Grant

Sorry for the delay, this is now on YouTube:

30 minute warning 🙂

This Sunday at 7:30 we are joined by Peter Williamson FRAS of http://www.peterwilliamson.co.uk/, http://www.solarsphere.events/ and http://www.astroradio.earth/. Peter is an astronomer, broadcaster and musician who created the Astro Radio station, organises the Solarsphere astronomical and music festival as well as delivering talks / workshops across the country. He is also a Deep Sky imaging consultant for the Faulkes telescope as well as many other things related to astronomy and astronomy outreach - we are very honoured to welcome him.

Pete gave us a super talk earlier in the summer 'Hershel to Hawkwind' so we are delighted to welcome him back.

This talk will be Myth to Moon, a story of the moon from ancient Myths to the Apollo 11 Landings with stories from the family and astronauts Pete has interviewed over the years.

Hope to see you there 🙂

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP28 - Sunday, 29th November 2020 7:30pm GMT - Myth to Moon by Peter Williamson
Time: Nov 29, 2020 07:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99770766109?pwd=eDZ6L2x1SkkwNUhlK3gyZTRPZE0zdz09

Meeting ID: 997 7076 6109
Passcode: 795566

This starts in 45 minutes, see you soon!

We have the pleasure of being joined this week by Ezzy Pearson (https://twitter.com/EzzyP) to give us a talk on 'The Chelyabinsk Meteor'.

Ezzy Pearson is a science writer and author of Robots in Space: The Secret Lives of Our Planetary Explorers. She is the News Editor of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

Ezzy describes this talk as: On 15 February 2013 a meteor detonated over the industrial town of Chelyabinsk in Sibera. It showered space rocks down onto the surrounding landscape, drawing thousands of people to go hunting them. I was one of them, shooting a documentary for Channel 4 called Meteor Strike – Fireball from Space. This talk tells the story of both the meteor and my trip to see it.

I hope to see many of you join us Sunday to find out more about this meteorite and Ezzy's journey to see it 🙂

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP27 - Sunday, 22nd November 2020 7:30pm GMT - The Chelyabinsk Meteor by Ezzy Pearson
Time: Nov 22, 2020 07:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/92346028829?pwd=dStvbjZWVFN6VWo5WG5xQkVjbjFNZz09

Meeting ID: 923 4602 8829
Passcode: 694773

Bob has asked us to not make this publicly available on YouTube but should anybody have missed it and want to catch up, please PM me and I can send you a private link to watch it.

Paul has asked us to not make this publicly available on YouTube but should anybody have missed it and want to catch up, please PM me and I can send you a private link to watch it.

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

Following the wonderful entries from the first and second processing competitions 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: 4th December 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 by the 9th December 2020 via SGL

Thanks all and look forward to seeing your entries!

P.S - I know I said we won't run a competition every time but I think whilst we remain in lockdown here in the UK and the weather is so poor we will keep these going as a welcome distraction!

This is our fourth release of IKO data and as promised it should be more regular here on.

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 - 80 x 20 mins
• OIII - 80 x 20 mins
• SII - 80 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 and we look forwards to sharing more very soon!

This has been a really fun one to watch the entries come in - lots of different approaches on this one and some absolutely stunning entries.

A group of us at FLO have picked our favourites, you can see all the entries here and the winners are....

Winner - Spongey

Runner Up - Selmak

Runner Up - Derbyshire Dave

Thank you all for taking part and we are looking forward to the next data release which will hopefully be later this week.

I will be in touch with the winners to arrange their prizes 

On 12/11/2020 at 10:10, old_eyes said:

One of the values of this excellent project is giving us good data to practice our skills on. How about a mosaic? Just two panes would help us get into this skill. Not sure if they fit, but Heart or Rosette nebulas would be excellent.

Good idea 🙂

The weather in Spain (and everywhere!) has been rubbish the last couple of weeks so we've not made much progress on the current target but hopefully, the forecast looks better the rest of the week.

2 hours ago, Peakedge said:

Excellent data, yet again. Thank you.

 

Here is my attempt in SHO palette and processed completely in PS CS5.

