Conditions nixed looks like soupy bowl

Some visibility some clouds and haze


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At rallys getting some food

Won't be at the observatory until 8:30 conditions look poor right now. Will likely play with my little Celestron 4SE most of the time, not the big scope at the observatory.

Just to learn a few things about the little scope, which I've been neglecting, for it's much bigger brother in the Celestron product line. . . :)

I'm off and running errands now, on the way over there. Will likely be not staying out there very long, because conditions look to be pretty poor.



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Hmm sky conditions

Could be very restricted viewing tonight.


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Not much time to post

Don't know how good the skies will eventually be tonight.

I know I'm working late and won't know more until later. Hope to be there by 8pm but it's more likely to be 8:30



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Nice evening with some clouds

Had a fun time at the observatory tonight. Here's a handheld iPhone shot thru C-14 and Williams Swan 33mm eyepiece.


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Plan to open tonight at 8pm

I plan on being at the observatory at about 8 pm tonight. Faac members can call me via phone number for yesterdays yahoo group post to confirm.

I'm hoping to see a few members and maybe some core group, who can tell who will show up.

Last night a 9mm was too powerful for Mars conditions were not good enough.

A 15 mm was okay with the c14. A 12 or 13mm might have been the limit but I didn't try those.


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Had to turn off the heater

The heat rising from the dome caused massive interference with Mars tonight.

Mars looks awesome when the heat currents settle down.

Nice dark patches visible in 15 mm eypiece with c14 tonight.

It looks a lot like Jupiter it's so big in the eyepiece.




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Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday

I'm at the observatory at this moment taking measurements and perhaps viewing a bit.

I'm going to try to be here most of the nights this week. The difficult one will be Thursday night.

You may have to stay tuned here for an update regarding Thursday night.

Pvideo@aol.com

Check out the low light iPhone photo from Monday night. Photo shows the Celestron C-14 along with my small Nexstar 4SE in the foreground. In the back you can see my observers chair which visitors can sit on sometimes to get a more comfortable view while looking through one of the telescopes.

Also,
It will be warmer later in the week.



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Okay it's been a bit of a cloudy weekend faac club had their annual dinner banquet. With astro trivia. It was a lot a fun.

Our table win the trivia contest with Dr Timothy Dey running back and forth like a kid during the contest.

A very busy week

It's been a very busy week. Can't go into details but a big software problem has kept me at work long hours.

Wasn't able to get to the observatory Wednesday or the faac general meeting on Thursday.

Greg


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How pigeons almost stopped the restoration project

When the Hector J Robinson observatory was being renovated by the FAAC club, they ran into a problem. It was related to bird droppings. Bird droppings had accumulated inside, even on the mirrors of the two old telescopes left inside, with their covers mysteriously left off by someone years ago.

When I talked with Dr. Timothy Dey about the restoration project he told me that there had been some fear that the droppings inside the observatory were pigeon droppings. Pigeon droppings have been known to make people sick at times. You can "google" and research pigeon droppings on the internet and find out that sometimes when a large amounts are anywhere, even in a pile next to a building they can contain viruses or other micro-organisms and this can be picked up and when people breath these they may become ill.

SMALL DIGRESSION - About waste in the ecosystem.
Of course in nature, usually remains and droppings just end up as natural fertilizer over time and are broken down by the soil worms, and other micro-organisms. Animal waste is just a normal part of life, but when it accumulates it can cause problems - especially outside the natural environmental cycle Inside an enclosed building with a cement floor, there is no natural ecosystem to clean up the droppings and create new soil.

TO CONTINUE OUR STORY
There's the possibility that a hazmat procedure would have to happen in the cleanup and that would cost a lot of money and could have be a pretty big expensive hurdle. It turned out that they were sparrow droppings and although I'm sure they were yukky (is that the proper term), it apparently was less of a threat and not as serious a need for hazmat recovery. The observatory was cleaned up and a specialist with a license checked it out anyway. Thanks to good old fashioned networking by Dr. Dey.

PALOMAR - PIGEONS, PIGEONS EVERYWHERE
Ironically one of the largest observatories in the world is the Palomar Observatory in California, which is home to the 200 inch Hubble Telescope. According to Wikipedia:

The word palomar is from the Spanish language, dating back from the time of Spanish California, and means pigeon house (in the same sense as henhouse). The name may be in reference to the large shoals of pigeons that can be seen during the spring and autumn months atop Palomar Mountain or reminiscent of an old pigeon-raising facility built there by the Spaniards.

The pigeons almost had their revenge on our small observatory, but the school and FAAC club restored it anyway.

Note last location was wrong

This blogger software for iPhone has the option to include you're current address. Sometimes it can get the wrong location I don't even know where Denmark street is?

That's how it is with new technology I have to get back to real work now.

Greg


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Location:W Grand Blvd,Detroit,United States

Here's a screen shot from the stereo satillites

Stereo live images rendered on rotating solar model.




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Location:Denmark St,Detroit,United States

Screen shot of green snow under NASA 3d sun alert

Here's a screen shot of the green snow from the northern lights.



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Location:Maple St,Dearborn,United States

Up and coming 3d sun review

Here's a photo from the NASA 3d sun app for the iPhone. It's a free app and give solar updates. Yesterday because I have the alert features on I received a message that a new version is available.

But also I'll get alerts on any big solar events that NASA sends out from the stereo system to 3d sun users.

Here's a screen shot of new alert samples.


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Location:2nd Ave,Detroit,United States

First blog entry from iPhone

I'm writing this quick entry from my iPhone. To see how this blog tool works.

Last night I worked late and had a long day so the observatory wasn't open (at least not by me).

I'm going to try to add a photo here from my iPhone now.


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The Problem with newsletter designs and web downloads

Here's an example of a problem that can happen at the end of a small publishing cycle. The FAAC Astronomy club has a newsletter. I've been the editor of it for a few months now, starting in January. Getting the articles together can be a challenge.

It's probably a typical job that any newsletter editor faces. One of my problems is I'm really not that great a writer, so it's a learning experience. In the end you have a PDF that we put up on the net. But that PDF size can become an issue. There's a few ways you can get around it. With Pages, an Apple application I can export out a PDF as a Good, Better or Best resolution. There are some tricks for screen resolution that can be done to photos to keep the photos small. Greg Ozimek pointed out to me back in January that I can reduce the resolution of the images to 72DPI for each photo. Still keep all the colors and that will shrink down the size of the PDF tremendously. This is likely a standard trick of the trade for desktop publishing.

Now a few members have "dial up" modems yet and access the internet with slow connections. We put the PDF file out there a copy of the newsletter than anyone can download. If I export the PDF in a BETTER format it's almost at as high a quality as could be exported. It's compressed pretty well, but hold resolution closer to the original scaled in the document. This means if a person looking at the PDF zooms in to 200% or 300% they will see larger and better quality images. If I use BETTER I get a 1.3 meg PDF file, for the same file (this months newsletter is 16 pages long.) That's pretty big for some people downloading. If I export (the same type of PDF file) that would take 1.3 megs in better. At the GOOD resolution, we save space, it's only 703kb in size. Half the size, but less than half the quality for images. The image quality is okay at 100% but lacks quality when you zoom in to view the "good" document.

Maybe we'll end up having both resolutions on the net. Attached is a sample of a photo inside this months newsletter zoomed in at 200% in the GOOD and BETTER resolutions. Which would you rather look at? Maybe posting both sizes will allow the members to decide depending on their dial up speed. The goal is supposed to be something less than 1 meg per newsletter. GOOD, does that job, but it's just not up to the zoom quality.

There's a typical choice in the life of a newsletter editor (and webmaster I suppose). It will be interesting to see how others involved with the newsletter weigh in. For now I'm just putting this in because it's a slow astronomy day.

We saw the Imax movie last night about the repair of the Hubble telescope with shuttle missions. It was shot in IMax 3d and was amazing. Tickets are normally $10. If you like space and Astronomy and can afford the $10 ticket for a short movie, and for astronomers, they all wished it was longer, you'll get a real thrill and treat seeing that IMax movie in 3d at the Henry Ford Museum IMax theatre. It's like being on the shuttle, the closest thing you'd ever get to actually flying on it in space.

DOB Project. I've been thinking about doing a really cheap low end dob project, just for fun. Nothing of super high quality, but something more like a really minimal approach to see how cheaply I could build one. Because I have a very affordable mirror. If I built it with a very minimalistic design, I could even use it as a basic demo scope, to show people how they work. But of course it would suffer in quality of what the mirror can do. I may do this just for the fun of it and to quickly throw something together. I'm even wondering about putting together a very non-conventional mirror mount at first. Not a real travel scope, but more of a scope one would put together out of poverty if they only had a few scrapes and a mirror and other basics.

