On Loss and Processing

What an interesting week it's been!  New Lenses, Tips and tricks from the pros, new design work, a meteor shower par excellence and general all-around starryness.  Oh and I even updated the blog, quite substantially.

From the top then.

last Friday was the Geminids, so of course an expedition was organised!  Off we went to the very summit of Conical Peak, thereby getting us about a 300 degree view of the sky.  I shot over 400 shots, didn't geta  single meteor.  Oh wells ...

gfkBill did tho, as you can see below :)

I did all this with my new present to myself, a Samyang 14mm lens .. perfect for those wide wide shots like this shot of us at the setup phase:

Present were gfkBill, Jeremy, Jax, Michelle and Jeremy's relations (Hi Kim!) :)  So lots of shots were snapped, with varying degrees of success, which led me onto my Monday ...

While processing the shots, I thought I would be cheeky and drop Fraser Gunn an unsolicited email in Tekapo ... essentially asking (begging) him if he needed an assistant .. and much to my surprise he replied, unfortunately he didn't need one, but he spent the next 3 days giving me some coaching online.  What an AWESOME guy!

He shared tips for focussing, shooting, iso, conditions most importantly, helped me with my processing.

I know know about averaging to get rid of camera noise .. this is an awesome and highly effective way to clean up ISO noise in your shots, and it works like this ... (I will let Cambridge in Colour explain it for me)

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm

So, moving on from that, Fraser helped me work through a shot of Crux I had taken on the night, showing me the methods he uses to process his shots, I have done a comparison image of what I tried by myself, then tried averaging, then started using Lightroom's Chromatic Aberration removal tools to try and correct my focus, then tried an average + stack just for good measure.  I will write this up into a tutorial on the weekend for the tips and tricks page, so keep an eye out for that.

You can see how Fraser gets a whole BAGLOAD of detail out of his method, and of course if you want to check out the originals of these (apart from Frasers), they're up on Flickr:

NASA found a river on Titan this week!  A BIG river .. this is totally awesome :)

But on a sadder note, we lost Sir Patrick Moore this week, he has rejoined the universe, we will miss him, but he gave astronomy such a lot.  Farewell Sir.

Geminid Spotting 2012

A fabulous night up the Dome Valley north of Warkworth, Auckland for the Geminid shower with ValHallen and friends. Plenty of meteors spotted, though given the 600+ shots between myself and ValHallen, this is remarkably the only one caught on film we think. And given it's angle, perhaps not even a Geminid. But let's pretend, shall we? Flikr link below image.

Geminid Above Auckland

Boing!

We made Boing Boing!

Although it's the Sun guys, AND the moon :D

Eclipse, Nov 2012.

Well, the weather smiled on Snells Beach this morning for the best eclipse we're going to see here for a long, long time. Huge sighs of relief from myself and ValHallen, our gear performed just great, resulting in some excellent shots. 

Montage to come, too much work to do today to put that together!

Full Photo on Flickr

[Val]

Totally agree with Bill up there - a shaky start, just enough clouds to kill the idea of a timelapse, but a glorious day was forthcoming after that with maximum coverage (about 10:24) shining out clear and bright.  The home-made Baader film filters worked a treat, along with Bill's new T2 mount :)  So all in all an awesome result!

I have post-processed some of the shots, with about 6 up on Flickr so far, this is one of my personal favorites, showing the mountains of the moon outlined against the sun!

gfkBill's Solar Test Shot

Since you asked, here's my test from this evening. The shadows are bamboo in the "foreground".

This was a test shot this evening through a 60D, using a ND3.8 Baader film filter built on the weekend. T adaptor to shoot through a 25mm eyepiece in my cheap and nasty $100 3" Dob.

Looking good for the eclipse tomorrow, have also got Canon utility prepped on the laptop to drive said camera tomorrow - the live view feature looks VERY promising, should be able to get great focus if I can keep my scope from wobbling while I fiddle with the focuser!

Sun on Flikr

Baader, Filthy Cameras and CHDK

Just done the first camera tests with the new, home made, Baader solar film on the end of the scope ... encouraging!!!

Hard to focus on the old star, but once you get in there the same rig I use for lunar shots seems to be doing the biz :)

You can check out the 5 test shots here :D

Oh what the hell, here's one to get you started ...

Bill ... where's yours?

NASA - Spot The Station

NASA - Spot The Station:

'via Blog this'

Farewell Sir

Neil Armstrong: 1930 – 2012:

The first human to walk on another planet has died at the age of 82.

Neil Armstrong's "one small step for a man" defined us as an interplanetary species.

Thank you sir, for your courage, your legend and for showing us all that we can dream. 

Farewell