Dave

13 minutes ago, Lunuar Mike said:

I am in the process in seeing who might want to join up for a club. I posted my interest on Facebook as well as my personal page on Facebook and a group site I will give it a day or two and see who and how many would be interested. If there's an interest awesome if not I will keep my brilliant hobby to my self and some friends either way I will see who may or may not be interested . Clear skies , Michael 

Happy to give any advice I can. Good luck with getting it all going. 

I'll try and keep myself intact to attend this. 🤣

On 27/10/2020 at 23:23, Alien 13 said:

I had a question that didn't get answered during the live event, does anyone know if Affinity works best when doing small iterative adjustments rather than single larger ones like PS does?

Alan

Yes it does. Very much the same as PS.
Those small levels adjustment that Steve Richards showed a few weeks ago is something I will be looking at trying on Affinity Photo when I get a bit of time.

I was going to pop up for the day on Saturday.
I just tried to get hold of Kelling to ask, but was on the phone too long.
So I think I will have to miss coming up for a socially distance meet up with folks.
Have a good one those that are going / there. 

A follow up pic from the same morning showing a lot more detail.

And waiting in the wings was... 😄

Flipping heck. The dyslexic fingers have struck again...

In the clear bit between the neighbours houses, I managed to get Big Jupe and Saturn.
Now waiting for Mars to get high enough.

On 01/09/2020 at 10:13, Pixies said:

@Dave That's a great pic. I was observing at 2am and made my first sketch. Do you mind if I do a quick grab of your pic to put into another observing thread? I'll credit you of course.

No problem. 

3 hours ago, markse68 said:

Fantastic! you’re not using an adc though?

Mark

Next time...

Well Mars is certainly starting to look fantastic. Lots of surface detail showing and polar cap shrinking.
It's going to be a busy few months. 😆 
I also created an animation from three of this mornings images.

Taken with a Celestron C11. 
2x Barlow.
ZWO ASI120MC Camera.

On 01/09/2020 at 03:34, Pixies said:

With about a month to go to opposition and a month since my last clear night, I thought that I couldn't miss the chance of observing the red planet tonight, as all sources were indicating a clear night. I had my new Baader Hyperion zoom and barlow, plus a cute little University Optics 7mm ortho, I hadn't tried yet, so thinking tonight was the night, I set up around 10pm. I thought I'd get ready then have a little nap until later, when Mars would be in a good position to view.

Started with double-double and the seeing looked good. I could split them both at around x 85-90 and the collimation star test had reasonably stable diffraction rings - better than usual for here anyway. Then I looked up and saw the dreaded clouds. I went back inside and moaned online and had a beer.

01:00 and things were clearing up. I went back out and saw that Mars was visible from the bottom of the garden. It wasn't a great location, observing East right over the roof of the house, but beggars can't be choosers and I didn't want to risk waiting until 4-5 am for a better view. So I set up under the watchful eye of the cat, getting all the various EPs I thought would be useful, and settled down to find the best viewing setup. I tried the zoom, barlowed zoom, barlowed 12mm BST, but by far the best view was with the new 7mm ortho. I didn't try the 6mm or 4mm Circle-T orthos, though. Perhaps next time.

The view wasn't great at first, with the seeing poor at that lower angle and over the roof. The 40 deg FOV at 170x meant I was constantly nudging the dob, but it was pretty much just Azimuth movement that was needed, with the occasional Alt nudge, so I could get on with just observing relatively OK. I'm not a seasoned planetary viewer, but have heard enough to know that I needed to settle down and just do the time at the eyepiece. I kept getting momentary glimpses of dark bands and a white cap - the once pale disk slowly shifting into a creamy orange with some surface detail. I guess most of you are all familiar with what happens but it was fascinating how the details started to slowly emerge. Suddenly I got the urge to record what I was seeing. No hope for a picture, so I decided to do my first sketch.

Completely unprepared, I went back inside, grabbed some printer paper and hastily drew some circles around the base of the empty beer can. With red head torch on dimmest setting I sat down again and started to mark down the darker areas. By 02:00 I was happy and started winding up. When I looked back up, I saw that the Pleiades had risen above the house, so quickly grabbed the 30mm 2" EP for a quick view.

Here's my first sketch (coloured in now). As I said, I hadn't really considered ever doing one before, so not exactly sure of the correct format, so forgive any naivety.  I still need to try and work out what I saw and how it compares to Sky Safari's representation. Fingers crossed I haven't got it completely wrong....

 

 

 

 

Great sketch. My drawing is rubbish. That's why I image... 

9 hours ago, Pixies said:

@Dave That's a great pic. I was observing at 2am and made my first sketch. Do you mind if I do a quick grab of your pic to put into another observing thread? I'll credit you of course.

Thank you. Of course you can use it. Cheers. 

An early start today for Mars as Syrtis Major was due to rotate into view and be nicely on display just before dawn.
Image taken with a Celestron C11, 2x Barlow and ZWO ASI120MC camera.

I couldn't resist having yet another play with the data.
Such fun!

I just couldn't resist having a play with this wonderful data to try creating something different.
I first created the RGB image in Photoshop.
Ha - Red. OIII - Green. Si - Blue.
All subsequent image processing was performed using Affinity Photo.

Duplicated layer to create three identical layers. 
Used curves to tweak out the fainter material in each layer to varying degrees.
Strong curve adjustment on bottom layer. Medium curve on middle. Very subtle curve on upper. 
Created and applied layer masks on the upper two layers created from the layer below it.
Flattened the image.
Duplicated layer and made the upper layer a luminosity layer.
Made saturation adjustments on the lower layer.
Tweaked the individual RGB colour curves to adjust the colour to try and get something a little bit different.
Applied a subtle Live Layer Unsharp Masking adjustment to the upper luminosity layer.
Then applied the Topaz AI Denoise Plugin.
Made a few more subtle curves and levels adjustments on the luminosity layer before flattening, cropping, flipping and rotating the image.

Sorry I didn't make this. It took them longer than expected to get Bob & Doug out of the Dragon capsule. 

The Virtual Astronomy Club are holding a live watch party for the Splashdown of Dragon scheduled for 7:42 tomorrow. 
I'll try and join you as soon as we've finished.

Just fixed it. Thanks for pointing that out. 

Hi Folks.
I have just released a guide for Affinity Photo astrophotography image processing, but I don't think I'm allowed to advertise within SGL. 😉 
Dave

Really sorry to hear this. I know how much work goes into organising something like this. 

Sadly, I wont' be there on the Friday evening, so hope it goes well.
 

Looking fantastic Kev. Can't wait to see it for real this afternoon. See you later.

Looking fab Kev. Let me know when would be a good time for you for me to pop over and admire it.

Hope the dog's OK mate.