Quick processing a photo of HJRO from Friday Night

Here's a photo from last night.  

This photo is the first one I'm doing a little more processing on.  Basically converting it from Raw to JPEG and tweaking it a bit.  I haven't done heavy image processing on it, but tried Neat Image noise reduction after changing the brightness and sharpening it at bit inside Preview on the Macintosh.

There is no real reason to process the picture further, because the comet is not in this photo.

I like this photo however because it shows the observatory a little bit differently.  It shows the observatory with a "smooth" looking roof.  Tim Dey is inside with others from the Ford Amateur Astronomy club.  And they were working on the auto-guiding test.  During this exposure, it looks like Tim was moving the dome, so it has a smooth look.  We don't see the seams of course.  It's a pretty cool photo.

I'm going to work on a few more photos and tweak them a bit.  I'll probably go over to the observatory if I can get some time to check up and change some of the settings to the Losmandy mount will work properly.   I don't know if there will be any objects I can see, so I may not be able to properly align the mount with a Sync on a star as there may not be any objects visible tonight.  I'll probably concentrate on other settings, as far as slew speed setups.  There is a MULTI-SPEED setting that can be activated in the system.  I didn't have time to check that and menu down and figure that out this morning.  So I may go through some of the settings tonight to get things closer to normal.

Until I can get the mount working more normally I probably won't announce that HJRO will be open to the public on this blog.  If we are there we will welcome guests who stop by of course, but I won't announce a viewing event if the goto is acting up, because I don't want to waste the time of a visitor to arrive and watch me tweak and adjust and setup the mount.

For the photo below, although I tested Neat Image noise reduction, I'm posting the photo before I used that noise reduction as it didn't really improve the photo any.

The reason the comet isn't in the photo is the comet is further north than I anticipated and is actually behind the dome.  Other photos were taken from a position where I moved the camera more to the left (when standing behind the camera).   This allowed me to see more stars and the comet that is actually behind the dome in this photograph.