This platform is mostly made from 3D printed parts, except obvious bits like plywood, screws, bearings and electronics.
It’s controlled by an Arduino Uno with an LCD keypad shield.
The final step will be finding some sky, polar aligning it and setting the tracking rates. Then hopefully some good planetary imaging!
I took down the RAG Solargraph that had been in place on the front wall of my house all last year and finally got around to scanning it in.
It was scanned at 1200 DPI, the highest resolution available on my printer/scanner, then rotated and flipped. It took a while for me to realise that the flip was necessary in order to work out what I was looking at. Seems obvious, in hindsight! Then I created a negative image (thereby making the negtive positive) and cropped the edge beyond the south-west as it contained nothing but the shadow of the house next door.
Here is the result. Apart from the above, the image is not doctored in any way. Playing around with colours and sharpness didn’t seem to add anything useful, so I’ve stayed with the original settings. You can just make out the image of my campervan, slightly west of south. I’ve a better view to the east, but couldn’t quite catch the sunrise itself. Silhouettes of trees and houses are vsisble along the skyline. The white dots are street lights and ‘security’ lights that couldn’t be avoided (short of covering the camera up over night, every night).
It was an interesting experiment and the result is actually better than I expected, so I’m quite pleased with this.
Derry North
I took following photos through my Daystar Hydrogen Quark filter, with different settings on the dial on the filter. This dial varies from -5 to +5, and I wanted to see whether photos were better with one or other setting – those settings vary the tuning of the filter.
After this analysis, I am still not sure which setting is best! However, visually, and also Damian’s previous assessment, was that setting -5 was most effective for my Quark H filter.
it is worth saying that these photos were taken before I sorted out the flat frames on FireCapture, and the alternate dark and light banding in the photos shows (Newton’s Rings).
Andy
+5 setting:
+3 setting:
-3 setting:
-5 setting:
Experiments in astrophotography with my Canon EOS 700D attached to Meade LX10 8″ OTA (prime focus).
Derry North
My favourite images taken through my telescopes and microscopes to date.
Andy
Whilst I’ve browsed this site on and off over the years, I’ve never got around to posting anything on the blog. And now I want to, I find I’m not sure how to do it.
That is, I can add a new post, of course by selecting the New button, and I’ve even selected a category. But we are asked to add a second category, with the name of the poster, and to add a category if one doesn’t exist. I cannot see any way to do that. Will keep looking, but please say if you know how, or point me at some instructions if there are any.
Meanwhile, I uploaded an image for the first time yesterday and I’m wondering if anyone can see it. Andy had a look during the meeting and couldn’t find it. I can see it myself, but I wonder if anyone else can. Do I need to do something else to make it public?
Derry North
This is the image I shared in tonight’s meeting, M16 the Eagle Nebula and cluster in Ha, with the ‘Pillars of Creation’ in the middle. Nearly 3 hours (34 5-minute exposures).
I also grabbed a luminance layer for the globular cluster M14 to use with my RGB data, and this Luminance only image of M11 to add to my ‘Messier Collection’.
This is classifies as an open cluster despite being quite compact, to me it looks more like a small but raggedy globular!
Some folks could not view my hydrogen alpha image from earlier today – so here it is again as JPEG file.
Andy
A quick process of one video – best settings not yet determined.
Andy
