Grant

This is looking ace Michael! Lovely work and nice design 🙂

It is essential to use flats with the Quarks to ensure a nice even field of view - DayStar themselves recommend their Flat Caps which work really well to diffuse the sunlight and get a good flat alternatively, just move your focuser so you are fully out of focus and take your flats that way - Sharpcap has a great tool for doing that.

If that example image is from your Quark then it's working A-OK and you are getting some lovely results, don't be concerned - enjoy! 🙂

I built the app and I’ve been on holiday this week so haven’t been able to respond.

Android have made some changes which mean in essence we have to rebuild the app entirely if we want to support the latest versions of Android and given the app is just a wrapper for the website we are instead moving to a progressive web app model which will work on all platforms and make future updates much quicker to deploy.

I expect a beta version of this to be available in late-April / early-May.

Tonight we have banned a potential scammer using an old, unused members account to post potentially fake adverts to try and lure SGL members. Please be very careful with any online adverts and if it looks to good to be true, it probably is!

Ways to keep safe include never use the PayPal friends and family option - whilst this might save on PayPal fees it offers no protection if anything goes wrong.

Always take every precaution before parting with your money and on SGL it’s probably a good idea to look into the members user history - if somebody has been a member for years but hasn’t posted in a long time and suddenly starts posting classified ads it may be worth flagging this to the moderation team so we can take a look.

It is also important to keep your SGL account safe, never reuse passwords you use elsewhere and consider turning on 2fa in your security settings. Unfortunately there are now so many data leaks out there and so many people reusing the same credentials across numerous sites that credential stuffing is a real and present threat to internet security.

Stay safe out there folks and please continue to raise anything suspicious by reporting it.

We’ve been in touch with a few options in the background and dismissed a few because of campsite size or facilities.

We are going to try and visit the fforest fields site at some point…

This was a tough one for me and my FLO colleagues to judge - 10 different images got votes and it was amazing to see the variation from the same data set.

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

The winners are:

Winner - Taman

Runner Up: brunobou

Runner Up: Spongey

Congratulations to the winners!

I hope to release another data set very soon! 🙂

Thank you all for the entries - we will be judging this over the next week and will announce asap.

We have some other data sets we will be releasing soon as well 🙂

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: 31st December 2023 @ 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 January via SGL

Thanks all and look forward to seeing your entries!

I am sorry it has been so long since the last data release but I hope to post some more regularly from here onwards assuming people find it useful / interesting 🙂

This release is slightly different as it was taken from one of the 90mm StellaMira rigs from our https://www.remoteobservatory.com/ project. This started at over 270 hours of data that I have very aggressively whittled down to the best 120 hours. 

You can see the full list of equipment used here. The data isn't perfect - I didn't notice until processing the corner stars suggest the reducer spacing needs a slight adjustment but the data is so deep I wanted to share and see what other people can pull out of it.

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!

This image was processed in the Pixinsight Weighted Batch Pre-Processor and comprises:

• Ha - 652 x 5 mins
• OIII - 389 x 5 mins
• SII - 402 x 5 mins
• Flats 21x for each filter
• Darks 21x 5 mins
• Flat Darks

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.

If somebody is listing it for $13k that must be a mistake, other U.S retailers are around $5k which matches the UK price when you take into account VAT etc..

Thank you and appreciate the feedback - I had a quick play with a HOO palette and it does look nice with the reds 🙂

I'm not always one to share but I am very pleased with this one - I think it represents my best ever processing effort so far. There's still a way to go and I am sure I will keep playing with this! Feedback, criticism and suggests are very welcome - I am keen to get better with my processing!

This represents around 270 hours of initial image in Ha, OIII and SII using one of the rigs at https://www.remoteobservatory.com/. I then cut the data down dramatically to around 130-140 hours to try and take the best of the data and the processed that.

Processed in Pixinsight using a whole variety of modules including BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator and NarrowbandNormalization with some final tweaks in Photoshop...

Wow!  That’s very impressive detail, love the star colours!