Just a thought for today. I may get around to that with an 8 inch. I've also been thinking a bit about that 12 inch mirror at the Hector J Robinson observatory or the 8 inch we had and wonder how much it would cost to build a folded dob, to shorten the focal length severely. The large secondary flat and second secondary would add to the cost. Just some telescope building thoughts. Time to post and move on for now.

Observatory will NOT be open tonight - by me.

At least not my me.  If I happened by the observatory tonight it would be late at night and I don't think the skies will be very good and I'll be pretty busy tonight.  Other members of the FAAC group who would open it up will likely not be available either, so I don't think it will be open.

What's in a nickname.

Greg Ozimek.  Or Oz as he's called wondered if I had a nickname the other night when we were in the middle of the great hunt for many Messier objects.  Hmm. . . I thought back, what nicknames have I had in the past, especially in Astronomy or club circles that could be used when star gazing with a couple of Greg's.  Other FAAC members call him OZ, which is a good nickname.

I haven't come up with a good name from the past that might be very suitable.  I've been called "video guy" before, when I was doing a lot of video.  But that's not a good nickname.  I could use my middle name, but my middle name is to popular and would match other guys in the club.   Gregory is a longer term, but people might still wonder which Gregory they are addressing if we are both at an event.  I could use an Armenian version of Gregory, but my cousin uses that name and I really don't want to be thought of as Krikor.  

Two many Gregs is usually not a problem at an event, but in our department at work we have five Gregs, which is really unusual.  Maybe I'll need to think a while for a better nickname.  

(And who picks their own nickname. . .? which is another question, perhaps worthy of another blog entry.)

I could use "Watchman" (some name plaques have said Gregory means watchman), but that sounds like a comic book character.  I could use "Scotty" but I'm only 1/8th Scottish and that sounds like a Star Trek character and I don't want to impersonate Scotty from that episode.  Although it would be cool to call up and say to other FAAC members, the Losmandy mount she can't take any more Captain, she's about to break up.

Some other nicknames I've had in the past, actually I can only think of one, won't fit very well in an astronomy group.  I could use "connec"  I've been called "connec" before as in the sound of the abbreviation of the French Connection without the T.  Connec, is what the first part of my last name sounds like.  (with a hard K sound.)  Sometime teachers used to pronounce my last name with the sound of "knee" instead, because my ancestors didn't know how to spell our last name when they came off the boat in New York.  I could be called "knee", but that's a strange nickname.

Hmm. . .  Watchman or Knee or Scotty.  I don't know.

Maybe I should suggest a cool astronomy nickname something like "Magnitude".  But that sounds like a nickname for a girl, "Mag" or "Maggie" or "Magnitude".   Hmm. . . I still don't have a good one.  Maybe a primative one, something like Blog.  That sounds like a good caveman kind of nickname.  It might make a good nickname for a dog as well.  Has anyone named their dog, "blogger"?

Maybe one of the negative tease remarks would work better.  At one time a friend made a joke and called me Popcorn as a slam.  Maybe that would be a good nickname.  After all most everyone likes popcorn.  I'm still too tired to figure out a good Astronomy nickname?

Suggestions?

Messier Marathon, torture test or brisk walk? A deep sleep post

Okay. . . here's a update from the walking comatose, me.

Wednesday night, and this morning. . . I had a kind of side goal of attempting a half hearted attempt at the Messier Marathon at the Hector J Robinson Observatory. It's a shorter drive than to an official observing event that the club was putting out in Lake Hudson. Some 2 hour drive. And I'm getting back into Astronomy of course, so I'm not about to set the world on fire at a Messier marathon unless I have a goto scope and plan for it. I really didn't have time to plan for it and just wanted to check the mount and perhaps see what this scope can do, pointing at a bunch of objects. 

I thought I could probably coin the term Messier torture test if we were bogged down and ran into a lot of problems with the mount.  Or perhaps torture test for testing the mount. Would it pass the test, pull in M objects and keep going.  We know it's a great mount and highly regarded. Would the little "six star model" that I (thought) I put in work?

Well it worked. But it's not exactly a six star model. It seems I was putting in depending on how you read and understand the mount a one star model with 5 adjustments or sync points after the fact to the model. I'm not sure technically, programmically or how logically this would be different than having a six star model. The steps I was taking don't even seem to match the steps in the manual. So maybe I'm doing something undocumented who knows. . . someone knows out there. . . but of course they are probably out looking for 110 Messier objects at a nice dark sky site or sanely staying at home and getting up in the morning . . . heading to work. Which really was my goal and plan. . .I really wanted to kind of simulate the 110 object search. But what happened. . . well Greg Ozimek was there with me. He came out pretty quickly to the site and then Dan Barriball came out (another FAAC club member). So we had three members of the FAAC club and things were going along pretty nicely.

Except I didn't plan the actual marathon goal very well, being in a hurry and planning it basically during a break in a very busy workday, I grabbed a chart from the net and manually typed out perhaps most of the M objects and numbers in a kind of east to west manner. Creating a list of objects that might cover most of them, but I didn't even have time to double check all of them. So I had this half baked list of objects. They worked okay for a while, but then a few were out of the way and not in order and Greg Ozimek had a planetarium software program that he quickly loaded and was used to. So we started just aiming in the same general location where the dome was. Then we started talking about tweaking the model and I described how I put the steps in. This didn't mesh with what Greg O had read, so we started looking at the manuals. Greg O and I were pretty tired by this time and Dan looked up the alignment procedure in the manual. I could go on and on with this account, but the end result was we decided to trash and cold start the model and do it the "right way" by the book rather than the hacked way I apparently had put it in. However the button sequences didn't seem to work to add additional alignment stars. I could go on and on. It may be that we had one star alignment most of the rest of the night. It seemed like some additional stars were being added, but we didn't get confirmations and the RA+ key wasn't working at all when we tried to use it. Enter seemed to work instead, but no confirmation.

OKAY HOPEFULLY YOU SKIPPED MOST OF THAT ACCOUNT

TO SUMMARIZE

We started looking at M objects. Went off my half baked plan list. Went free form following the software. Going off the plan was not a good idea in one sense of finding out what you were doing and tracking it later. We were perhaps locked in the fun of finding a lot of objects and just seeing them appear. Then tweaked the scope for perhaps an hour or so, with the manual work discussion putting in the new model. That probably doesn't work any better than the earlier hacked one. But seemed to work okay pretty close and dead on by the end of the night. Then wisely Dan leaves at about midnight. Which is pretty late. But the two Gregs keep going, locked in some kind of marathon obsession. Not necessarily efficient, but one of the drawbacks was, we had to many lights in the building. Okay we had the light from my Canon EOS back flashing and shining, need to turn off that readout. We had light from the great heater that Greg Ozimek had brought. It made it really comfortable in there. Maybe affected viewing a little but was not really noticable for faint fuzzy objects. We had light blasting from the computer screen and at times from my eyephone. Really everything was GREAT. . . I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. It was very addictive and fun just moving from one deep sky object to another and looking for it. Taking a photo and then moving on. The camera of course caught more than our naked eyes would see in the eyepiece, but gave a pretty good idea what we had looked at. Using the Canon EOS on the refractor matched with the C-14 to document quickly what you looked at is a pretty nice setup. Almost perfect. Perhaps if I took a short exposure of maybe 8 to 10 seconds using ISO 800 I'd get a pretty good likeness to what we were seeing in the eyepiece. Of course in some cases we didn't see anything. The scope was likely on the object, but 10 magnitude objects were difficult to see clearly without using adverted vision and that really didn't help to much with all the other light pollution we were throwing around the inside of the observatory.

A visual observatory should be dark. We don't need much light inside and don't really want much added light when we need dark adjusted eyes. There's not a lot of light coming in the observatory when the door is closed. It's a positive for viewing, but there is a lot of sky glow and perhaps light pollution filters on the eyepieces would help a lot.

Anyway to try to cut this post short, because I should be dreaming right now. . . we stayed up until 4AM in the morning. A true marathon like performance for length of time, but we were pretty out of it by the end. Still excited perhaps and perhaps just going at it each not wanting to be the one to call it quits. Now I would have thought going until 4AM would allow me to see 80 objects easily with the goto mount, but we had delays because I wanted to take photographs, and tweaking the mount and that and some other delays caused it to go slower than I expected.

