jiberjaber

This work?

So I've been out and fettled with the focus a bit again, this time I climbed onto the roof out of a window, it's a bit easier than getting the ladder out and taking down the camera but I always worry about the roof when walking on it. I think it's a bit better focused but looks about the same as the capture from yesterday but it was very out of focus overnight (though no stars but the roof ariel was blurred) will see how this pans out - I've had this before due to temperature build up in the dome and seemed to be indicative of the lens not being straight on to the sensor - I think this might be similar looking at the trees out of focus bottom right.

So the 1.4mm was't 1.4mm as I suspected but the 1.5mm lens gives a much wider view though a bit darker. - will have to see how good the focus is if there are are stars out tonight - rain stopped play for now...

Yep - then you need a mount for the M12 lens to screw in to.

Arghh... new lenses won't focus as they need to get closer to the sensor than the present printed lens holder allows... time for a new lens holder to be printed....

I have found the M12 pretty good considering the budget approach to all this! 2 new lenses arrived this week for me to try - which might be today's job, the current lens is 1.8mm and I now have a 1.5mm & 1.4mm to try out I'm a bit suspicious of the 1.4mm as whilst it looks like it might be wide angle it's a lot smaller than the 1.5. Here's the 1.8mm one at the moment: I'll report back on the 1.4/1.5 experiments...

Good idea, I was thinking something closer to Chelmsford as a test, perhaps Hanningfield reservoir...

That's great and inspiring, I wonder where might be a good foreground round here to do something similar...

The 360 deg pots are not cheap though, £38 for a 3.8mm dia spindle version. Not sure which one is in the Davis unit however here's one (£10!) which is rated for 2 million revs and has an IP rating too... (datasheet in the link) - might be a cheaper version on one of the far east sites - though I think if this is going on the end of a pole and inaccessible, I'd perhaps opt for paying a bit for reliability https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/CTS-Electronic-Components/282T33L502A26C2?qs=sGAEpiMZZMukHu%2BjC5l7YQKnx7lgrENNMXOfQ6BaUek%3D

I wouldn't worry about the accuracy of the resistor values, just bang in the required number of 10K and 1K and then use a scale function to map the minimum and max ADV measurement to 0 and 360 degrees. eg: float winddirstate = map(analogRead(WD_Pin),0,1023,0,360); If that doesn't give you the right direction (due to resistor tolerance vrs read switch resolution) then empirically measure the ADC value for the locations you are interested in and use the values to discern the wind direction reading? The Davis wind direction just uses a potentiometer without end stops - I figure if it's good enough for them, then might be worth consideration if you are now at the point of using the ADC

Right - I think I am done, Version 6. The main difference here is I created a very hard stretched inverted mask of each channel before combination and applied 32 iterations of a multiscalelinear transform which did a fair lot of smoothing on the unmasked dark cloud sections after that I combined and used a unlinked ScreenTransferFunction based Histogram stretch, SCNR for the green cast, corrected the magenta stars and rotated 90 degrees. I did to changes in the Curves Transformation, an small S curve in the Luminance and a medium bow to the top right in Saturation - less faffing than before but got to a place I think I am happy quicker! No sharpening or any other fun and games with luminance masks that occured in V5 - this version has that look of a blue water pool you could dive in to and the reddish brown in the bottom left clouds which give them some body which was a look in @carastro version I liked so much! 👍 I might have to revisit my Veil Nebula now with a similar approach

Thanks Mark - I am just experimenting with some MLT noise reduction using a mask on the pre-combined mono images to see if I can dampen down some of the paint brush artifacts that seem to be there in the 2x2 images - will see if that makes a difference. Mind you I have noticed them in the HA 1x1 image too

Looks like it's going to be obscured by our vegetation at home, might get a view from upstairs windows but it's in the same direction as the city and rising daylight... might have to head out to see it the other side of town.

Give this a go, there's a nice pictorial view of the pinouts. Note some boards have the pins pre-defined others don't but that's less of the case now the ESP8266 is more mature. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-pinout-reference-gpios/ As I mentioned earlier, the ones with the two switches are a little bit of a pain to programme compared with say teh Wemos ones where it will force the programming mode using the USB. That said, once you have it up and running and connected to your wifi you can just programme OTA as long as you have the right code running.

