Astro-pron

[chupathingie]

All right, I’m gonna post the nerdgasm first. You can read the greek or scroll down to the money shot after the script runs out.

I took a bunch of subs tonight and a healthy number of darks. Then I spent an hour kludgeing together a command-line string to do all my manual tedium for me:

ufraw-batch –out-type=tif –out-depth=16 *.CR2; convert -average *.tif darkframe.tif; cp darkframe.tif ../andromeda; cd ../andromeda; ufraw-batch –out-type=tif –out-depth=16 *.CR2; for f in IMG*.tif; do echo $f; composite -compose minus $f darkframe.tif ds$f; done; align_image_stack -a ais dsIMG*.tif; convert -average ais*.tif andromeda.tif

Running ubuntu 10.04, with ufraw and hugin installed (both free from the repos). If you’re running linux and taking astrophotos, this string should work with file/folder names adjusted to fit yours. In my case, I dropped my raws into 2 folders: darks and andromeda.

[chupathingie]

Needs a LOT more subs.17 is far too few.

[ravnostic]

//better than I can do. I seriously need to sell my telescope and buy schomething with a wider field of view. I’m limited by the atmosphere to a blurry shot of the central core, and I’m sick of it. That and the fact I live in the absolutely highest light-polluted area in all of the 4 corners US region, and lugging around 130lbs of telescope to anywhere darker is a pain in the farking ass.

[chupathingie]

I came home from the shoot thinking I’d have some cool stuff to process. Between clouds rolling in cutting me down to a small number of subs and the temperature being up in the 80’s during the shoot I wound up with too much noise and not enough data. This looks really rough compared to the M42/horsehead shots, for instance.

However, there was a plus…in my up-all-night delirium the lights came on for me with regards to that script up there^. I’m going to write and test a cleaned-up version that I can execute from a directory containing 2 folders of raw files- darks and lights- that does all of the subtraction and stacking for me then cleans up after itself. I’ll be able to simply open a terminal window in the directory of choice and type “sh stackme” and go get lunch. Heck, I might even pick apart the startup script I’ve got that adds “open in terminal” and “resize images” to my right-click menus and add stackme to that.

re:selling the bukkit… piggyback on that thing! You’ve got a mount that tracks more than well enough for several hundred millimeters of telephoto, and is that thing hyperstar-compatible? Shooting at F2 would make all that weight worth it. Another option would be to sell it and trade the proceeds in on what I’m using (geared head/ball head/astrotrac/heavy tripod… ~$1K worth of hardware). You’d be limited to only widefield with whatever lenses you have (which is not so bad as it might sound), but you can be set up in 10 minutes and taking pictures with gear that is light enough that you could actually hike somewhere with it in a pack and still be able to carry water and food for the night without having to be an olympian.

[ravnostic]

I can convert it to f/2 with about 4-5 moonwidths view, loosing a ton (well, 1/2) the focal length (not a bad thing) but I’d STILL have to lug it around, and it would have to have a webcam attached to a computer to do viewing (you replace the 2ndary with it). Resolution would suffer–a lot.

[ennuipoet]

I am going to make you Astrophotographers weep:

http://fstoppers.com/amazing-start-streak-photos-by-don-petti-taken-from-the-international-space-station

All you need is to get to the ISS.

[chupathingie]

Location, Location, Location.

[fluffybunny]

I studied “Uncle” Rod Mollise’s free book “Choosing and Using a Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope” when I began as a noob amateur astronomer. His practical views on things made a great impression on me and I have yet to regret taking his advice. I’m not sure if this quote can be attributed to him but it is certainly a central tenant to his philosophy:

“The best telescope for you is the one you use.”

Having said that, it’s hard to replace aperture and you may someday acquire the circumstances in your life to leverage “the beast”,.. Maybe get a small plot outside town and setup it up as a robotic scope?

Best of luck coming to resolution on this and please keep us informed.

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