Science Daily: Mars
- Surprising insights about debris flows on Mars March 14, 2024
- Giant volcano discovered on Mars March 13, 2024
Science Daily: Uranus
- New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like January 5, 2024
- Ringing in the holidays with ringed planet Uranus December 19, 2023
Science Daily: Pluto
- How Pluto got its heart April 15, 2024
- Evidence of geothermal activity within icy dwarf planets February 15, 2024
Science Daily: Kuiper Belt
- How Pluto got its heart April 15, 2024
- Evidence of geothermal activity within icy dwarf planets February 15, 2024
Year: 2022
Lost Drivers from the Days of Windows 7
So I haven’t used my Orion ST120 in a while which means I’ve gone through two OS upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and recently to Window 11. Which means I don’t have a driver for my archaic James Lacy LazyFocus controller that goes with my very nice first generation Moonlite focuser. Fortunately, I’m …
StarXTerminator 2.x: I’m sold
I’ve had mixed luck with StarXTerminator. When I first came across it, I found it worked better than StarNet for the images I was processing. Those were with the RedCat 51 at 250mm F/L. It was wonderful, so I bought a license and considered worth every penny. Then I started doing some wider field images …
Star Haven M31
As usual, between equipment issues and weather issues, I got much less than I expected. But it was a good time with friends from the club and I did get some images. Object M 31, in the constellation Andromeda Camera dual Canon T6i, modified Lens/Scope Rokinon 85mm f/1.4 @ f/4 Exposure 55 x 3 minutes …
PixInsight Background/Gradient Removal
Sometimes, you just have to keep asking the same question over and over again until you get a good answer. PixInsight has some really good background/gradient removal tools and if you use PixInsight, you’re immediately thinking of the Dynamic Background Extraction (DBE) or Automatic Background Extraction (ABE). Truth is, that’s what I always think of, …
Analyzing Images
So, this is a post, but I might convert it to a page for reference at some point. I’m exploring how to analyze my imaging train for aberrations and what I can do about it. ASTAP has a couple of built-in tools that make this easy. The question is what constitutes an aberration that is …
Weather, Weather….
It’s been nearly six months since the weather was decent around the new moon. I had all these plans and just need a couple of good nights to finish off a project with decent data. I guess I’ll start looking at what I have to see what I can get out of it. Really, I …
NGC 7000
This is the object that got me hooked on astrophotography. Well, sort of. I started a long time ago with a Pentax 35mm film camera and a CG5 mount and tried to take a picture of Cygnus. It was horribly underexposed, but one of the frames had just enough exposure to make out the North …
Leo Triplet, Luminance Mosaic Test
This was shortly after (I think) some work to improve the collimation on the Ritchey-Chretien. I don’t know why I didn’t concentrate on a single target, but I jumped around from several last March, so once again I have mediocre data on all. Object M65, M66, NGC 3628 Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, Luminance Only Lens/Scope AstroTech RC6 …
M36 with Marginal Collimation, a Misbehaving Mount, and Poor Seeing
And if that title wasn’t enough to pull you in… The seeing in Brooklyn is always bad. I’m on a flight path to LaGuardian. So 3-arcsec is typical. And did I mention I’m in Brooklyn, NY? So the light pollution is always bad. Which make star clusters reasonable targets. Object M36, Open Cluster Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, …
M36 with Marginal Collimation, a Misbehaving Mount, and Poor SeeingRead More