Well, in the past couple of days I got both a pleasant surprise and a bit of a let-down. First, I discovered that sometime in the past year or two, the gphoto2 folks have been very busy with Canon DSLRs. They’re reasonably well supported (in spite of what appears to be a lack of any …

Canon DSLR and LinuxRead More

I reassembled the wiring harnesses for my equipment along more functional lines. I had put things together by type of connection which was pretty silly in hindsight. So now I have two four-cable harnesses for each Canon 350D (one DC power line, one serial line for the shutter release, one USB connection, and one heater …

Getting Ready for Summer Star PartyRead More

Despite the full moon, I got out with my AstroTrac, modified Canon 350D and Borg 45ED. With the light-polluted skies of NYC, I put a Lumicon H-alpha filter on and shot as low as ISO 100 in order to test with 5-minute exposures. The conclusion?

Well, I managed to get out and use my AstroTrac under reasonably dark skies just north of Cape Girardeau on the night of July 13/14. The moon didn’t set behind the hills until around 1:30 am, but I shot across the sky from it at M31 using my Borg 45ED. I used the laptop for …

Disappointing AstroTrac First UseRead More

Well, Richard Taylor of AstroTrac got my polar alignment scope back to me before we left on vacation. Alas, the new scope has the same image scale problem as the old which makes it a bit difficult to align. Not impossible by any means, just more difficult. So I packed everything up and carried it …

AstroTrac and CanonRead More

Back at NEAF, I purchased an Astrotrac unit hoping to put it to good use for wide-field astrophotography. I had been looking at the unit for the past couple of years since it first showed up in a few magazines and saw the early units at NEAF. So finally I got my own. I got …

Astrotrac WoesRead More

I was interviewed a month or two ago for an article in Time Out New York Kids about astronomy activities with children. The call went out from Rich Rosenberg or the Amateur Astronomer’s Association here in NYC to all members and I guess I was the first to get in line. Our neighbors saw the …

Article in Time Out New York Kids!Read More

The imaging conference (NEAIC) and the Telescope Show (NEAF) are over for this year. The last few days have been pretty hectic and I’m just now catching up. On Friday, I attended a spectroscopy workshop led by Olivier Thizy where he walked us through the process of using a spectrum taken with a diffraction grating …

NEAIC and NEAFRead More

The Northeast Astronomical Imaging Conference is starting its second day. Yesterday’s set of talks were great. The plenary session by Ken Crawford provided some interesting ideas on how to bring out image details. His focus was on techniques appropriate to what he labelled "technical art" wherein he spends quite a bit of time using various …

NEAIC Underway!Read More

If you haven’t seen today’s APOD image, go have a look. It’s a view of the night sky over Flagstaff, Arizona. Flagstaff institutded dark sky rules years ago to limit billboard lighting, bad lighting fixtures, searchlight advertizing, and other light polluting activities. While Flagstaff is no New York City and I wouldn’t really expect our …

Dark SkiesRead More