imgalt – Image Alignment Tool
author: GreatAttractor
Written with solar animation frame alignment in mind. Uses the phase correlation method to detect translations of an image sequence, which can be widely varying, the images severely cropped – exactly what one gets after a few hour solar session with telescope buffeted by wind, drift due to imperfect polar alignment and lack of manual correction in time etc.
The same method of image alignment is also included in ImPPG (starting w
Had my first hour grinding with the tile tool and must say its an interesting and utterly sweat inducing process.I slightly misread some of information I had read and ended up grinding with a 3" overhang on my tile tool rather than the centre of the tool being 3" from the centre of the blank which is a 1" overhang rather than 3".tbh in my first hour I just wanted to bed the tile tool in and get the hang of grinding with the tool but the curve already looks more spherical and my sagittal is nearl
I have posted some technical information and some initial results of the live stacking coming soon to Lodestar Live in the Video astronomy forum: http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/213955-lodestar-live-version-08-beta-download/ Live stacking is coming on well but lots more still to do!
So, after 40 hours of grinding I finally got down to my desired 12.5mm sagittal depth!!stage one complete and looks like a good curve.total time just over 55hours from starting!!
So it was time to make a tile tool ready for second stage grinding. Trip out to homebase to buy a 25kg bag of cement and then an hour trawling through tile shops looking for decent mosaic tiles which proved fruitless so I emailed John (glasspusher) who as always came up trumps with an ebay link and a pack of mosaic t
Version 0.8 (beta) is now available to download from the Video Astronomy part of the forum: http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/213955-lodestar-live-version-08-beta-download/ The new version adds a few minor features and has some tweaks and bug fixes. Work on live stacking is proceeding very well, I should be in a position to start running some end-to-end tests on previously captured data very soon! :laugh:
Hello everyone, I am very new, very green but have been interested in all things Space since I was a child. I wanted to be an Astronaut........ Now 62, female and retired, I am planning to purchase my very first telescope..! I discovered SGL today whilst surfing the net for the best dark skies in which to view the Milky Way. I have a bucket list, containing things like, viewing the Aurora Borealis, takings photos of the Planets, lying under the sky to watch the meteor showers Perseides and Le
Well as per, ive not had much time to grind but ive made the most of the time I have and im now just short of the 12mm sagittal that I was aiming for!!!
Im still in two minds if I should go a little deeper before I cast my tile tool as its much easier to shallow the sphere off during second stage grinding than it is to deepen it if I go too shallow(need to cast a new tile tool and re hog out the depth again).My target sagittal for my focal length is 9.75mm so hopefully 2.25mm is enough extra de
If it looks like a clear night, is cloud free like a clear night and you can see stars like on a clear night............ It probably isn't a clear night because there's just enough fog, mist or other agent of atmospheric mischief sufficient to prevent me obtaining a sharp avi-clip of Mars. It's 12.20am, the Council has been kind enough to extinguish the street lights, Mars is approaching opposition and I might as well go to bed!!!! I'm not adding an 'entry image' because I haven't got one. Grrr
Version 0.7 is now available which has a few tweaks, bug fixes and now also is available for Windows platforms. Below is a link to the video astronomy forum where the links to download the application are available. http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/212494-lodestar-live-version-07-beta-download/ Currently working on the live view stacking, and in my latest development version I have also been working on optimising the colour processing by re-writing the critical bits in SIMD assembler. Also I ha
Another night of clear skies forecast for most of the night, however it was also forecast with some low temperatures around freezing point. With barely even seeing a star over the last week I was certainly determined to get out with all the gear and make the most of the night, even if it was work the following day. The daylight is certainly starting to draw out now as Jupiter become clearly visible from around 19:00 and most views in the zenith to southern skies really do not pick up for another
Well after what seems like an eternity,ive finally broken through 10mm depth of sagittal on my 22" grind!!!another 2mm or so to go which will hopefully be done by the end of the weekend and its tile tool time.been some clear skies this last week or so and with virgo up well ive missed galaxy hunting but it will be worth it when the beast is ready!!!!