1. Initial stretch of each channel with levels and slight curves.
2. Removed stars from each using Starnet++.
3. More stretching of each channel using levels and curves.
4. Removal of some of the larger artifacts in each cannel using Spot Heal Brush.
5. Brightness & contrast.
6. Local contrast enhancement (Astronomy Tools plug-in).
7. Tweak of levels.
8. Combined each channel in PS.
9. Selective colour, hue, saturation and vibrance adjustments.
10. More brightness and contrast followed by levels tweak.
11. Blurred colour image with small gaussian blur to remove noise.
12. Created master luminance layer using all three earlier channels to avoid data loss.
13. Levels, curves, brightness and contrast adjustments.
14. Small noise reduction.
15. High pass filter to sharpen.
16. Stars reintroduced by layering original Ha image.
17. Luminance combined with earlier colour image and opacity adjusted.
18. Et voila!!
19. Or something like that!

Hope you like.

David

Sorry David, you missed the closing date for this.

Judging will be announced later today 🙂

Talk starts in just over an hour, see you soon 🙂

23 minutes ago, BinocularSky said:

I've attended this talk; it is excellent!

I think it was your suggestion that caught my eye to contact Bob 🙂

This week we are delighted to be joined by Bob Mizon, MBE, FRAS from the commission for dark skies (CfDS) https://britastro.org/dark-skies/index.php to give us his talk titled: What Future for Britain’s Dark Skies? Britain’s dark places and the threat to their existence and biodiversity.

Bob  is the co-ordinator of the BAA's CfDS as well as a planetarium operator and astronomy lecturer. The CfDS aims to turn back the tide of light pollution which has seriously affected our view of the stars over the last 50 years.

His talk will also mention the new All-Party Parliamentary Dark Skies Group of MPs and how we can support their work in persuading Government that dark skies policies and legislation will make a difference not just to our view of the stars, but also to expenditure on energy, the biodiversity collapse and a more comfortable nighttime environment.

This is a topic surely important to us all so we look forward to hearing from Bob and hopefully seeing how we can help this important campaign.

I look forward to seeing you there 🙂

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP26 - Sunday, 15th November 2020 7:30pm GMT - What Future for Britain’s Dark Skies? by Bob Mizon
Time: Nov 15, 2020 07:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/91049427583?pwd=MUhSR2ZoUGFaUzE5Y0htbk5HcHVXUT09

Meeting ID: 910 4942 7583
Passcode: 132428

4 minutes ago, MartinHiggins said:

Hi, really enjoyed watching the videos on Youtube. Would it be possible to get all the videos posted there?

Cheers

We make all the ones we can available on YouTube but some speakers ask us not to record and some ask us to keep it private so people who missed it can PM me to get the link to watch it within a couple of weeks of it being on.

We want to get some feedback on times, frequency and days for our StarGaZine talks.

Please can you vote on the poll?

Also, if you have any feedback, suggestions or anything at all, please let us know in this thread or feel free to PM me privately if you prefer. We would particularly like to hear how you think we are balancing the topics, is there anything you feel should get more attention? Any subjects / topics you would like us to cover?

All,

We didn't have a speaker booked for this one and were hoping to do a virtual star party but unfortunately, the weather is looking pants both here and in Spain so this doesn't look possible.

We will try to organise this for a future date when conditions are less unsettled and it's got more chance of going ahead.

If anybody else would like to join in on this and present live views from their setup (assuming the weather cooperates) please let me know.

Sorry about this, it means we will give this Sunday a miss but we will line up a speaker for the following Sunday.

Take care all,

Grant

Yep - afraid so but should be ok now. Every so often the searching system needs a restart. We will be moving to a different searching system soon.

This one is going to be a very tough one to judge!

I'm loving the different approaches to processing this, I think it's the most varied yet!

Tonight’s talk starts in two hours 🙂

This week we are joined by Paul Money of http://www.astrospace.co.uk/. Paul is very well known for his extensive talks and as review editor for BBC Sky at Night magazine. He also publishes his yearly 'NightScenes' sky guide - an extremely useful book!

Paul is going to join us and take a look through 10 astronomical images that have been inspiring him through the years and look at the stories of and sometimes behind the images.

If you've not seen one of Pauls talks before you are in for a treat, there are few more passionate and energetic astronomy speakers out there and it's always a pleasure to attend one of his talks. This should be very interesting and entertaining, hope to see you there! 🙂

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP25 - Sunday, 1st November 2020 7:30pm GMT - Images of the Universe by Paul Money
Time: Nov 1, 2020 07:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/92069436395?pwd=Q2hqRTBhMUxNdWNKNVhXTGtPTmdjZz09

Meeting ID: 920 6943 6395
Passcode: 903667