanks for the input a while back. I will use my 300mm 2.8 camera lens as well as Canon R6, and get EQ6-R mount, ASIAIR PRO, ZWO 120MM, ZWO Mini Guide Scope 30/120 (f/4) (the latter 3 a bundle). The struggle now is to know what else i need than these specific items? Like how do i attach the guidescope to my camera/lens? I don't mean "you need a mounting bracket", but a specific product. From what i understand the ASIAIR Pro removes the need for a laptop while out in the field? I see there is a DSLR compatibility list for it on the ZWO webpage. Why does the ASIAIR need to be compatible with the camera? Isn't it the guidecamera it needs information from? Do i need cables between the guidescope and the mount? guidescope and ASAIR pro?
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Aug 30, 2021 10:51
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Ineptitude posted:Thanks for the input a while back. I originally used a side mount bracket that connected the base of my DSLR to a 90 degree angle so that the guide scope was securely mounted. I tried a shoe mount but found it had too much flexure. But in hindsight I'd use a mounting plate and just bolt the camera and the guidescope to the plate.  Something like that. then you can secure your guidescope and mount and camera side by side.  My guidescope mount looks like that, I run a bolt through it into the plate and then secure the guide scope. You will need a cable from the controller to the mount, guidescope, and camera. Depending on your imaging camera DSLR you may need an actual shutter control cable and not a USB. I'm not familiar with the ASIAIR to comment on that.
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Aug 30, 2021 12:31
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Stellarmate is an alternative to ASIAIR, I have no experience with either. https://stellarmate.com/products/get-stellarmate-plus.html
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Aug 30, 2021 14:28
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Had a few nights imaging. Last night looked really great, except my mount hit the meridian before I expected it to and locked in place. So I missed out on 6 more hours of IC342. Going to dig into these for more processing in the coming weeks.  That's IC342, 12 hours, 180sec subs.  That's NGC6946. Roughly 1 hour of subs.
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Sep 3, 2021 01:44
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I'm pretty much convinced M31 is my white whale at this point. Every time I get a night off and the astronomy forecast predicts clear skies and great transparency, clouds end up rolling in out of nowhere by the time I get my gear set up 
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Sep 3, 2021 05:24
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