Later in the evening or early morning one of the group asked me how I would know which photos went with each M object. Well actually since we aren't following a plan and didn't log the order in which we saw them, we don't have a written record. Just some photos that should match the M objects we saw, but not necessarily a label for each. I even recorded some audio clips which of course are long and virtually useless of the session. Audio is probably a good idea to record highlights and narration. Greg Ozimek had the sense to have Brian record by checking off objects from the list. That worked out okay. We each had plenty of eyepiece time. Actually Brian showed a lot more eyepiece constraint and time looking briefly than Greg and I did. So basically it was a half speed marathon, more like a fast walk, not really a marathon.

You have to have a lot of respect for the more experienced star gazer out there some who do the marathon by star hopping, when you try to do it with a goto and see how slow it can be even with a goto. Some other comparisons, between our setup and a good outdoor site.

Our site requires us to move the dome. We can't just aim the scope at a different part of the sky, there is shutter and dome movement involved. Because the shutter can open in one of two sections to open fully we may have to close it to attach the lower section and rotating the dome takes some time as well. The additional slowdown of taking photos of course could not compare with a guy just looking seeing the object and taking a note and moving on. You'd have to be very disciplined to actually complete an marathon and see all 110 (or 109) objects.

We saw 38 M objects. More like a speed walk with plenty of breaks in between than a marathon, but nonetheless fun. We did encounter a lot of strange equipment issues. Perhaps I had a jinx on the computer and the EOS as well. I didn't seem to be able to get the laptop and EOS to sync and work as well as they have in the past. I need to work on that a little better. That wasted some time as well.

Now the biggest problem of course is I was up until 4:30AM and probably didn't get to bed until 5AM. So I had only a few hours sleep. Then I was a walking zombie at work. With a lot of difficult work as well.

So I worked late and had to stay late. I heard Leo took 5 kids and a fellow teacher out to the observatory and they looked through the Lunt Solar Scope at the Sun. But they had a problem. It went to the sun fine. Four kids saw the sun, but the fifth didn't see anything. The mount went dead, lost all power. It turned out something knocked out the circuit breaker to the power supply for the scope. We aren't sure why. So that was a pretty good short event, but there was a problem.

I decided to go to the observatory for a short time. I called up Greg Ozimek, to let him know I'd be there if he wanted to come out and try it. He's sleeping, in an almost comatose state, which I should be in. We chat a bit. I have a device to measure current and wattage flow called a kill o watt meter. I'm thinking about trying it out. Maybe I'll try out my little Celestron and take a peek at the moon. Just for fun then go home. Up walks a guy from the local area. He was at the dedication, he's been calling Leo to see when the observatory is open. We start talking. I offer to show him a few objects. First just through my little scope, but I know the real fun is in the observatory. Okay . . . let's just open the shutter. I know I shouldn't do this. I should be at home sleeping. But this guy has waited and wanted to look through the scope for months now. He has a Celestron and tells me he could actually run home retrieve it and show me the problem he's having with the GOTO. We look at M45 Pleiades, M42 Orion Nebula, Mars and Saturn. Mars is okay I suppose, but I'm never impressed with it, so far. I always want to see more detail and never see enough to be happy, but maybe it's just conditions or maybe I'll never see what I want to see through a telescope. . . it's just that way I feel about it. . . but we look at it. We can see the caps and some faint detail. Perhaps the visitor has better eyes and can see more than I can. Then we look at Saturn. It's nice. The visitor is impressed, but I've seen better in earlier nights. Saturn is only about 18 degrees above the horizon however and there's some thin cloud issues maybe it's the atmosphere. Still the Big C-14 picks it up and brings it in better than most scopes that most people own, so he's happy.

And he's asking me if I want to take a look at his goto scope. After all I have a Celestron too. (He doesn't say it, but we both know it because I pulled it out as I was heading to the observatory.) But I'm tired, and to out of it to really look at manuals and debug his scope at this time. I actually am a new Celstron owner myself and haven't read my own manual much. Just a quick scan. I tell him my suspicion which is the batteries are running low or perhaps it's a problem with the power supply not supplying enough current. It was a problem with my scope and low power can cause the Celestron scopes to lose their star map.

He realizes I'm tired. He admits he is out past his normal bed time, because this visitor gets up early in the morning to go to work.  Now it's 10PM.  I had arrived earlier at 8PM. So there's another two hours. But we're happy, looked up at the sky.  If I was younger and more rested, maybe I could look more, but I have errands to run, and I'm off to grab some dinner at a local Checker drive through.

So there you have it.  A pretty long and perhaps poorly written blog entry about the Messier torture test of the C-14. 

One nice thing about the session was . . . although I don't have really good long tracking photos . . . I do have photos of practically every M object we looked at. 

They are short exposures compared to many and can use a little work.  And we of course need to really revisit and take some serious photos of these later. But for now, I have some evidence of the fun and long hour attempt at the Hector J Robinson observatory.  

In retrospect. . . there's a lot to learn.  And a lot supposedly that could make things better and more efficient. But it's about having fun as well, and we really aren't always efficient. We make mistakes and slow down at times. Brian of course got to experience a little bit of a crazy production-like race to get a bunch of seeing in.  During that time we didn't do any requests just for the most part searched for M objects that were for the most part brighter than Magnitude 10.  It was really fun to see a lot of objects in a short amount of time. Greg Ozimek summed it up nicely at times, with "we gotta come back and give this some more serious attention later". It was a whirlwind tour to us.

Okay. . . I'm tired and this is becoming to long. Before I waste more time with an edit or rewrite. . . it's time to post here is one photo of one of the objects. I'm not going to tell you which object this is, because frankly I don't remember and don't have notes at this time. But we can find this out later. Who knows I may just post all the objects in some article and let it become a puzzle for some to research and solve. Here's some photos, now determine which object they are. That might be a nice quiz and project for some.

More details to follow perhaps an easier read.

Finally aligned the mount

Now that I've finally muddled through aligning the mount with a lot of helpful messages from the Core group and some phone support yesterday with Greg Ozimek, I almost feel like an expert. But it took a little longer than anyone expected. There's a six star alignment in the mount and it's not acting up currently. (Meaning no out of control slewing (moving of the mount toward an object continuing past, being out of control.)

That's good news, and the mount seemed to be finding everything I asked it to via GOTO. Almost perfect timing to do a little Messier Marathon test of the mount. Now if I can only convince my boss an all night session would be justifiable as "helping the kids". . . :)

Have to make this post quick during lunch. A lot of work involving computer configurations happening at work today, but that's another story.

High Resolution means a Higher Price

There is a theorectical limit to how much light will be falling on an image chip, that is the resolution that can be provided by the optics. Advanced imagers will often quote specifications which are perhaps a little difficult to comprehend by beginners like me. Resolution in ARC seconds, etc. They will talk about how much resolution could be oversampling by an image chip. In other words in a digital realm there are only so many dots of resolution being painted on the image chip and if the chip is sampling to densely these dots or the basic image arriving, it's "oversampling". You can reduce the number of dots or light buckets you are getting by grouping them using a technique called "binning" which reduces the resolution of the image chip but increases the sensitivity of the light because it's summing perhaps 4 image sensors and grouping their sensitivity creating a larger pixel or light bucket in a virtual digital realm. This binning creates more sensitivity. Is it good or bad? Compared to adjusting the gain on a CCD camera like a common ordinary Canon EOS it would seem to be a little of both. Binning is good because it's increasing the gain without noise. It's bad because it's reducing the resolution of the sample. But is that bad?

HIGH RES IS BETTER
One of the more experienced imagers in the group at the last meeting brought up the fact that if you blow up an image to zoom in and make a print, it's usually better to have more detail. To get more detail you're better off with a higher resolution sample to begin with. But this can become a case of experimenting and determining if the higher resolution is useful and helps you're images, displays, prints etc. And of course you need the digital resolution in the camera to begin with, a more expensive chip with a higher resolution. If you don't have the resolution to play with, you're not going to get a higher resolution sample (unless you use more power and overlap photos, but we aren't talking about that).

It becomes more of an experimental thing, something to play with and learn, but also taking into account what others have learned.

There are things about the human's perceive an image that allow us to fill in detail where it's missing. We have the ability to fill in details. This happens more with moving images than stills however. But we can still fill in details, so we can sometimes use this characteristic and reduce details, processing and cost without a noticable drop in quality.

In some cases things like color can be cheated on and may add to an image with other details, like chroma (or brightness in black and white) providing the details. We can see this with older television systems. With the advent of Color TV, color had to be added to a previous system. It required a "color component" to be added to the signal, but they didn't have the broadcast space to put in all the color details. It was discovered that all the details didn't need to be added and they could "cheat" a bit adding less color and the way the display systems and our eyes worked, we'd fill in the details. This saved on color space, and resolution. Allowing color to be added with a thing called "color burst".

