Grant

Tickets for the imaging day including packed lunch bookings are now available!

The general theme for the day is maximising what is possible under UK skies and weather, the provisional agenda for the day is:

• 08:30-09:15 - Doors open, meet & greet, coffee available!
• 09:15-09:30 - Welcome - Darren & Grant
• 09:30-10:30 - Talk 1 - Imaging from Light Polluted Cities - Peter Jenkins
• 10:30-11:30 - Talk 2 - Astro-imaging with Affinity Photo - Nik Szymanek
• 11:30-11:50 - Morning Coffee Break
• 11:50-12:50 - Talk 3 - Processing narrowband images - Peter Jenkins
• 12:50-14:20 - Lunch - Packed lunched available to pre-book or, bring your own
• 14:20-15:20 - Talk 4 - 13 things to help improve your planetary/lunar imaging - Martin Lewis
• 15:20-16:20 - Talk 4 - Solar imaging from the UK - Gary Palmer
• 16:20-16:40 - Afternoon Coffee Break
• 16:40-17:40 - Talk 4 - AutoStakkert! 4 - solar, lunar and planetary imaging stacking software - Emil Kraaikamp
• 17:40-17:50 - Close - Darren & Grant

As you can see, it's a jam packed day with super speakers covering a whole raft of topics which will mean you come away with lots of new techniques, ideas and processes to try on your own astrophotography.

This will also be a great opportunity to meet fellow SGL members and we really hope that many of you will stay over until the Saturday for the astronomy festival day - more details of this will be posted next week. If you book a ticket for the astrophotography day then this also includes entrance to the Saturday 🙂

Over the next week, I will post up more information about each individual speaker and more details about the talks.

Both days are hosted at the Norman Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth - an amazing, beautiful place that is well worth a visit to see the historical telescopes and incredible facilities. We hope that tours of the domes and planetarium displays will be available for people on the Saturday.

We are just finalising some catering details so plan for the final details and tickets to go on sale Friday AM.

Unfortunately we have made the difficult decision to postpone these events.

We are hearing repeatedly late-Oct is too short notice. You are right and we agree. In hindsight, we should have scheduled both events for early next year. 

Once new dates have been confirmed we will post details and make tickets available. 

Thank-you for your patience.

More details and tickets will be released Wednesday next week but here is a sneak preview of two upcoming SGL events 🙂

The Friday event is focused on astrophotography.

The Saturday astronomy festival is family-friendly with fun activities for all ages, including beginner talks, trade stands and more!

These are great opportunities for SGL members to meet in a beautiful location and learn some new imaging techniques. 

The dollar price won’t include 20% U.K. VAT though…

Locked at the request of the original poster.

Better explanation here: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/tutorials/what-is-amp-glow.html

Those rays are amp glow on the filter sensor - very common with CMOS cameras and can be removed completely through calibration with dark frames - nothing to worry about 🙂

Apologies for the downtime earlier today and the issues with activity streams and search.

Everything should be fixed now but the search database needs to be rebuilt which means searches may be slow and not complete for the next few hours but, activity streams should already be caught up.

The SGL server ran out of disk space today - I hold my hands up, I knew it was running high and had a plan in place to upgrade shortly but what I didn't realise, is when it reached a certain percentage,  the search engine system we use would refuse to index any more and went into read only mode - this in turn caused over 100GB of error log messages to be generated thus taking the server from having 1-2 months of storage space left to 0 in a matter of hours.

Thanks to our forum sponsor FLO, we now have an additional 1tb of storage on the server so this issue is now resolved and should not crop up again anytime soon (famous last words!).

Sorry for any disruption in your viewing pleasure. If you notice any issues ongoing, please report as usual in the bugs forum.

Cheers,

Grant

3 hours ago, Pompey Monkey said:

I think we are being spammed with "new members".

Apologies if this has already been sorted out.

Not sure what you mean? We’ve not seen or had any spam reported - can you send me a link to what you are referring too?

