[chupathingie]

A golden opportunity, and I’ll most likely miss it. Damn shame I’m only 1/2 way to retirement, these clowns eat all my spare time it seems.

[chupathingie]

Yup, jealousy +1. Don’t miss a single opportunity while you’re there.

If the altitude gets to you, I’ll trade! LOL I’ve spent days at ~12KFt before without issue… can’t imagine 14KFt being too much different. Just remember, when the hallucinations start you have one of the best views on the planet…. 😉

[chupathingie]

Easiest way to get that kind of color is to overlay a non-stretched selection of your stars (or trails) that has had the saturation increased over your normal, contrast-stretched, long-exposure sky. If you’ve ever wondered how people manage to get such pretty star colors in astrophotos, this is the usual culprit. Long exposures make stars all appear white beyond a certain length.

Yeah, those colors ain’t natural (still pretty, tho…)

[chupathingie]

#2 is portrait-ready, I especially like the composition. What is the light on her wrist from?

[chupathingie]

I’ve used both PS and GIMP, and really the only basic thing lacking in GIMP is high bit-depth color operations. Some of the tools operate differently, and some functions that one can automate in PS must be done manually in gimp. PS is pretty slick, but that pricetag (and especially DRM issues) make it a no-go for me. I have issues with Adobe installing software on my machine designed to snoop at the contents of my drive. Of course, if I felt like dropping some coin on PS, I’d simply never open the box and fileshare me a non-drm’d copy anyway…

[chupathingie]

You folks are really making me miss the northeast…. I spent quite a few years up there and in the Adirondacks. Very pretty area.

[chupathingie]

Gimp, here. Krita for any high-bit color tweaks, and enfuse for bracketed composition. RAW handling usually is done via command line with ufraw-batch.

I do miss me some Irfanview, however.

Is there anyone on the gimp team I can bribe into getting a release with GEGL fully operational? LOL

[chupathingie]

Oh.. haha… it’s right there on their site…
http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf

[chupathingie]

Raytrix ( http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/Cameras.html ) supposedly was first to market, and they boast some pretty decent resolutions on the high-end models (8MP~ish) but list no prices whatsoever (translation: You don’t want to know). Their high-end model has a Nikon f-mount for the main objective. I have yet to find a cut-away or some other basic theory of operation for these beasties. So many questions… what’s the effective f-ratio? Is CA better or worse? Is expanded focal depth the only advantage? etc, etc…

edit: I realise those are questions more of optics than sensing, but from what I’ve read so far, the technology uses many micro lenses so I’m not really sure if the chip itself registers z-data (would love for that to be the case, tho) as opposed to being essentially a complex camera that takes, say, 64 concurrent images then processes them into a final, higher resolution image. At first blush, this looks more like a focus stacking software package with complex hardware thrown into the mix.

There’s a link somewhere that I saw to the dev’s thesis publication on the topic. If I can find it again I’ll post. I could use some reading material.

[chupathingie]

I didn’t see a mention of resolution on their site, but I’m running Internet Explorer Barney Rubble Edition at work and the page is nigh unreadable due to jumbled text overlaying each other…

[chupathingie]

“Adjustable from ISO 100 to 51,200 within its standard range”

0.o

[chupathingie]

Keep an eye on the histogram on some test shots. Depending on how dark your skies are (or aren’t) you may not even be able go beyond 30 seconds. Skyglow is easy enough to process out, but if you go too long you’ll saturate the red channel.

[chupathingie]

Is it ever cloudy atop Mauna Kea? :poke:

[chupathingie]

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.

[chupathingie]

6/10 for me… can’t do the boobies quiz at work… dangit.

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