The color burst information was actually 4 times less detailed than the black and white picture, but the average viewer never noticed this. Color burst was supplying enough color detail to give our eye an idea what colors were in the image and as the image was moving there was more room for a loss of detail without viewers noticing a resolution loss. In the same way we might be able to reduce the red, green or blue components of an astrophotograph by 4 fold and not notice the difference. The overall resolution and in the composite photograph we end up with not might look the same to our eyes. Using binning we may increase the brightness of a channel and decrease resolution, but the human eye we might not notice the difference, especially on a computer display.

In NTSC earlier Television
Actually two fields of reduced resolution were sent, called interlaced fields. These were being delivered in the old days, a slice and dice of the image which actually had slight movement between each 1/60th second field. The Television displays would mush all these signals together and the 60 interlaced field per second would merge into this 30 frames per second image on the glowing phosphors of the older television display/tube. (I'm using round numbers of 60 and 30 FPS.) This blurring would not be noticed unless you somehow digitally grabbed a still image and examined it carefully. If you took a digital still of an image, you'd see the blur artifacts. This can still happen to still captures from interlaced systems, unless they sample only one field of the 2 field image and effectively remove half the vertical resolution a still from an interlaced signal will likely have motion artifacts.

But motion was more of a issue with moving images and interlaced systems will likely not cause a problem with a still image such as one from an astrophotography. But we don't use interlaced systems much in astrophotography. Modern systems are using more of a progressive frame capture type of video grabbing technique (unless you're using an NTSC video camera.) A webcam would likely be giving you progressive images.

A DIGRESSION WITH DISCUSSION OF MOTION VIDEO vs FILM
In some countries they had a different system called PAL, which had single frames or images, like a still arriving all at once. These were more like traditional film movie houses which would display 24 frames each a full photo transmitted to a screen seperated by a moment of black in between. In movie houses and perhaps on PAL there was this black space in between the photos being delivered that gave a different "feel" to the film being viewed. More like a flip book for some viewers, a slight artistic difference in perception. Of course in big theatres having a larger resolution on the film role helped a lot as well. American TV had a different more fluid feel for motion because it was sending more signals with movement in the image. At apx. 60 frames per second you'd capture a lot more fluid motion and movement than at 24 fps in film. So sports movements as in the throw of a football would look better on a television broadcast from a motion perspective than on a filmstrip of 16mm film at 24 frames per second. But this is in regards to motion perception, and I'm getting off the subject of astronomy stills, so let's return to still photos.

REDUCING COLOR RESOLUTION INCREASING BRIGHTNESS
In the same way reduced color (or any channel of color) can be captured today's modern astrophotography cameras using a technique called BINNING. If you BIN the RGB channels you will reduce the color resolution in your photograph and get a brighter color with less time spent exposing the image. Less resolution may be in the digital portions of the file that are in color, but the end product a stacked photo with R, G, B, and chroma channels(without binning). If the Black and white resolution is higher, the eye might not notice the loss of resolution in the overall photograph. Or alternately you could bin the black and white (chroma channel) and use higher resolution ("unbinned") RGB. Reducing parts of the image may not affect what we finally perceive on the monitor screen, especially for web or digital displays. Once the channels are stacked together the eye may take the detail from one of the channels and see that detail and fill in the missing detail from other channels. Should you capture higher detail in the color channels or lumanence channels? I can't answer that question, but with some experimentation perhaps someone with the equipment could provide some samples and analyse and come up with a conclusion. The answer likely will depend in the type of image you're shooting.

If you're shooting a star cluster or something with very little color in it, you may want more resolution in the black and white components of the image. If you're shooting dust clouds in a nebula, you may want more color resolution.

Some imagers do a digital binning of the Chroma channels as well, meaning the black and white channels to brighten up those and leave the R, G and B channels as their original resolutions. This will brighten up the black and white portions of an image, but reduce it's resolution by four fold if it's a 2 by 2 bin, grouping 4 pixels into one. Depending on the sample of the image to begin with, you may not even notice a loss of detail, but gain a lot of extra light and a bunch of dust and bright light can appear in the photo. Perhaps you're camera captured so much detail to begin with a 2 by 2 bin of the black and white really provided a lot more detail and in effect a brighter exposure after the fact. More details compared to almost no details. Higher brightness via binning can always be added after the fact in image processing programs. Higher resolution (getting rid of binning) cannot be done in post.

TRADITIONAL SCANNING
In traditional imaging systems if you're doing print a higher sample resolution will often provide more in the end result, something of a higher quality. If you can sample an image with a scanner at 4x the saved image resolution, even if it's saved at a lower resolution, you will often end up with a better picture. This is a trick of the trade that publishers have learned. It likely will work i astrophotography as well. Higher resolution may be better, but it may not be as noticable unless you're doing large prints of you're images. Binning may save you time in image gathering and provide enough resolution for your online web images without anyone even noticing the loss in detail.

Higher resolution of course means more money for the camera and possibly less "binning" which could translate into longer exposures. Longer exposures could be required to get the same brightness because you aren't binning. And that means a more expensive mount or longer tracking times to get the same results. This all translates into spending more money. Higher resolution means a higher price, there is no free lunch and in the case of astrophotography, you probably will be factoring that extra expense into added costs for the mechanical mount and optics of the telescope, a darker sky site location, etc.

Youtube and Flickr Failures in uploading video

I read some old posts on Google and conflicting posts about whether a person can upload a long video to Youtube. Apparently back in 1996 some users were allowed the ability to convert their accounts to director accounts, and then a bunch of Youtube users started to upload movies to Youtube. This causes Youtube to stop allowing director accounts. Although you can still change you're channel accounts to "director" which is useless and means nothing. I uploaded a ripped version of Astronomy For Everyone to Youtube and the video was uploaded, but was quickly taken down as being over the 10 minute limit. I read another post somewhere out there that you could upload video to Google video (this may have been an old post) or Flickr. I have a flickr account so I tried Flickr. It took the entire long upload. Then when trying to play back the video, Flickr will only show the first 90 seconds. Flickr is a photo type of site primarily and supposedly wanted to limit bandwidth for their primary users or something like that. Who knows.

I've read in one post that google video may be the answer but it compresses the video and makes it look pretty poor in quality. Why would someone not just put the entire show out there on an FTP site and some space they rented? Well youtube and perhaps Flickr optimizes the video for playback over slower connections. If you upload a video of a large Quicktime on some site, it may be 200 megabytes or more in size. (In the case of one video clip I recall Dr. Timothy Dey mentioning it was something in the 1 gig range to download.) This is a lot to ask for internet users. If you have a marginal connection or not a lot of time to sit and wait for a download you may want something more compressed. You tube does a good job at providing multiple resolutions support in a streaming format.

The limitations can be a pain. What does this mean for people who want to create a cable show for distribution and put it on Youtube. If you have an end product that is on DVD and want people to simply rip that DVD in segments to files for Youtube upload the chapters should be less than 10 minutes in size. You're show should have good 10 minute or less breaks in it's construction. This kind of stuff was done all the time for sitcom segments so it's something you can plan for when you're creating a show.

But since the "Astronomy For Everyone" show doesn't have sub-ten minute chapters. I'll have to do more work with that video, perhaps importing it to a different editing system and then exporting out segments before uploading them to You Tube. This is a lot more work than a simple rip and post. So I probably won't be doing this.

There are a couple of other things that could be done perhaps to improve the show. But I know these things are put on by volunteers and I don't know if I really have the time to be involved enough to make those minor improvement suggestions and corrections. There were a couple of minor mistakes in the discussion, not a really big deal in that episode. Something I might catch if I was a director of the show or involved in the taping. But not any real deal breakers. The other thing they might be able to figure out and correct is some of the graphics on the show. Some look a bit out of perspective on the DVD. I thought my rip settings were wrong, but some of the clips and graphics were a little out of shape, and looked oblong instead of round. The logo and some shots of the moon for example. But most clips are normal. This looks to be a problem that can happen if you're mixing wide screen footage and normal (older 4:3) format footage. If you try to render 16:9 graphics into a 4:3 frame you may end up squeezing the footage and ending up with tall characters or in the case of the FAAC logo in the show an ellipse. It's a minor thing. Something they may correct or may choose to leave alone.

Not much to report - working on FAAC newsletter

Working on the FAAC Newsletter and also tested uploading the Wyandotte Cable show on a Youtube account. If it works we might be able to load up all the cable shows that FAAC did on Youtube. I know it should work, but I'm figuring out how to do this with the Youtube accounts. If I can upload the entire show in one clip it would be more convenient.