30 minutes ago, rsarwar said:

Thanks chris. 5 mm is great as i got a wierd BF combo: QHY268 (12.5+1.8) -> M54 F (4 mm) -> M54 M to M54 M (2 mm) -> ZWO 2in EFW (20 mm) -> ZWO M68 (17.5) -> M68 F to M63 F (1 mm) = 59 mm. 

Have you tried using a OAG with a APS-C sensor.  i think it should give you a good indication if the image circle is big enough to cover Full frame as well, because APSC diagonal + 8 mm prism would amount to 35 mm more or less? 

I was about to place an order when i spotted that FLO has a ex-demo RC on promotion as well. no i am so confused as if i buy two scopes at once, i will no be allowed inside my bedroom 

I’m using it with the 2600 and an OAG and it works great, had to be careful to get the OAG on the long side of the sensor and pull it out a little to get it in a good position but I’m happy with it now 🙂

Apologies for the delayed announcement. Thanks as always for everybody who took the time to enter 🙂

You can see all the entries here, the data is still available here if you want to have a play.

The winners are:

Winner - Spongey

Runner Up: AndyWeller

Runner Up: Anonymous Astronomer

Congratulations to the winners!

The 1st generation IKO setup has now been sold, we still have a few data sets to release and some very, very exciting news about IKO v2 coming very soon!

53 minutes ago, badhex said:

The lynxastro cables are great. The only thing I don't quite understand is why some of the lynxastro cables don't have a boot for the RJ11 connector? All of their cables with RJ45s have a boot - pretty much essential for stopping the tab getting caught on something and snapping off. 

Unfortunately similar boots for RJ11 cables don’t exist, there are a snap on type available which isn’t great but no rubber boot like there are for RJ45 cables.

I thought this may be of interest to people: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/astrophysics-for-beginners-an-online-introductory-course-6-weeks-tickets-166910739515

Colin has done talks for us in the past and is a superb speaker, I think I will be asking for this as an early Christmas present 🙂

Cheers,

Grant

Our current setup is still available to purchase and ready to takeover and start imaging immediately 🙂 Please let me know if you are interested.

We have now committed to our expanded setup over in Spain and will share more news of our future plans very soon - it's exciting!

We've just released another set of data from the Ikarus Observatory project here.

Following the wonderful entries from the first processing competition we are running another to see who can get the most from this data and create the 'best' image! The winner will receive £150 of First Light Optics gift vouchers and two runners up will receive £50 of gift vouchers.

Details below:

• Closing date: 22nd October 2021 @ 22:00
• Please post your entries into this thread
• Please only use the data we've released - don't blend it with other data or add to it with other sources
• Use what ever processing software and techniques you like, potential bonus points for sharing your workflow and techniques with others - that way, we all get to learn as well 
• Multiple entries are allowed but, please refrain form posting multiple attempts that are very similar - better to update an earlier attempt if it's just an incremental improvement but, it would be interesting to see totally different attempts using different narrowband blends etc...
• If you win or are a runner up, we would really like to use your creation in future marketing materials, on our website etc.. so by entering the competition, you are giving us permission to use your image in this way.
• Judging will be done by a small team of judges from the FLO team - It's completely subjective  but will be based on what image(s) we think do the best job of extracting the most from the data released and, look the 'prettiest' 
• We will announce the winners in early November via SGL

Thanks all and look forward to seeing your entries!

Our next release of IKI Observatory data, enjoy 🙂

The small print:

• We will be releasing all public data from the Ikarus Observatory project under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence. What this means is you are free to share, copy and redistribute the data as you see fit and adapt, remix, transform and build upon it but you must attribute 'Ikarus Observatory' as the source of the original data and must not use it for commercial purposes - i.e. no sticking images on the side of mugs and selling then 

Beyond that, enjoy and have fun!

You can find out more about the IKO project here including details of the equipment used, observatory site etc.. This image was processed in the Pixinsight Weighted Batch Pre-Processor and comprises:

• Ha - 120 x 20 mins
• OIII - 120 x 20 mins
• SII - 120 x 20 mins
• Bias 101x
• Flats 21x for each filter
• Darks 21x 20 mins

These have been stacked and calibrated in Pixinsight. The raw XISF, FITS or TIF files can be downloaded here.