I think the reed switches will out survive the enclosure they are in

I grabbed another 12 SII subs last night which prompted me to give another reprocess a go - there's is certainly more detail in the dust cloud in the bottom left now but there's still a fair amount of noise in the blue 'pool' below the off centre right star and additionally a new type of artifact/noise in the darker solid clouds above HH555 - like brush stroke marks, I suspect I might have to go back to post stretch and treat some noise reduction with a luminance mask but what I don't want to lose is the interplay between orange/red and black in the bottom left corner... perhaps some of the new artifacts are because this is the none drizzle version? anyway - here's "version 5" Weighted batch preprocessor with cosmetic correction, all subs aligned to the best in their filter. (Selected bottom-up FITS) Sub-frame selector, reject anything with score less than 67, approved subs separated out into own directory. 1x1 = 1.5 arcsec/pixel 2x2 = 2.99 arcsec/pixel Gain 0.652 12bit camera res Ha IC_5070_Light_H_Alpha_600_secs_2020_06_22T00_57_53_006_c_cc OIII IC_5070_Light_OIII_600_secs_2020_06_26T00_28_51_008_c_cc SII IC_5070_Light_SII_600_secs_2020_06_29T01_32_37_006_c_cc Best sub from each filter then used as reference for Alignment and Local Normalisation. Integration using SSWEIGHT from sub-frame selection for Sub Weights Muredenoise of integrated images cycle-spin = 48 Gain 1x1 = 0.06 Gain 2x2 = 0.240 Gaussian Noise 2x2 = 24.99 (OIII & SII) Gaussian Noise 1x1 = 50.65 (Ha) Combination count SII = 26, OIII= 23 Ha=36 ABE of integrated images subtraction then division. Align integrated imaged to the best Ha sub Linear fit to SII (lowest median, can only do at this stage after images resize to Ha size) dynamic crop on all channel combination SII,Ha,OIII correct magenta stars script (amount = 0.8) 90deg clockwise rotation STF & Histogram stretch Curves transformation Saturation, L, a, b and c Luminance mask applied to mask large cloud and expose the 'pool' Multilayertransform 4 layers, 2,3&4 = +0.1 to sharpen slightly Curves tweek with same mask Inverted mask Curves tweek (L) to bring out dust cloud detail

Yep - very flexible the IO on these controllers though be careful on which you use as some have alternative or special uses as well as standard IO (i.e. some are hardware interrupt capable or named pins for some drivers etc) I think reed switches win out on simplicity - either just a common ground or power and then the switched output back to the controller. Are you going to mount the controller with the wind sensors or remote from it? That might factor in thinking around if to bring back multi-core switched outputs or do something more elaborate to simplify return wires (i.e. bring back over parasitic one-wire, power and data combined to 2 core cable) The advantage of resistive direction sensing is a reduced number of cores combing back to the controller, I then just scale the input to 360deg with 1 line of code.

I made an artificial horizon in Kstars using my scope and mount in my usual location which then gives me a very good idea of what I can see where and when, from this info I then stood in that location and in my other options for where I might want to mount the scope and concluded through trial and error the location for my pier, based on the compromises. It took a while of slewing the mount and plotting points to get the horizon, I think there might be an app on Iphones to do similar but doesn't load in to Kstars - maybe other software though? In the picture below, there are 2 horizons, the dark red was the telescope on my decking and the darkest colour is the scope on my patio (present prefered tripod position) the bottom is my house roof etc (Scutum is where the kitchen single story extension is, Vulpecula is the gutter/ridge of my roof line) The remainder from Andromeda round to Scorpius is vegetation (trees/large laurel etc) I'll be interested to see what first light on the new pier location gives me relative to this when I eventually get the adaptor for the top of it! I'm hoping for a bit more view to the south over the kitchen extension.

I don't think ESP32's were around when I looked at it. I think I might have got these ADC to build my own wind sensor but in the end decided to get Davis sensors and base on that, on the AAG unit it replaced the issue was the components physically deteriorating due to UV rather than the electronics - though it was connected to a PC to run the wx station rather than the smaller unit of an ESP as it is now Other bonus of the ESP32 is it will be a bit more able to handle all the tasks without missing an interrupt ect due to its faster clock speed. Flip side is the reed switch is not prone to any need for potential cleaning (remote chance but the other is optical so might get some muck in there)

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1083 About £1.50 of Ebay I think https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ADS1115-ADS1015-12-bit-Conversion-Module-Subminiature-Precise-Development/192504483066?hash=item2cd2294cfa:g:NO4AAOSw3K1ayIBO More expensive if you want them quicker though (I miss-remembered the specs, they are 12bit 4 input - so probably ideal)

Might be of use, http://sheepdogsoftware.co.uk/sc3wmw.htm So looks like it used 8 switches and a 4 input ADC one-wire device or similar. I did buy some 12 input ADC I2C devices quite some years ago but never found a use for them but they were dirt cheap at the time. I'll try and dig out their details.

Yes, you posted just after I had re-read the post in more context! IIRC the AAG one-wire uses reed switches for position, it then used a one-wire device to take in the switches from which then position could be calculated, so instead of a complicated resistor network, perhaps just have a MUX device to take in the switches and calculate from there? I'll see if I can find the info for the AAG detector.

I think I might have a 4k7 pull up resistor in there too (on the wind speed and rain bucket) I am sure I sketched a circuit diagram somewhere!

Doesn't the read switch just require a pull-up (or down) resistor - I am sure that is all mine is ? In the arduino code I enable the internal pull-up and then setup an interrupt with a small debounce timer (500us I think) to increment a counter of wind speed pulses eg: pinMode(WS_Pin, INPUT_PULLUP); //Wind Speed Every 5 seconds I calculate the gust speed and every 60s I calculate both gust and wind speed eg: wind speed = number of pulses in 60 seconds * distance moved by a cup in one revolution of the device. Interrupt for wind speed: function to calculate and return wind speed I think my original code derived from this code but has huge modifications since then but some of the functions have remained the same (such as the interrupt and wind speed calcs.) http://chynehome.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Personnal_Weather_Station_ESP8266_V2_12.txt

Yes, the process uses the flat data to form the model to detect noise from, so they all need to be the same, if you crop one, you would need to crop all. There is also a helper script to calculate the model data, this needs 2 of each dark, flat and light sub-frames to work so they all need to stay the same size (though not sure on alignment of the two sub-lights but I would expect that might have a slight impact if they are not)