Astrophotography SIG meeting Thursday 3-11-2010

I started a long rambling tutorial about Stacking and astrophotography but decided to cut it short. Re-edit it and perhaps post it later.

I decided to rewrite my blog and focus more on the Astrophotography meeting and perhaps give some links and hints at internet searching. You should know that by typing any question in Google you are bound to find some interesting technical discussion and solutions about the topic. I know many technical staff contractors who use google when they get stuck so check it out.

ASTRO IMAGERS SIG MEETING

First some meetings are really stellar (pun intended) with the images and information shown. Last Thursday the SIG group was held at Rider’s hobby shop because HFCC was closed. That’s a long way from my workplace, and I arrived fashionably late. After checking out a bunch of items at Rider’s. (I had a list of perhaps six things I might buy and wanted to see, I went into their meeting room, wow what a great meeting.)

Thursday, there was so much information at the meeting and so many great photographs it can easily be intimidating for beginners. I met a couple of other beginners in Astrophotography at the meeting. Since I’m new to this Astrophotography thing, I can easily relate to how they might feel when faced with a deluge of great photos and all kinds of technical advice on imaging.

It seems like a pattern develops for beginners arriving at this SIG.

First you’ll find that you didn’t turn in your USB key to show your own photos or in my case, you didn’t even preload a USB key. So the SIG group doesn’t have you’re photos to show them at first. Then you start seeing the work that the advanced imagers are working on. By the time you’re finished seeing what they’ve done, you start thinking . . . Wow they are so much better than what I’m working on, I don’t want to waste their time. So you leave and wonder if you’ll ever have the money, talent and equipment to get anything like the results they are getting.

This is the feeling I had a first couple of times I attended. I thought “why bother these guys with the small attempts at imaging” or “why waste their time”. After all, I’m just taking some small pedestrian styled photographs through an eyepiece and not really taking “real astrophotographs”. So I might want to wait until next time. Sometimes a fellow member will encourage you to show you’re stuff. After all it’s not about showing up others, but more about showing where you are, and asking others how you might improve your techiques, make small improvements and enjoy the hobby further. Greg Ozimek mentioned to me that he liked certain shots and that I should show them to the Astro SIG. I showed them and basically was showing them as a really basic subset of astrophotography that is more like “pedestrian photography” or handheld through the eyepiece photos of the moon. Guess what happened? I wasn’t laughed out of the room, I received complements and questions and some good encouragement.

The guys in the group no matter how advanced their techniques and far along really like to see early attempts and will give you a lot of good advice and feedback. Most of the time I don’t show images it’s because I just didn’t organize them and prepare remarks or comments to let them know. Most the time, I don’t show images, not because I’m afraid to show my early stuff, but more because I’m running out of time and doing to many projects to spend time to get organized and have a USB key with some images available. It’s something I need to work on getting prepared for. (Less blogging perhaps, more organizing.)

The advice I received from other imagers and just watching and hearing what they do is a great education in how to expand my future imaging plans, or even just an education, without doing a lot of imaging.

As those who attended Thursday found out, there are more images shown at the SIG group than are in the photo section of the FAAC website. Many of these imagers may upload their photos somewhere else. Maybe their own observatory website, or on Flickr, and you won't easily see them. One fellow member told me ahead of time he didn't see very many photos on the FAAC website, and this is true. But once you start reading the posts you may find links to the locations other FAAC members are storing their photos on. You may have to hunt a little bit and dig to find the images. Perhaps looking through more posts in the FAAC Yahoo Group before finding many of them. (This of course is more specific to FAAC members.) The FAAC website is kind of like the tip of the iceberg and just a small cross section of what all the members in the FAAC club are doing.

Although I arrived late, I was able to catch the end of a demonstration of a ($45 PC based) stacking program. These programs allow you to stack and manipulate images. There was a lot of discussion and comments about different software, both software you can purchase or freeware from the net. Some of the comments were brief, of course some of the information is technical in nature and may go over the beginner’s head. I probably understood 50% of some of the comments at times and perhaps forgot another 25% after a long day. So I’m probably lucky if I can retain 25% of what is brought up at the meetings. That’s okay, I had fun anyway.

John from Riders hobby shop mentioned a new stacking and image processing software webinar that was going to happen on the net at 9PM. It was about a new product called Fisch Image Lab given by “Explorer Scientific”. I didn’t get into the Webinar until after it started (maybe arriving at 9:25PM) but this was also very informative and showed some of the advanced features being offered in today’s software. The Fisch Image Lab software had a lot of features but was on the pricey side($249). One of the features they touted and I'm sure there's a lot more was a color curve feature that was a little more advanced than Photoshops standard manipulation. It allows you to change colors or apply changes to different parts of the image based on the intensity of the image. It also allows selective sharpening, etc over part of the image rather than the entire image, which helps bring out detail in moon photographs. Watching some of the image manipulation features on the Webinar inspired me a bit. I later I tried some of the curve color control features demonstrated thatI happened to find in a low cost image manipulation tool I already have on my Macintosh (called GraphicConverter).

This improved an Astro-image I have taken a bit and gave me some more ideas. So it becomes a process of learning a little applying that knowledge and tweaking and experimenting. If you have some images to stack and play with, you can have hours of fun getting the most out of your photos. A big advantage to today's astro imaging is you can be doing something with you’re hobby when the skies are not cooperating.

CAMERA TRACKING AND IMAGE PROCESSING

The software shown in the webinar could take multiple photos from an untracked camera and rotate and stack them automatically, even as they were being shot. It was amazing. However it seemed to work better as would be the case, with a guided mount. There were some controls that seemed to be live with camera control. I wasn't sure if these were specific to a camera under direct control, or something you would also be able to do afterward with the images. I feel that it could be worked both ways but was to tired at the time to even get into those details and figured I'd find out more later. (With the price being $249 for that software, I figure I'll have a lot of time to research that product before considering a purchase.)

There are of course to different phases in getting a good photograph when imaging for astrophotography. First you gather the images. Then you try to “tweak” the photo playing with the digital images to get the best possible final image. It’s part science and part art. There’s a lot of room to try to get the best possible image, most true to life or perhaps to emphasize some scientific feature of the object you’ve captured on “digital film”.

Computers add a whole new world of possibilities to Astrophotography and it just keeps getting better. Common image processing techniques involve programs that deal with layering, image manipulation (like photoshop) and stacking software. If you’re into photography you might have an advantage. If you’re into optics it could help. If you’re into engineering or math it could help. You can bring whatever talent you have to the hobby, although I haven’t figured out how to bring singing talent to play and get better images with while belting out a tune.

The gathering of images is just the first step. I’ve even had George Korody show me an image and remark how he gathered the images and mention that a friend of his did the image manipulation. So you can work as a team and perhaps focus on one part of process as well.

As beginners we may be taking photos with cameras that are perhaps in a number of categories, Maybe unguided, handheld, fixed on a tripod aimed at the North star. Reflections of a moon off water. Maybe handheld or in front of an eyepiece. These are more “pedestrian” (my term). You can take more than one unguided photo using a simple tripod and a camera that offers long manual exposures. Using a self timer helps keep the shake of your hand out of the photo.

FAAC member Greg Ozimek mentioned to me a good way to start out with astrophotography is to just shoot some wide shots of some area of the sky, maybe Orion, the big dipper, just some frame of the sky. It can be unguided. Take several shots, and then download some free stacking software off the internet and play with the stacking software. You’ll find out if you like tweaking images and experimenting getting better results pretty quickly. With little extra expense. Then you can focus on getting more involved.

Then you can work you’re way up. At first I concentrated on photos that would be what a pedestrian at a star party might get just holding a small camera to an eyepiece. You can learn a lot off internet articles just google terms like:

CCD Astrophotography.

Stacking software.

Free stacking software.

Barn door tracker.

These search terms will turn up a wealth of information.

Astrophotographers at least in FAAC are actually very friendly and want to help you advance in your hobby. As you get deeper into the field if you’re into imaging you’ll find you may want a really good solid mount and a way to take photographs and some access to computer software.

Don’t let the steep learning curve stop you from having fun, if that’s your goal. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to get some pretty decent results. If you’re a member of FAAC and come by to the observatory sometime, we can likely show you how to get some nice shots through equipment that FAAC has access to. How inexpensive is that?

There are so many paths to imaging perhaps different approaches. You can do long exposure landscapes with the night sky and star trails. You can do some eyepiece photography through the eyepiece with a cheap camera, usually of the moon. This is better with some setups or telescopes. Usually fast telescopes with big low powered lenses are easiest for an eyepiece handheld shot.