Lots and lots of galaxies in there 🙂

This change is now live - when you login you will now need to use the email address associated with your account and not your username.

Just a reminder that this change is happening tomorrow morning.

From that point on, when you login you will need to use the email address associated with your account rather than your username.

1 minute ago, reddoss said:

PM sent.

Thank you 🙂

We would really like to start organising annual SGL star parties again starting next year - I miss them and I am sure others do too.

The challenge we have is a venue - Lucksall has developed a lot over the past few years and has many more static / residential type pitches now which makes it less suitable for star parties. Lucksall has been amazing to us over the years and it is sad to move away but after the last visit we had, we concluded it was probably no longer suitable for the larger SGL yearly star parties.

We've tried very hard between the mod and admin team to find an alternative with no success - finding the right combination of decent skies, accessibility, facilities and location are proving very difficult!

Here is what we need:

• Around 100 pitches a mixture of hard standing / grass but essentially all will need electric
• Good shower / toilet facilities
• Ideally catering on site such as a cafe or room we can book for talks / quiz etc..
• Space to have a marquee
• Reasonable skies - better than most peoples back gardens is a reasonable starting point.
• Location - flexible but I would suggest for the majority of people it needs to be within say a 3-4 hour radius of London.

Ideally, we would be able to block book an entire camp site to then be able to control lighting etc.. 

It would be great to find somewhere that would welcome a whole bunch of astronomers and work with us to build this event up 🙂

Any suggestions / ideas welcome - feel free to post here or PM me.

Thanks,

Grant

From the morning of Monday, 4th September 2023 at 10am onwards when you need to login to SGL you will need to use the email address associated with your account and password rather than your username and password.

This offers extra protection to your account because your username is publicly visible whereas, your email address is not. This is following best practice advised by the forum software developers.

This should make little difference to anybody other than needing to remember to use the email address when logging in - I will post additional reminders leading up to this change.

SGL is back 🙂 We are now in our new hosting environment and everything appears to have transferred as it should and things should work exactly as they did before.

Search is still updating so may be partially incomplete for a few more hours whilst it catches up but this will largely affect older posts.

If you do notice any issues, please report them asap in the Bugs forum: https://www.stargazerslounge.com/forum/50-forum-suggestions-bugs-errors-and-foibles/

Thanks,

Grant

The sheer size of this thread has started causing some performance issues with the forums search indexer!

I’ve created a new thread, please consider following that one and posting there ongoing:

We will refresh this thread every year or so to stop it building up so much in future.

The old thread is so large it is causing performance issues with the forum’s search indexer. We think this is the reason for the recent search issues we’ve experienced.

The old thread has now been locked and is available here: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/305552-what-did-the-postman-bring/page/557/

Please use this thread ongoing for ‘What did the postman bring?’ posts.

In future, we will look to start a new thread every year or so to stop this issue repeating.

Info about this ongoing issue here: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/411405-forum-search-unread-activity-problem-tonight-wednesday-5th-july/?do=getNewComment

Update - there should be a workaround / fix in place for this now so it should be working normally. Let me know via the bugs forum if you have any further issues.

Following a software update earlier today there appears to be a bug whereby members are getting logged out even if they tick the remember me option.

It seems if you click on any link the forum will then remember you again so if it happens, try clicking back to the homepage and seeing if that works.

We have logged a support ticket about this issue and I will post updates here.

We've had a number of issues with the Twitter login functionality over the last few months. Twitter appear to be trying to get everybody to pay for this functionality and are making all kinds of changes that have caused some problems with the forums Twitter login options.

Today, without warning our access has been suspended and there doesn't seem to be any way of logging a support ticket to understand why. Looking around, this looks to be affecting lots of other 'free' users like us.

With this in mind, I have switched off the Twitter login functionality. If you already have an account created this way you should be able to recover your account using the password reset tools to setup a regular password to access your SGL account.

I don't think many users have been using this option so hopefully it won't be too much of a loss but given the upheaval at Twitter, I think this is the most option for the time being.

If you have any problems drop an email to contact@stargazerslounge.com