kirkster501

How is it on the Road to Damascus Olly? 😆

Very nice. Fabulous colour!

It can last months as in last winter. Nothing November 5th to March 2nd.

Hey guys, Built a Skycam from a RPi 4B and an ASI 120MC-S that I acquired as part of a recent purchase. Still making a few tweaks to the skycam - I need to take it down and clean it because I have dust bunnies visible and some fluff on the sensor after I sealed the dome onto the top 🙄. If you feel so inclined you can view my feeble effort at http://skycam.zapto.org/allsky One thing I have noted is the temperature of the sensor under the acrylic dome that is presumably acting like a mini greenhouse. The temp was 60C yesterday midday under the Sun. Cools off quickly though to 40C or so and then back down to 15-20 or so overnight in these summer months. I just wondered if temps like that are liveable mid-long term for the camera? It is only quite a [relatively] inexpensive ASI 120 but still, I would not want to be swapping out every few months due to failing sensor due to heat My other alternative is to take it down over summer. To those who have built skycams, what are your summer temps under the midday sun please? Steve

Great session, thanks for writing it up. I've printed it and will do these in one night like you have done. All fabulous objects to observe and image that I've done a few times. Not in that sequence though, very interesting. I must start to observe in a more structured way. I tend to be all over the place in my observing sessions. Reminder to self:::: Clean the 12" dob mirror Steve, it is filthy!!!!

That filament is still there

Gee whiz, amazing when the camera is connected how much stuff you see. Some are clearly birds. But there are many tiny, tiny things crossing the disk too, often in the same direction and angle!

Very nice and great colours and focus/detail. Especially commendable when the moon is so low in the summer.

Great stuff mate. I also get up early sometimes to get The Moon at last quarter. It takes some dedication and commitment!

I was in your position too about two weeks ago and bought a used Lunt 60Tha B1200 from a forum member. I also use mine with ASI174MM. I am learning solar imaging but love it so far!

To quote JFK in his Rice University speech: "But why, some say, The Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?" Why play football? What purpose does it serve? Why play Cricket? Why go on holiday? We do not live just to exist. We live to explore, to learn. That is what makes us human. That is what differentiates us from the rest of the beasts and birds of this planet.

I just don't think you can beat refactors and camera lenses for imaging, especially in the UK and our skies. Having used SCT's and RC's for deep sky, I'd absolutely echo Olly's sentiment that the claimed PP numbers do not tell the whole story. I use two quality refactors and a 135mm camera lens for all my DSO imaging (TEC140, FSQ85 and Samyang 135m) and simply accept that the more zoomed-in imaging scale that RC's and SCT's with their longer FLs provide are not feasible targets in the UK and choose my targets accordingly. After all, there are enough of them! A photographic hunt/study of the UK visible Sharpless objects, for example, would consume every clear night in the UK for years. My 2penneth.

Oooh, lovely mate. All of them.

Not far.... The width of visibility from just passing the top of the disk to the bottom of the disk is about 4km, so not far at all. A few hundred metres movement on the Earth's surface makes a big difference to the exact chord or diameter of visibility the ISS takes across the surface of the disk. For example, for the top ISS image, I was almost at dead centre of the track the ISS took. I only live about 2 miles away from the place where I took this image and yet it was not visible from my home at all and missed the disk completely from there. Trigonometry at work!

The Redcat is perfect FL for lunar ones Dave. I hope to test it on one.

Here is another one from the day after from my observatory.

Captured this from Cropwell Bishop near Nottingham, about 2 miles away from where I live, last Saturday at 15:05. A boiling hot day and sun was very high. I was not bang in the middle of the transit, I was about 300m too far south to get the ISS bang across the diameter. Oh well..... This is my first ISS capture since I bought my Lunt T60Ha scope. I used my ASI 174MM and was running about 80fps. Used PIPP to create the GIF and I colourised it in Photoshop. Hope you like it. Still learning how to focus precisely on the disk but making progress, I was not too far out.

Wow thanks for the kind comments. Wow Rusted, that has made a huge difference! Ok, I tinkered with a longer exposure to bring out the proms. The problem with doing that is that it then bloats the sun's disk so that it makes it hard to match the images when blending them. Is there any rule of thumb as to what increase in exposure is needed for proms vs disk please?

Be gentle with me, I am new to this Struggling a bit to get proms and disk from one image capture. Bringing out the proms brings out murk in the background. Need to keep working at it and reading up more. Anyway mono and colorised from Lunt T60Ha and ASI174MM. I don't like the images over sharpened, I have very gentle with any kind of sharpening.

I’m sure it’s some light reflected from the earth onto the dark side of the ISS. Hardly any processing done at all on this image. It’s just a stack of the aligned frames and some colorisation applied to the solar disk.

From my Lunt 60Tha and ASI174MM about 4 miles from where I live in Nottingham at 15:05 this afternoon. Very roughly processed. I was not quite at exact diametric centre.

Thanks. I'm also thinking of running this off of PoE as well. I'm not sure if the PoE hats supply enough power to run the Pi and the ASI camera though. Ethernet woudl be more reliable and can run a cable up to the roof much more easily. I need to look into it.

https://www.instructables.com/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera/

Hi all, I have a spare ASI camera and a few Arduinos kicking around - I could get a RPi as well. Any idiots guides about please? I am a dab hand with soldering iron if needs be. Thanks

Wow, very nice!