If you’re into visual astronomy you’re goals might be different and your purchases might be different if you decide to go into Astrophotography. There are even internet sites like Global Rent A Scope that allow you to rent a $50,000 observatory and shoot shots through that with internet control. They give you free time to try it out. How inexpensive is that?

WEBCAMS FOR PLANETS

Many are using lost cost webcams hooked up to a telescope via an eyepiece adapter. Webcams shine for planetary photography. A Webcam AVI file will record thousands of frames of a planet in the telescope. Then special software will be used to automatically can the movie and select the best few hundred from thousands of frames. These frames which are higher quality will then be stacked to provide some of the best planetary photographs amateur astronomers have recently taken.

Modern Amateur photography is far better than the old days with film. You have more choices and more control over processing with computers. You don’t have to worry about learning how to develop film or wonder if your shots turned out, you can get results quicker or take your time and tweak the images without a darkroom.

And modern day CCD cameras have very low light high gathering efficiency. Enought to advance telescope making technology to keep up with the demands of imagers. They have actually helped drive better telescope design. They are 70% efficient at turning light into an image. The old film cameras were often only 2% efficient. So modern technology is 35 times more sensitive to light than film was.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A DIFFERENT APPROACH WITH DIFFERENT EQUIPMENT

There are different cameras and things that people focus on in astrophotography that is a lot different from visual astronomers however. You may want to be aware of this. A short focal length refractor with a good mount is preferable to a large light bucket on a dobsonian mount if you’re looking to get serious into imaging. The larger telescopes are nice, but they need really heavy and expensive mounts for stability to gather the images. One shortcut that some people use, but this is above the average beginner astronomer’s budget is a system like Hyperstar for SCT telescopes. These types of systems offer wide field and very fast focal lengths for short photographs, but a large Fastar or Hyperstar system like the Celestron C-11 could cost you $5,000 for the HD CGE edition and that’s quite a bit of money. It provides F1.9 speeds which is a very short and fast focal length and bright image for quick exposures. You can take a 30 second photo and get the same results as in a 5 minute exposure with a fastar or hyperstar configuration, but with a big telescope like the C-11 you’re only shooting at 18x. Which is for wide field images. Some are attracted to these systems for big photographs of wide areas of the sky. And they save money on the expensive mount, because they can take very short exposures 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes.

If you want to shoot small objects at higher power, then you need a slower longer focal length telescope and this would mean the image would be darker and require a longer exposure. That longer exposure time translates into a better and much more expensive mount. Imagers state they spend about 70% of their budget on the mount. So a typical high cost imager spending perhaps $20,000 on a system might have $10,000 in the mount and $10,000 in the telescopes and cameras or even more. And if they were at a $10,000 price range of equipment they may have $6k in the mount and $3k in the telescope and perhaps $1000 in other items and that could include an inexpensive camera.

Serious imagers can easily spend $3,000 to $10,000 for the camera alone. But you can spend much less. You can purchase a lower end camera for astrophotography or get into low end EOS SLR type cameras in the $500 to $900 range and get some excellent results.

You can get pretty nice results with a low end EOS SLR CCD camera and a barn door tracker as well if you want wide field photographs that track the sky. A barn door tracker could costs around $25 to build.

Perhaps an even more affordable solution exists. The best solution for many FAAC members might just be to come by the observatory and bring a Canon EOS camera with you. If it’s a Canon EOS camera, I have an adapter the we can use to fit it to the telescope and we can take a few photos that you can take home and play with. If you email me I can even send you some shots I've taken if you want to just play with stacking software. Depending on the number and amount of images you can get better results with different file types. Bring a USB key to a FAAC meeting and ask me to upload some images for you, if you wish. I can get JPG or RAW images to you for some stacking fun. You won't even have to acquire the images. Why spend $10,000 when you can experience, a little bit of Astrophotography for free? If you’re a FAAC member and we have time and I’m around, as far as I can tell you’ll be able to dive in and learn about Astrophotography, without spending an arm and a leg.

Some other tips and hints for now. If you want to get involved with Astrophotography and use CCD cameras like the Canon EOS or Nikon digital cameras there is a CD called “The Beginner’s Guide to DSLR Astrophotography” by Jerry Lodriguss. If you haven't picked up a camera yet, and are wondering about which brand to purchase, a lot of astronomers are using Canon's so there appears to be more support for those, but you can use other CCD cameras. The advantage of these is you can use them for other photos and then shoot some astrophotography. Of course I'm just scratching the surface, there's a lot more to say and write about. The "Beginner's Guide" mentioned above costs $40 and is a book on CD. If you want to purchase it, you'll need to get it from a website. Just google it. He has an advanced CD as well. It really goes over a lot of information.

He even has some of the chapters free on his website, but the book has so much more information. You could likely get as much but at a different level of information as you would in 10 meetings in the SIG group just by buying this CD. It’s very affordable and focuses mostly on CCD imaging.

Someone at the club actually reads my blog

I guess I should have guessed some of my wordy posts, even with some bad grammer are actually read by some people out there. To show you how tired and on the run I've been, someone at last months club meeting metioned they heard I was thinking about a 20 inch dob project and I wondered where they heard it from. It was only after reviewing some of my posts here (and shaking my head a little at how bad my writing is. . . ) that I realized I had mentioned a 20 inch mirror for sale on Astromart in my blog. They must be reading this blog.

You have to remember I'm a dreamer and like to dream about gadgets. I dream perhaps about 20, maybe 200 or even 2000 gadget dreams before trying to actually make one. I can dream and imagine a lot, and save on perspiration (old fashion Edison work ethic) by leaving them in dreamland.

This weeks dream includes thoughts about the little 8 inch mirror I bought either for a little toying around or to have the kids at the school play with. The other day, I was thinking about creating some kind of unique and super light mono-body construction Dob. Something more like a monoframe, that held a mirror box. Sort of like an open mount. Kind of like a ("telescope man") Harold's example telescope that uses a simple board.

But instead of a board it would be more like a contructed body. Perhaps one sculpted in foam at first, like a Recumbent racing bike. Then covered in Carbon fiber for strength, like the body of a Carbon Fiber low racer. Carbon fiber would give it a killer look. I'm not saying it would be some kind of James Bond combination of a telescope and bike or something like that. That of course would be going to far. Perhaps adding a wheel kit and bike chain and sprockets would be going to far. Althought it's be interesting to say, I drove my telescope to the meet. But that's for another post and a more heavy design session.

It might have a primary and secondary box attachment and it could hold a mirror box of some kind. The secondary attaches to one end with the eyepiece and finder, like modern dob designs. It would be a monotube body with the rings and mirror boxes free floating on one side of it. Of course would have to be fairly rigid. Perhaps hoops could be designed to hold a shroud, for city viewing. Without the shroud it would make a pretty killer demo piece with a completely open design, but of course in a real field it would allow a lot of dust into the telescope and on the optics.

Then my imagination starts to go a little more extreme. How about making it a dual configuration kind of thing, maybe add a place for a second mirror that would slide in or attach some how with a different secondary or spider. Maybe two secondary cage configurations that would swap in and out. One closer to the primary which would be tilted. Perhaps the primary mirror box would have two slots to fit into and one would tilt it slightly. This would create a Dobsonian with two eyepiece and secondary positions. The first position, furthest from the mirror in standard conventional Newtonian position would be a full mirror setup with a regular spider. The second position would use a mask and the mirror would be offset. The top secondary cage might even be removable for this second configuration. In either case, the second configuration would tilt the mirror and a mask would be added to the front.

FOLDED NEWT DESIGN CONFIGURATION (configuration 2)
We'd be using half the mirror or a circle allowing light in. For the 8 inch this would be a 4 inch circle perhaps. It would reflect off half the shrouded mirror and back to an offset diagnal with the second focuser which is further back. This makes the dobsonian an offset Newtonian that is masked. Why do this? It creates a light path that doesn't have a secondary or spider at all in the light path. It's a "folded Newtonian" design in the second configuration. Basically a fully corrected clear 4 inch telescope with no color issues (like refractors) and no secondary obstruction. This is the kind of design you'd want to have to use for planetary viewing. If you don't have $10,000 for an expensive APO from Takahashi, you can perhaps build a folded Newt and have some pretty nice planetary results. Hmm. A F7.5 masked 8 inch becomes a F15 4 inch in this configuration. Sounds like a pretty cool planetary focal length design.

