[chupathingie]

Well timed info, and thanks… I’m about to shoot a book cover in the next week or so, hopefully, and this is something that I will keep in mind.

[chupathingie]

I’m gonna miss the child eater, that was a great FARK handle. I will at least be able to associate the new (old) name. :thumbsup:

[chupathingie]

We are going from a species of tool creators to a species of tools,..

That good sir, is the single most eloquent, succinct and lucid sentence encapsulating 15 years of me ranting. I am keeping that one on a plaque, my business card and on my bumper.

Get on that, ennui. Copyright it and make me some bumper stickers dammit.

[chupathingie]

First sentence from the first link sums it up to me:
“The most exaggerated product demonstration we?ve ever seen.”
That’s all it is, really, a demo. They’re throwing in a few somewhat famous people and a dash of reality-TV-manufactured-fame to grab the LCD vote; basically “Let’s take a fresh face and make him famous”. I hope the guy realizes he’s about to maybe become the Justin Bieber of photography…

[chupathingie]

Yup… a trade-off, to be sure, but it doesn’t take much to bolt a rail on your scope to piggy-back a camera and lens… you’ve got tracking good enough for exposures at over a meter focal length, so a telephoto (or even a shorter standard prime) will just love it. Yeah, you’ll miss out on the pinpoint stars with the smaller glass, but there’s something to be said for a wide field; dust lanes and nebula complexes are usually on such a grand scale that <200mm is the only way to capture them without doing a panorama (which is on my list to do, though it's going to likely take a season of subs to pull off).

[chupathingie]

I wish I had some tools for doing sigma stacking. A straight-up average works, but doesn’t reject things like random noise spikes, satellites and aircraft trails… I need significantly more subs to get the same S/N.

Here’s where an actual telescope proves itself. While I’m waiting for the seasons to turn to bring large objects into view (most of which lie on the galactic plane), you have the focal length to tag smaller, more distant objects. Some astronomers call this time of year “Galaxy Season” for that reason.

[chupathingie]

Ooohhhh…. that’s purty… You know, you’re gonna *have* to do flats sooner or later… you’ll get to the point where the vignetting drives you crazy! 😉

Lots of detail in that… I love how all the nebulae show up. How many subs? And what did you decide to stack with? Cropped? Full sized? Reduced?

[chupathingie]

I despise having to dual-boot. A VM is a great way to go if your main OS is going to be Windows. Linux plays nice in a VM, Windows not so much. I have but a single use for Windows anymore, and that’s games. Everything else I do on a PC is handled by the tools I’ve found in Linux. Some of them I like much better than Windows equivalents, some make me miss the Windows days… such as inadequate 16bit/channel apps. Raw Therapee is nice, but 16bit support in GIMP is something I’m really chomping at the bit for. Basic stuff like subtracting images from each other to control noise and light pollution is command-line only with Image Magick; which isn’t really hard, but being able to do it in layers and get immediate visual feedback is something I really miss from Photoshop. Of course, not having to buy software has allowed me to spend that money on glass, accessories and a tracking mount so it’s a trade-off.

Oh, and just look at that CSC down there for tomorrow night… unfortunately, all of the big winter DSOs have set, and the cool summer stuff doesn’t get high enough to do anything with until well after midnight. That reminds me, I need to go order an AR-coated UV filter…

[chupathingie]

heheh… yeah, it’s weighty. I originally bought it just for AP, but it’s fun to shoot with and reasonably sharp…when I can nail focus in the right place. On an APS-C cam it would be a great wildlife lens, might even be worth packing (especially if you can get it cheap from the guy at work). Anything above 13Mpixel in an APS-C is going to have a tighter “dot pitch” and larger target size (in pixels) than the 5DII…18Mpixels would produce an image equivalent to mine at ~280mm (I’m talking target image size, not FOV) and a doubler still leaves you at f5.6 which is fast enough to be useful at 1600 or above in decent light.

[chupathingie]

Cheap beer. My wife hates real beer, and I hate cheap nasty beer… Coors Light is as utterly tasteless as beer can be, so that’s usually what’s in the fridge. When I can’t take it any more, I buy some Shiner, or Guinness, or try some European craft beer. Pale, dark, amber, hoppy, I don’t care… as long as it’s got some flavor and doesn’t make me gag like Bud.

[chupathingie]

I had an Amish modem. And you had to keep the string on the back at exactly the right tension or it gave you email in Croatian.

That or I’ll just buy a cheap netbook or something for the times I need mobile computing.

I set a $500 limit on laptops. Much as I like my tech, laptops obsolesce so quickly that I just can’t see buying a really good one. If it’s your sole machine, it makes more sense, but I keep a workhorse at home for the heavy lifting. All I need the lappy to do is store images, do some basic image processing, surf and play Moonbase Commander.

Even a well-endowed lappy fails at 1/2 gigapixel in 48bit color… it’s like hauling cattle in a Ferrari.

[chupathingie]

Canon Extender EF 2x III and a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, which together are my astrophoto line-up.

[chupathingie]

Is there a way to re-order them after you drag them all into the window? I had to delete them all and drag in the order I wanted them to appear.

[chupathingie]

Man, I think I was 13 when that happened… look at that glorious late-70’s color LOL and the ever-present T-38 chase planes that were everywhere with the shuttle.

The drop tests off the 747 were big news back in the day. I never noticed before, but they rebuilt the nose…

[chupathingie]

If adblockplus and no-script run in Chrome under Ubuntu, count me in for a test drive.

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