United we stand, divided we...

This data was collected over the previous weekend. After the end of this data collection my laptop conked out and lost it's mind. Won’t boot anymore. The image is 7x10 light and 12x10 dark frames. The flat and bias were collected on my Mac then using iCCD but I screwed up and the data is invalid now. Cannot open them anymore. The processing is very basic and I took a new approach and am very happy with it. Instead of splitting the frames into LRGB and then processing each channel individually, I calibrated and combined the light frames without splitting. I then converted it into RGB in Maxim and brought the tiff file into Photoshop and processed the various channels. The results are very pleasing! There is still some coma in this image which should be taken care of by the MPCC which I am yet to receive. Also I would probably benefit with some stretch and DDP in this image to tease out more of the details. All said and done, I think I will be processing my future images this way as opposed to splitting them before working on them.

Return of the Astro-Jedi

So, I have been away for almost 2 months. I was off getting married and on my honeymoon etc. A much needed break from the daily grind. Now I am moving in with my wife and long-time girlfriend into a single bedroom apartment :( Which means I won’t get as much face time with my tele anymore. But, over the span of these two months, I did get robofocus and feathertouch focuser installed on my trusty reflector. Make a huge difference in the focus. First, it’s a much shorter and more pleasant experience. And then, it’s spot on!! Just look at some data I gathered while playing around. I am using focusmax to achieve critical focus. Some images of the focuser and the motor will come soon.

This image is 12*10min light and dark images. No flats. I was playing around with robofocus and wanted to get some data to see what improvement it brings and wasn’t really trying to get really good data. But it’s obvious with some better data and calibration this image would shine. The focus is really good and very little coma. Although a coma corrector and a light pollution filter would really help. This also happened to be the march challenge for the tac-imaging mailing list.

Maxim DL+EQMod = Flame

I got my EQDirect mod from Shoestring recently and I now have the capability to control the telescope completely from my Laptop and doing PulseGuide through EQMOD Ascom driver. Took a bit of experimenting with the settings on Maxim DL and a bug fix to EQMOD before I got this working, but once I had it working, this was the result. This is a 3 hr exposure (18 * 10 min exposures) with equal darks. 50 4 sec flats were taken with 50 bias frames to go with it. The clarity and details are far better than my previous attempts.