So I'm thinking in the second variation (of course I've had more thoughts) that if I was going to get radical with some kind of carbon fiber design, why not go further and get two scopes out of one body. Of course with designing and planning any added thing may add options, but take away others. For example adding more options and features by expanding the frame of the scope and how it works, adds weight. You have advantages and disadvatages to each design idea, which is what happens in the real world. In snowmobile design for example which changes each year, some came up with the thought of reducing parts to make the sled lighter and design each part to do many functions not just one. So a successful light design would use fewer parts. Or would require more swapping of mirror cell layouts and retain only one eyepiece and secondary in either configuration. You might have one primary mirror box and two secondary cages. One with the mask and folded optics. If both were seperate the collimation of the secondaries would be rather quick and might not require much work. If you were really good in you're design you might have some kind of adjustable tilt stops with fine adjustments to setup a tilt and tune colimation of the primary to happen with a fairly simple tilt and few adjustments to go from one mode to the other, but that's asking for a lot.

If you make it some kind of massive scope with both secondaries and focusers on it and somehow have the folded one swing into the light path when in folded mode, you've added a lot of weight to the original Carbon fiber idea. Different designs have advantages and disadvantages. Some of course just use a shroud over their Newt to make things simple. That might be the quickest solution, but you may lose a little bit of primary mirror size, due to the secondary being in the way, size compared to a true folded design with a different secondary that removes the regular one or shifts it somehow. (I'm not a fan of shifting one secondary with this design, because it would likely require more secondary collimation each time you switch modes.) If you really had the big bucks and had some kind of robotic secondary adjustment using lasers and computer controls or something like that, well then that takes my simple design and put's it into really hgih priced territory.

So I'm left with possibly going back toward a simple minimalistic design of one type to make it really light and have an advantage of using it on a cheaper lighter capacity mount or put in other cool features, but then needing a more expensive and heavier mount to use it.

Of course a million other ideas can come out of this. For example the body could have the mounting bracket built in for mouting it to a telescope mount. A built in dovetail in the sculpting of the Carbon fiber monotruss would allow you to mount it without an external bracket, just mount it to the Carbon Fiber. That of course makes it less flexible but lighter.

Then of course some would argue what's the best design and most rigid. How big would the monobody have to be to keep flexture down and why not just use light carbon fiber truss poles instead.

There's a lot of different options you might have. You might even fail without the truss poles and have to add them later. If you designed the main support frame strong enough it might handle different size mirror boxes with different sized mirrors. I could build it so it could expand. Start with an 8 inch and then add a different 10, 12 or larger mirror to it later, with a bigger mirror box and different secondary cage, the same monoframe might be workable for a range of telescopes.

Then I start thinking about that 20 inch mirror again.

Of course I could just go out and spend the money on a VK1 lowrider from Velokraft Poland and ride off into the sunset instead. Before I bore you with more dream variations it's time to sign off.

http://www.jjscozzi.com/VK1.htm - link if you want to see what a Velokraft racer looks like.

Greg K

Dents in dome part 2 / Astro SIG Meeting in Ypsi today

This will be a short entry, there may be more tonight, but I'll be pretty busy today. Hoping to make it to the Ypsilanti meeting of the Astroimager SIG group. For those of you interested in the Astro Imaging SIG group it's meeting this Thursday at Riders Hobby Shop in Ypsilanti Michigan, not HFCC. HFCC is closed for the week.

Riders has a lot of telescope stuff, so it should be a fun visit.

Let's see my short shopping list: I'll need to pick up a cable or two, an adapter perhaps for the little Celestron I bought and maybe some other items that I can use even at the observatory, something as radical as Celestron binoviewers or something. I've even thinking about a GPS for my scope that would work with the Hector J Robinson Observatory's mount as well, but I'm not sure about that yet. You'd still have to find guide stars to realign a cold started mount apparently, the GPS may not do to much to help in convinience with the Losmandy mount.

I have a break a lull at work so I need to get this post finished.

I found an interesting and somewhat disturbing object near the observatory a few nights ago and forgot to log or mention it but will mention this to the club and Leo. It was a golf ball. Perhaps people are playing a little golf near the observatory. Maybe on the field, which is probably not allowed, but being done anyway. It's possible that someone could be even be targeting the dome with these, but I don't have evidence of this. Still there are a lot of dents in the dome, maybe it became some kind of hobby golfers target.

Should we have a procedure in the manual in the event a golf ball crashes through the corrector plate during viewing by some errant golfer? I'd say it would have to read something like, don't touch the golf ball and try to preserve the fingerprints, or something to that effect. We might have to treat it like a crime scene, because it would be a kind of accidental vandelism.

Are we going to need to develop a process of having a lookout watch the football field for golf fanatics or crackpots? Let's hope it doesn't come to that. I suppose that might be one good reason to have more people staffing the place when it's open, to have someone outside checking the surroundings for possible problems.

I'm not living in the observatory or something like that (although last week I kind of felt like it there for a while.) So I can't say what has dented the dome in the past. I put the golf ball in the trash box inside for now. Something to keep in mind.

OTHER LATE NIGHT VISITORS
Of course the property is public property and people are bound to wander in the unfenced areas. I was surprised last week when early in the morning, we are talking about 3AM or so some young man was out playing with his dog in the parking lot near the observatory. He was throwing a large rubber ball in the lot and the dog was happy to be out and playing. He saw me and I saw him. I didn't wave or welcome him or start a dialog, because we were closed and not open of course for an event or something. As I was leaving, he and the dog wandered off. Who knows when the late night golfers might be out and about?

3-5-10 image from Meade EOS unmodified t1i

Desaturated image taken with the Meade. Some of the adjustments show a darkening of the corners of this photograph. The regular JPEG image was much brighter and I toyed with some basic settings to come up with this image. There are better photos out there. This is just a quick attempt to see what the Meade can do with a favorite viewing target.

This is a 30 second photo a 3200 ISO. The extra speed or gain of the 3200 ISO doesn't really provide any additional nebulous or glowing gas detail at this exposure setting. The added gain and brightness of the image didn't provide any advantage over lower ISO settings. An 800 ISO is probably as high a gain necessary to capture faint stars with the same detail as above. Lower speeds might provide sharper details of the stars, with less noise or apparent "grain".

Image GAIN by ELECTRONIC GAIN.

Cameras like the Canon T1i don't "group" pixels like BINNING settings. Astrophotography cameras often group them using a "BINNING" techique. Grouping pixels together to create a virtual super pixel will give more gang or sensitivity, but less detail and resolution. Getting more bright exposures using gain is a different way of doing the same thing but will introduce more noise. (Do you want more noise or less resolution.) There's a theory perhaps, if I recall it correctly that BINNING can be done with some photos in a stack and higher resolution in other photos and then you can combine them. The BINNED photos might have lower resolution, but you're getting clouds and more undefined objects in those photos. There's also photographic formulas that some use to decide how much resolution is possible at the image sensor and this can result in BINNED photos in theory showing as much detail as un-binned ones.

Turning up the gain as the EOS and other consumer CCD cameras for the general market will not reduce resolution by introducing "grain", but rather introduce a grain like gain smudging perhaps. (At least that's my take on it.)

This could introduce more noise artifacts that appear to have a grain like appearance. The HIGHER ISO setting can have some apparent resolution loss with a grainer look, but technically this isn't from less resolution it's from more gain.

IN REGARDS TO M45

http://seds.org/messier/m/m045.html

Please take a look at the link above. Most photos of the Pleiades on the net often show a blue glow of dust that is not present in this photo. They may be using a bigger setup or longer exposures. The Pleiades is one of my favorite things to look at. I like looking at this with a wide field telescope and low powered eyepieces. This almost gives me a wide field view like a pair of binoculars would.

Some say it's better to look at it with binoculars. I don't know if that's really true, there's probably some advantages to using binoculars. I haven't looked up much through large binoculars so I couldn't really say they are better or worse. According to some observers, binocular viewing tends to be easier on the eyes providing less eye strain.

I was looking at a large pair of Vixen binoculars at the swap meet. They wanted about $1000 for them. Probably a pretty good deal. This pair of binoculars was basically two small refractors. I actually thought they would cost more when I looked at them, but the retail price was pretty low.

What is the ideal setup for visual viewing at the observatory? Maybe it would be having some arrive and bring their scopes along. This has been mentioned before by some in the FAAC group. Maybe we could bring a scope or two and have them outside. This would allow groups to look through more than one telescope at more than one object. They could compare the views between smaller setups and the big C-14. It could create a sense of anticipation in the group as they progressed to the C-14 and also give them an idea of the different types of telescopes available.

Orion Nebula through Meade some adjustment

Here's a 120 second photo at 100 ISO of the Orion Nebula and surroundings with just a little manipulation of the color saturation, no dark frames no advanced processing.

This was taken to see how the Meade refractor would show this.