Happy days.
clear skies Rich
I have high hopes that I've made the right choice out of all the telescopes out there. The 16 Lightbridge arrives tomorrow, and I have to stay home to sign for it - ugh. Talk about giddy, it's like I'm 10 and it's Christmas eve... hours of back yard preparations - from trimming huge trees to putting down a patio slab, it is a sweet spot indeed. I hear the 16 is a big beast - hard to move, won't fit through a standard door..... got that all covered. I think. Regardless of all that - wh
This in the first in an undoubtedly infrequent series of ramblings from Michael Morris, unsuccessful amateur astronomer and prog rock fan. I thought I start off with a success story of sorts (lap it up now as there won't be many of these!). A couple of years ago my youngest daughter upgraded her old Windows Vista (spit) laptop to a Macbook. The old laptop sat around nontionently being a laptop for a few months before, in a desparate attempt to stop having to run Windows Vista, decided to start o
In time for some SGL star party usage! http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/192900-atik-osx-drivers-r100-example-app/?p=2263424 A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1.00, this latest release shows a real jump between 1.00 and now - it feels like a stepping stone. Perhaps a little bit of a pause after the 10.6.8 release considering some of my driver code goes back to 2011! I have many ideas and rework under the hood within ExampleApp is almost providing a base for these. However I have t
Well im still not getting as much grinding done as I would like due to a combination of having the worlds most unreliable car,a long distance relationship and a day job that leaves you with little motivation in life but the grind is coming along now.Im currently at about 8.5mm sagittal so there's a well defined curve now although my phone camera wont show it too well but will try and get a better picture next weekend.currently the mirror grind stands me at 46h 15 minutes with 31h 45 minutes of t
We have a Star-Gazer reflective telescope with remote control but have not yet been able to get it to "slew" to focus on the stars/planets we have logged into the computer. We are very frustrated. We even enrolled in a beginners astronomy course but even the teacher (highly qualified) was unable to get the telescope to work. Can any one come and help us? We live in Ringwood, Hampshire.
Thanks to everyone for your replies. I am removing the camera lens and attaching the camera to my telescope via the T Ring and Barlow lens then lining up images ( the Moon) through my red dot finder scope. I have just purchased a Synscan AZ-GOTO mount but have yet to set it up. Not even read the instructions yet (I believe this mount can track an object). Too many questions so little time. Like others I would like to take photographs of planets, nebula etc. The equipment I have is probably up to
8 March 2014 - Collimation Since even before I bought the scope collimation has always been on the mind. Like most newbies the thought of tampering around with the mirrors is not a welcoming job. However in my quest to get the best out of my budget scope I thought the least I could do was try and check it. Even before I had bought a collimator I had watched a couple of videos on how to do it, well it was more than a couple as there were several covering the Cheshire and the Laser. My scope doesn
The evening of the 9th of March was cloud free and clear and presented a number of photo opportunities, e.g a double shadow transit of Io and Ganymede, obtaining spectra of Sirius and Betelgeuse (with my newly homemade diffraction grating), Supernova SN 2014J in M82, the planet Mars and a small comet in Gemini. Well the moon put paid to imaging the comet and Mars would not get above my hedges and trees until about 1.00 am. so I decided to save them for a better night later in the month. I had an
Hi everyone Im buying a new telescope on friday (payday) and as a noob I have been looking at a few scopes of low end buget but decent enough viewing. I have a limit of say 400 and have been looking at a nexstar 4se and the 130sl, I like these as they have got some good reviews and I love the go-to device as I used my friends scope without this feature and could just about find Jupiter so I thought this a great way to view what I actually wanna see. I have also seen a 200 dobsonian on ebay for
So 2014 is now well upon us and to help motivate myself I have decided to make a public list of the things I plan to try and observe during the coming year. As i progress I will try my best to keep this list updated wth any I have managed to observe and others that I come across that I plan to observe.If any one has any sugestions for a newbie or something they feel may be a challenge then leave a comment for me! I will try to keep at least 5 active on here at any one time and any I manage to ob
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