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.

April Skies

Well here we are in April already.  I apologise for my lack of activity of late, lots of things happening around my life at the moment, including injuries, physiotherapy and notably, a burglary.  Which, it has to be said, sucked. They got my telescope lenses and our camera.

So Bill is doing awesome work with the tracker at the moment, I wont be shooting for a while :(

Dear Canon NZ, any chance of a free 5D? Mk II will do, I'm not greedy!

In other news, the Hike to the Stars event we all planned and spent money on camping gear to organise was totally cancelled due to the worsening weather, so we're thinking October/November now, or possibly a smaller expedition will happen later, anyone whose interested should watch this space!

Anyways, on to the skies this month, as that's supposed to be the purpose of this post.

Jupiter and Venus will be visible early in the evening sky this month, after being a pair of drama queens last month.  Mars is still out and about and getting dimmer and smaller as we pull away from it. Saturn, that beautiful gem, is up in the northern sky and Titan is well visible about 4 ring-diameters from the planet, an awesome site and if you want to see it, come over, and bring your own lenses because I no longer have any :(

The usual suspects are around this month, Crux, Orion, Scorpio, both Magellanic clouds (see Bill's awesome photos),

Mercury makes a good looking morning sky appearance this month, rising due east 2 hours before the sun in the middle of April, in the beginning of the month, it's "only" 95,000,000km from us!

As usual I will be updating the 1200mm Calendar with what I can find this month (Google-Fu pending of course).  Speaking of Calendars, I have added some calendars to 1200mm's including:  Cassini's tour of the Saturn System,

Oh and the blog got it's 10,000th page view this week! YAY!

Anyways ... keep looking up guys!



Interesting and/or Awesome things!

• Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Overview
• Starry starry night
• Venus and Jupiter cuddling up in night sky
• One last show for Venus, Jupiter and moon
• Saturn's Rings & Biggest Moon Dazzle in New Photo

March Skies

A good month coming up!

First off, 1200mm has a public Google calendar now, for events (like the hike on 24 March) and general stargazing goodness (Mars in opposition tonight!).

so, March So far:

4 March: Mars in opposition.
8 March: Moon close to Mars, Full Moon
11 March: Moon close to Saturn
14 March: Jupiter and Venus close together
15 March: Last Quarter Moon
20 March: Autumn Equinox, day and night are equal length
23 March: New Moon
24 March: 1200mm Hike to the Stars - if you;d like to come to this, please contact us.
26 March: Crescent Moon close to Jupiter and Venus.

Skies in March from the Royal Astronomical Society of NZ

For us Rodney/Snells Types, lots of LMC and SMC this month, as well as the usual cuplrits of Orion, Crux et Al.

Looking forward to some good moon and mars viewing!

Southern Skies in February

So, what to look forward to this month?

Straight up early in the month, the moon is full on the 8th, which unfortunately coincides with the peak night of the Centaurids meteor shower.

The moon then proceeds to last quarter on the 15th and is new again on the 22nd.

Early in the month, Both Jupiter and Venus will be visible in the west, during the early part of the evening. With Saturn and Mars rising later in the evenings, towards midnight.  These planets will continue their dance around the skies this month.

Orion is very visible this month, so some awesome M42 opportunities will be able to be had, 1200mm is thinking of a stack for that one, through the scope on AstroCam 2 :)

The Seven Sisters (Pleiades/Matariki) is also hanging around and is stunning even through a small pair of binoculars.

The 1200mm crew is planning our first star party of 2012 on February 8 to attempt to pierce the full moon's glare and see some Centaurids from the meteor shower.

And finally, there's another small meteor shower (Gamma Normids) starting up on the 25th of February, that will peak in March.

Nebulinks 20 November

Well! NASA is at it again (we love NASA)

New NASA missions to investigate how Mars turned hostile
Cygnus X-1: A Stellar Mass Black Hole:
Saturn's Northern Storm:
In Wolf s Cave:
NASA Extends MESSENGER Mission 

and just for a change ...
Cosmic particle accelerators get things going

And the pretties ...
A History of the Sky

Also, my partner in the stars, gfkBill flew off to Taiwan this morning for a week. No stars for him in the big cities!  He did leave me the tracker tho, so I will be playing a round with that :D

Safe journey bro

w0000t!

Got some shots!!!  Some nice ones!  It was cold (0.6 degrees coldest), the sky was beautiful and the seeing was also awesome!  Bill came over, Rusty and Pip  were here, Jeremy took pics and Eddie came over .. was a good good night!! As well as good shots, had a great time!

So shots live over here:  http://flic.kr/p/8hm9z2, http://flic.kr/p/8hpoTs, http://flic.kr/p/8hm9k6

This is my new fave :D

I would also like to take a second to say thanks to Canon and CHDK.  I got some nice DNGs from my system tonight :D  And thanks to all you guys for coming over and going wow!

Also, completed Bahitov Mask today and it works like a charm!  Instant and EASY focus :D - V important, plus I made it myself too!

One planetary evening

So far .. Saturn, Venus, Mars and a passing airliner :)

Coming up - Jupiter, Uranus, Luna and will have a go at Neptune, although that may be too close to the Moon tonight :)

Also, resolved the double in Acrux (one of my FAVORITE stars) :D

6mm for the win!  I can resolve a planetary disk for Venus and Mars .. for the first time!!! Well Mars for the first time FOR SURE anyways.

Happy!

The plan for tonight

Ok, so I am planning something.  It will hinge on whether I get the scotch mount done by tonight of course (drill charging now) but, here goes.

1730-1830 Venus Setting in the NW    Awesome Crescent, using 9mm + Barlow
1800-1900 Mars in NNW ~ 35°
2100-0100 Moon - half full
2100-0100 Saturn follows Moon down the sky  Oh so beautiful, will be looking again soon
2350 Neptune Rises
0200 Jupiter Rises in East
0220 Uranus Rises in East
0513 Mercury Rises

12 hours of solar system goodness :)

Lets see if I can do it :D

Ninib, Kronos, the Protector and Sower of the Seed.

Oh yum yum .. and they're the big pictures too!

And since we're talking about one of my favorite NASA missions (Cassini/Huygens), here's this and this and this.
It seems Saturn makes everyone poetic, hardly surprising, it is magnificent.

In other news, I picked up some more gear recently - yesterday was at Mitre10 Mega in Albany, getting the ingredients for a scotch mount, there will be a photo journal of that.  I want to just say a big thanks to Mitre10 Mega tho, you guys were awesome!

Also got a remote for the 20D today, which means I can do Bulb long exposure stuff, on the scotch mount and off it (SLR StarTrails anyone?)