Details of the processing competition are here.

I hope you enjoy playing with the data, we have a few more sets in the pipeline, coming soon.

Last week some Altair refractor telescopes were stolen in. the Doncaster / Leeds area. The models are new-style Altair 115EDT-X and 150EDF models - both are specialist, limited production run instruments with serial numbers so will hopefully be easy to spot.

If you are offered any of these models through SGL, eBay, Facebook, Astro Buy Sell etc..  then please let Altair Astro know.

Let's all keep an eye-out and make these impossible to sell and hope the perpetrators are caught.

Tonight a scammer managed to access a users account and post fake classified adverts to try and scam people via PayPal transfer. It looks like the scammer was going through member accounts and trying to access them through credential stuffing which is where people try login details from known data breaches on other websites in the hopes that people have used the same credentials elsewhere.

To stop this type of attack we strongly urge you to ensure you are using a unique and secure password for all of your online accounts including SGL and that you consider turning on 2FA (two factor authentication) in your user proifile. This adds a secondary layer of security to your account.

Please also be on the look out for any emails saying your account has been locked because of too many login attempts or your account email address being changed. These are all signs of either somebody attempting to access your account or, having accessed your account changing the email address on the account over to theirs.

Unfortunately, this type of attack is all to common and there are many data breaches out there from the past such as Dropbox and Linked In - you can see if your email address has ever been involved in a data breach here: https://haveibeenpwned.com.

We have no evidence to suggest SGL itself has ever been breached but we should not be complacent, having unique, complex passwords is a must for every site you use and switching on 2fa can make it even more secure.

One other note of caution - if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is and never, ever use PayPal friends and family as this will give you no insurance whatsoever against scammers. If you are ever suspicious of a classified advert or have any concerns about the security of your account then please contact one of the mod or admin team and we would be happy to help.

Thanks everybody who took part in this competition - this one was even closer than usual! I particularly enjoyed seeing what you all achieved with the data as M81/M82 are particularly problematic for me so I will be having a good read through of all the tips and processes used to try and improve my own processing.

You can see all the entries here, the data is still available here if you want to have a play.

The winners are:

Winner - bdlbug

Runner Up - Xiga

Runner Up - Matt Baker

Thanks everybody for entering and well done to the winners.

We have a few more releases in the pipeline 🙂

Yep my bad copying and pasting a template post I’d used before - closing date is tomorrow night.

7 hours ago, Orange Smartie said:

How heavy is the OTA for the 10"? 

Pete

15-16kg approximately.

Only on my phone but the list here is still current (for now!):

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/344489-welcome-to-the-iki-observatory/

We've just released another set of data from the Ikarus Observatory project here.

Following the wonderful entries from the first processing competition we are running another to see who can get the most from this data and create the 'best' image! The winner will receive £150 of First Light Optics gift vouchers and two runners up will receive £50 of gift vouchers.

Details below:

• Closing date: 30th August 2020 @ 22:00
• Please post your entries into this thread
• Please only use the data we've released - don't blend it with other data or add to it with other sources
• Use what ever processing software and techniques you like, potential bonus points for sharing your workflow and techniques with others - that way, we all get to learn as well 🙂
• Multiple entries are allowed but, please refrain form posting multiple attempts that are very similar - better to update an earlier attempt if it's just an incremental improvement but, it would be interesting to see totally different attempts using different narrowband blends etc...
• If you win or are a runner up, we would really like to use your creation in future marketing materials, on our website etc.. so by entering the competition, you are giving us permission to use your image in this way.
• Judging will be done by a small team of judges from the FLO team - It's completely subjective  but will be based on what image(s) we think do the best job of extracting the most from the data released and, look the 'prettiest' 
• We will announce the winners in early September via SGL

Thanks all and look forward to seeing your entries!