10:48PM 3/6/10 at the Hector J Robinson Observatory.

Note Banding in image didn't exist in original. Will repost later.

Thursday night 3-4-10 overdue part 2

Top photo iphone shot of back of EOS T1i camera display. Kind of fuzzy, but display shows saturn in Liveview mode. The liveview mode will also work with scaling on the EOS utility program that came with the T1i. The screen below shows a preview image on the Mac inside the EOS utility. (I sharped up the second image a little which is a screen shot of the Macintosh.)

This is more from distant recollection now. I've been out there so many times it's more like a blur of memories, of half awake ones.

So I went out to see what I could view. I worked on the mount briefly, just trying to get the controller to follow commands, or rather find the proper commands. They say in the book it's a steep learning curve for beginners. I'm definately in that category when it comes to the Losmandy mount. I couldn't seem to get the goto to work, but it was probably because I was in the wrong menu or following down the wrong path. There are manuals and discussions about the Losmandy mount online, I'm not putting the link here, but can post it later if someone is interested.

So I started observing again. The goto when I select something goes off by about 10 degrees. Now what could cause this? Maybe a wrong model. but also perhaps someone moved the mount physically. This mount doesn't have digital setting circles to read it's position, it stores it's position in a memory chip inside the mount. This chip keeps the "star model" stored inside and that model hopefully remains inside the mount in a permanent setting like the observatory from session to session.

Okay enough technical details. Let's just say the mount is off by about 10 degrees RA when you aim it with goto and a little on the declination axis. What is RA and DEC. On an equitorial system the mount points toward true north, in alignment with the north and south poles. In the northern hemisphere, astronomers will point the telescope mount toward the north pole. RA is Right Ascension and basically relates to how stars appear to ascend from the East and rise up around the north pole area, near Polaris - our current "north star", and then after reaching their peak continue along that path. It's the path the star takes, ascending from the east. Another way I suppose you could think of this would be Right Ascension and the "morning star" as in references to that rising. Or RA, kind of like Ra the sun god ascending from the east and setting in the west. RA - Right Ascension.

On a Gem mount like the one we have in the observatory, the counterweight hangs below the telescope mount. The counterweight is moving when the telescope is moving along the RA axis of the mount. So the counterweight falls and ascends as well in relation to the ground or axis/shaft that the scope is mounted on. Right Ascension is following the movement of one star if you're aimed at it and the Declination axis is set and locked on that star.

Declination is how far up or down you are looking on the axis that is spinning along in parrallel with the earth. In other words, it's the north and south point along the same axis. It's kind of difficult to visualize and I should probably reword this better or show an illustration, buy you can look it up with Google and find out more and I'm sure there's some good illustrations on the net. This is how equatorial mounts work. In the old days, many of these mounts had a motor on the Right Ascension axis or you could add one. The motor would be geared down to rotate in the opposite direction that the earth is rotating and thus it would stay aimed at the star you were pointing at. They even had speed controllers, that you could buy. These speed controllers changed the frequency of the AC current in the motor. They were frequency speed controllers that changed the frequency of the AC sign wave and thus speed up or slow down the Right Ascension motor. But many early mounts didn't have a "Declination" adjustment motor.

There are slight errors in tracking that can occur and you may have to move the mount slightly on it's north and south orientation (Declination). A simple way that I can easily remember that declination is related to the north and the south movements of the mount is a little mind map trick (relational word game I play). I know that the North and The South fought the Civil war. That brought about a temporary DECLINE, in American power, of course because the civil war took resources away and we were weaker at that time. Some might say our strength temporarily declined during the civil war between the north and the south. Decline is a word that of course corresponds to "declination" so I can think about the Civil War between the north and the south and that's a kind of "decline - nation" or declination. See how a simple word game can make things clear. Maybe not, maybe I've been up to much lately and need more sleep.

I took some photos and the session took a familiar turn, which is I said to myself I'll be there for a couple of hours, but once I started looking through the scope, I was having so much fun 4 hours passed.

Saturn was really sharp in great viewing conditions. I had never seen it that sharp or big in my small telescope of course. I hadn't looked at Saturn in a long time through a big telescope. The rings were razor sharp, I could catch perhaps faint glimpses of rings or clouds on Saturn, but they were so faint, perhaps due to faint seeing conditions or my bad eyes, that I couldn't clearly see them, more like a temporary perception almost with averted vision. The moons hung out like jewels near the Planet. I threw in the 10mm eyepiece and 9mm eyepiece in the C-14. The image held up nicely and was bigger. I wanted more power. Would the 6mm show more detail.

I pulled out an old 6mm eyepiece that I own, a University Optics Orthoscopic eyepiece. It probably cost me $40 or $50 over 30 years ago and you can almost get these for the same price today. Saturn was closer, but there were no more details. Still fairly sharp, but details were not improved and if anything it was slightly softer, than in the lower powered eyepieces. Limits in the eyepiece and the seeing conditions apparently would not let me get the best views, but closer views, with the 6mm.

I tried to take some Pedestrian photos with the 6mm eyepiece with my iphone. This is very difficult because the light throw of the cone or EXIT PUPIL from the eyepiece is very small. I had to take my iphone out of it' cover to get the iphone lens closer to the eyepiece. I even tried taking a movie. I'm going to have to review this to be sure. Actually it may have been with the 9mm eyepiece instead of the 6mm. Because the 9mm has a little more light throw. But in any event, you can sometimes get a little glimpse of a planet using a camera phone and carefully "flying" over the small high powered eyepieces. Most often you'll get a slice and part of the cone of light and not a really nice photo.

I tried to get some movies in the iphone of the planet as well. My iphone 3GS has a movie mode and can take 640 by 480 resolution movies. The best planetary imaging by astrophotographers who are amateurs often come from little webcams that cost less than $100. How is that possible? They take a movie clip of the planet. The atmosphere that we are looking through, (sky conditions) changes and varies with ripples and bubbles of hot air constantly changing. It's almost like we are looking through a bunch of invisible soup bubbles of heat in the air, and these bubbles of heat are about 4 inches in size. We are looking through small heat bubbles and other particles of course can be up there as well, ice particles, temperature changes, etc. These cause images to slightly change as the conditions vary at a very fast rate. During poor seeing conditions a planet or even the moon can appear to jump around as if it's dancing in a hot mirage with thermals rising off a hot highway or desert. These images jump around more in poor seeing conditions, but slight variations in quality are happening even in very good conditions. The variations are quick and ever changing. If we take a movie of the planet using a video camera, each frame is getting a very brief picture of the planet in a time slice inside the movie. Movies of course are moving pictures, so we can use a computer program that will take perhaps thousands of these pictures (remember the video camera in the US is recording at 30 FPS) and this means 1800 frames a minute or photos are taken in our movie clip. A computer program can automatically look and detect the sharpest images, probably using edge detection techniques. And it will select the sharpest ones. Perhaps 200 of the sharpest ones out of a 3000 frame set of pictures. You can imagine how long it would take a person to manually look through 3000 images and select the 200 best or sharpest photos. A computer program can do this very quickly and then use a feature called Stacking to merge those 200 sharpest photos and present one image. This image can then be manipulated with some adjustments in a photo editing software package and you'll get the best image from all those produced. Our eyes can't respond and store the best images and stack them in a memory system and then present them to our brain, but the computer can.

We may perceive almost subconsciously a quick amount of quality during varying conditions, and seem to see more detail, but the overall sharpest images are blurred out with the overwhelming number of poor moving fuzzy images. So the eye has a disadvantage over a simple camera and movie software and some additional computer programs.

But if I take some quick photos even with an $800 CCD camera like the EOS t1i, I'll find that simple exposure is often not as sharp as what I will see in the eyepiece. This may be because I'm still inexperienced, but every photo I've taken looks less sharp than what I'm seeing in the telescope. Even with an EOS mounted on the C-14 using mounting hardware. Even a properly mounted EOS camera up to now has not produced images nearly as sharp as I can see with my eye on the eyepiece. The lesson of that night is, you really need to come out and look at Saturn yourself through the eyepiece. The photos I take or post here will not show the quality that you will see through an eyepiece when viewing conditions are good out.

I stayed out until about 3:30AM at the observatory. Part of the problem was I was so cold and tired and slow moving by the end of the night I couldn't quickly get out of there. But for the most part you can blame it on Saturn. I looked at some other objects as well and took some photos. I'll have to review them and double check the time date stamps before making further comments. I will post one of the photos here later under this post. As I post this I don't have time to find and upload a photo.

I have a lot more to post and will post some more updates soon. As the weather gets worse I'll have more time to sleep and then review and post images. Clear skies have slowed down my posting.