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- This topic has 21 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 12 years, 1 month ago by chupathingie.
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February 25, 2012 at 10:44 am #45541chupathingieParticipant
Oh. My. God.
An Astrotrac is worth every penny. Polar alignment is a snap (after collimating the polar scope, which is an ordeal), and this thing just works. I had to battle wind for most of the night, so experiments on some 200mm widefields on the Coma Berenices galaxy cluster didn’t work so well, but….I can’t WAIT to get these Orion wide-fields processed! 🙂
February 25, 2012 at 10:55 am #45542ravnosticParticipantPics or it didn’t happen! 😀
February 25, 2012 at 11:14 am #45543chupathingieParticipantI need to process yet, which is going to be a mostly manual affair until I grok writing scripts in Linux to automate things. I shot about a dozen darks and maybe 30 lights worth processing. I learned some things, of course: remove the UV filter before shooting (I have some ghosts) and make DAMN sure in-camera noise reduction is off BEFORE you waste an hour and a half wondering why your camera hangs up after each shot.
My single images look far, far better than my stacked images taken from within the LP zone in DFW, and I ran off my frames at f2.8 and ISO1600 so gathered 16x the data with each exposure. I can see wisps in my singles that never made it into the finals before. It was so dark out there (here’s where we parked) that once we were outside the jeep for 5 minutes it was very easy to see the parking lot etc by starlight. The Milky Way was bright.
February 25, 2012 at 11:19 am #45544ravnosticParticipantI found the same with the MW light last Sunday. Unfortunately, there’s a cold front with precip. moving in Sunday night (when I planned to go out.) It will be colder, and clouds will be rolling in. I’m thinking of either postponing, or planning on leaving if it gets too cloudy. Which would suck. Either way.
February 25, 2012 at 7:32 pm #45545Choc-Ful-AParticipantI need to process yet, which is going to be a mostly manual affair until I grok writing scripts in Linux to automate things.
I’m happy to help you grok the scripting if you want. Post here, PM or send e-mail if you want to explain what you’re looking to automate.
February 25, 2012 at 9:27 pm #45546chupathingieParticipantChoc, you are my new hero! I’ll put together a chain of desired events and post back here later. Scripting is something I’ve needed to learn for a long time, and a little hand-holding is most appreciated.
Rav, I wasn’t sure whether to start a new thread just for astropics or not or post here. In the end, I figgered you already the appropriate thread title going with the “Astrophotography: A beginning” thread so I tacked a couple of images to the end of it. 🙂
February 27, 2012 at 8:47 pm #45547chupathingieParticipantI’m happy to help you grok the scripting if you want. Post here, PM or send e-mail if you want to explain what you’re looking to automate.
I’d like to script the following command:
composite -compose subtract imagexxxx.tif unchagingimage.tif resultyyyy.tif
so that it applies the command to all files in a directory, where xxxx is the numbered portion of the file name (ie IMG_2765.tif for instance) and yyyy is either incremented from 0000 or simply copied from the original file name (the latter is preferred, but not absolute). “unchangingimage.tif” is a static file, ie is the single file I’m trying to subtract from all of the other files in the directory. This is my dark frame subtraction step in my processing pipeline.
I think I can make the rest tick easily enough. My script-fu is weak, and something I have been wanting to come to grips with for quite a while now. If you know of a good reference for a beginner to learn the ropes from, I’ll be happy to kick the tires. I’m poring over linuxcommand.org currently as I find time, and it looks to be a good reference, but if there’s an easier way I’ll certainly give that a go.
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