hmmmmm… stars….

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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  • #2424
    chupathingie
    Participant

    I’m not hoping for much, since I discovered during setup that my mount will no longer track (it’s 34 years old). I’m going wide at 70mm and short&fast enough to kill trailing, and I may not be able to stack them well depending on the lens’ distortion, but I’m jonesin’ to process some more astro…

    So a tripod is the mount of choice. I’m gonna have to do some of the processing in 8bit/channel (I love GIMP, but they really need to hurry up with the 16bit release).

    | Just look at that thing down there.
    V

    #41514
    lokisbong
    Participant

    I wish I could figure out why my clear sky chart never posts correctly. What software do you use for stacking? I went out last night and did a series of 20 10 second exposures of Jupiter.

    #41515
    sleeping
    Participant

    I wish I could figure out why my clear sky chart never posts correctly.

    Try taking out everything after .gif in the image URL:

    #41516
    sleeping
    Participant

    …although that looks to be a little big to use as a sig….

    #41517
    lokisbong
    Participant

    I have tried every thing I could and all of the suggestions I have received from the first thread I tried to figure this out and now your advice and It refuses to show the actual graph. I am on the verge of just removing it all together.

    #41518
    chupathingie
    Participant

    I had thought of doing a few shots of jupiter, since the very short exposures needed would make tracking irrelevant; but at only 200mm it would be a very small disk (although moons would still show up)

    As far as my stacking goes, I’m planning on attempting to register the shots with align_image_stack after I figure out how to write a script to crop and convert the RAWs to 48bit TIFF with a gamma correction to stretch out the lower end of the histogram. I have to stretch the levels in high bit-depth since gimp is only 8 bit/channel still and doing it in that low a bit depth will posterize the image.

    Yeah, I’m attempting this without the benefit of actual stacking software, so this is a bit of a gamble. I have yet to go through all the images and toss the shaky ones, but out of about 2500 images I’m hoping for more than enough to stack to knock the noise out. I will likely wind up doing multiple attempts at the processing pipeline to see what (if anything) works.

    At least I managed to get sharp focus before I started shooting this time, and i managed about 40gig of image data for andromeda at 70mm f2.8@3″ and about 20gig of the milky way thru cygnus. I’m expecting to toss more than half of that, but I’ll have to look at the subs first. Surprisingly enough, 3″ was enough to see a smudge for andromeda on the RAWs, and some milky way details. Seeing any details at all in the RAWs is a good sign, that usually means there’s a lot of detail in the image to tease out. It’s prolly gonna take a week or more for me to do anything useful with the data, as part of the exercise is getting to grips with writing BASH scripts.

    As to the CSC, my sig line looks like this:
    (url=http://cleardarksky.com/c/CldAACTXkey.html)(img)http://cleardarksky.com/c/CldAACTXcs0.gif(/img)(/url)

    replace parentheses with brackets, of course, along with the appropriate alphanumeric .gif name. I remember your post about not getting it to work, and I really have no clue why it’s not working for you. The only guess that comes to mind is that there were (are?) 2 places in your profile where a sig line can be entered… I’m not sure if one of them is non-functional, or if they both have to agree to function correctly or what.

    #41519
    Plamadude30k
    Participant

    Hey, at least you guys can get a CSC. They don’t even make ’em for us out here.

    #41520
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Is it ever cloudy atop Mauna Kea? :poke:

    #41521
    Plamadude30k
    Participant

    Well, they don’t like us talking about it, but MK does get clouds every once in a while. One of my roommates just had a two night run on Keck, the first night of which was clouded out.

    When I was up there in March, I got the sense that they were only half joking when they told us to not take pictures of clouds on the summit. I did anyway:

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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