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My schedule’s a little easier to work, I think… at 7 hrs drive, a long weekend would be a plus… who do we talk to to schedule 2-3 clear nights?

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HAH! Turns out this is the site of the Okie Tex Star Party… dunno if they use this parking lot, but they use the park.

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^true that. I dealt with Krita for ages, and cinepaint looked like it was gonna bloom but died on the vine. PLENTY of tech tools, and lots of pieces-parts for the code junkies, but little in the way of polished UIs allowing the steering of the mouse that most casual PC users need.

Theli is still high on my list of geek tools to learn. Damn near all of my knowledge and skillset regarding photography has developed from astrophotography and applying/modifying those techniques to fit into stuff like panoramas and technical accuracy. I think it’s worked for me, but I’m a far cry from what anyone could call a photographer. Small bites, though. I’m approaching photography from a different direction than most; which is fine by me… I get to share a bunch of stuff that most don’t find coming up from the traditional avenues while I scratch my head over what is basic to the rest of y’all. 😆

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Well, we now have another high-depth contender: Darktable. Who knew Linux would explode with choices? ‘Bout damn time us open-source weenies got some love! 😆

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compile:fail:scan logs for missing dependencies:install dependencies:compile:fail:scan logs…. etc, etc… The things we do to get away from commercial software! 😆

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Damn, Rav, you were up late! The Lagoon and Trifid don’t rise til like 4AM this time of year! Beautiful stacks, I gotta say…

Man, I’m bummed over the IR mod for you. Have you spoken with the folks who did the mod? That ain’t right…IR block removal normally results in beautiful astrophotos; it’s a 2+ stop increas in HA sensitivity.

Those darks make quite a difference, don’t they? Most folks look at you like you’re from Mars when you start running off a bunch of exposures with the lens cap on 😆 It’s anti-intuitive until you realize what’s going on.

I’m going to have to settle for going WIDE I can see, since I have no scope there’s no way I can approach the resolution you’re getting with your light bucket. Your sunflower image makes me drool, but it’s far too small a target for me and a telephoto lens. Beautiful. The M8/M20 area is one of my favorites to point binoculars at… it’s lousy with stars and fuzzies. Here’s one I took a few years back (with a 300D, no less, and a borrowed 200mm f5.6L) showing scale and proximity of the two. Not to mention the sheer density of stars in the area. I can’t wait til that part of the galaxy starts to rise at a decent hour…look for some very wide dust lane shots from me about then 🙂

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O.M.F.G. RT knows dark and flat frames. Wheeeee! 🙂

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I was just made aware of yet another cross-platform 16bit/channel tool, photivo. I have not had any time since finding out about it to download/compile/install/test drive/etc. but a quick glance at the features makes me want to find time for a trip around the block to see how it runs. Looks like they have package files for SUSE/Debian, and binaries for Windows and Mac in 32/64 bit flavors. Of particular note is the plugin for GIMP integration.

This project is open-source, written in C++ (as is RawTherapee) with the Qt framework, great news if anyone here is a code freak. This also makes it possible to compile for other OSs when pre-packaged files are unavailable.

Now if I can ever get time off of work, I’ll see about getting it installed… if anyone here wants to try it out, please post impressions! 🙂

I’m beginning to think maybe we need a sticky for free/open source/cross platform software for those of us unable or unwilling to throw down the scratch for things like PS…

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Oh yeah, I liked the rotation angle tool…. at first I couldn’t figure it out, but a little RTFM action turned the lights on pretty quickly. The authors did a great job on the manual, and it looks like you can run a series of actions on an image and then batch those to a group.

I want to play more with the tonemapping. My initial impression is good, being able to control the strength and avoid color shifts is a huge plus over any of the other tonemappers I’ve used. Anyone who wants to be able to use tonemapping without having to deal with the surreal HDR look will likely find this useful.

Haven’t played with the white balance much, but the noise and sharpening tools didn’t take long to figure out. All I used for the noise was luminance noise… and toggling before/after view or enabling/disabling the effect helps there. Also found that you want to disable a function before making changes to it, else the changes go into the queue and you apparently stack the effects.

The authors seem to be quite active, there have been a lot of changes in a short period of time… the differences between ver3 and ver4 made for a pretty big leap in functionality (score one for open source). These guys are running on a donations system, so I’m going to throw some cash at them for their work after I play a bit and figure out how much I want to donate. The more I find about this program the higher my estimation of what I should pay up goes 😆

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OK, so I installed RawTherapee and had some time to play with it. It didn’t take long to realize that the manual I had was for version 4 and the linux repos installed ver.3. I fixed that today. Wow! What a difference. I’m still playing with all the widgets but so far I’m finding that I *really like* this program! Noise reduction and sharpening work well, and the vibrance function really does a great job of bumping the color up a smidge without simply increasing saturation… it looks much more natural. Gotta love new toys.

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I’ve never been to the Dallas one, the Fort Worth one tho is gorgeous. Heck, check them both and post pics! 🙂

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I should add that this was an f4.3, but yeah, would LOVE to see that bounced off some major glass. And no, I’m not still up, I got called in to work (grumblegrumblegrumble). At least it’s O.T.

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OK, had to fire up this thread again because I just found out the little park I shoot in has other nocturnal users as well… the local astronomy club! So I went down there tonight to shoot off some more frames and meet some of the folks.

OMFG! M51 is STUNNING visually through a 30″ newt. That scope is a yard cannon.

As for me, I ran off a bunch of 15 and 30 second subs at ISO6400 just to see what the noise looks like. I used the 70-200mm and the doubler this time, so f5.6. I also ran off a small number of 4 minute subs, which will likely be far too noisy for the number I gathered. We shall see after the stacking is done. That will be AFTER I go crash and get some shut-eye. The astrotrac did quite well at 4 minutes, slightly elongated stars with a very quick polar alignment. It’s going to make for an interesting test case to see if Hugin can scale and rotate these to stack with my earlier frames. I left just as Scorpius was rising. I really wanted to grab a handful of frames of the region, but I left the 24-105mm f4.0L at home. 🙁 Oh well. In a couple of months, I’ll be back out there to start collecting lights of the summer Milky Way as it climbs higher in the sky. I really wanna do some deep&wide Rho Ophiuchi wide-fields. That’s a beautiful part of the sky.

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All in all it was a great trip, even though I am still bruised and have a few scrapes that haven’t healed yet.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a good vacation that didn’t involve that, or sunburn, or blisters from hiking/getting the jeep unstuck/etc. From the description, it sounds like a great time was had, and it’s hard to beat the Karma Kudos.

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In an odd way, that’s good to hear… not that you’ve got da funk goin’ on, but that you’re actively doing something about it. Keep it up and keep us posted. 🙂 Hell, take a vacation and see how many of us you can visit by car in a month! 😆

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