Stub Mandrel

Well done all, I know they must have taken some tracking down let alone the skill of getting a good photo! Any news of Challenge number 7? It's two and a half weeks overdue!

Aha! This you clearly a person who would benefit from a copy of 'Making Every Photo Count' - it will answer all your questions, including most of the ones you haven't thought of yet and might even save you money by avoiding costly mistakes.

One problem is that a visual astronomer, who can easily switch to or choose targets in cloud free areas and is happy to wait as a cloud passes by, will judge 'too cloudy' by a different standard to an imager. Also, if you get demoralised by a run of poor evenings, it gets harder to get out and you start making excuses...

I'm starting to blame ClearOutside. I don't want to upset Aunty @FLO but I think it is currently set to be too pessimistic. I have missed several potentially good sessions over the last fortnight by relying on it too much.

This saturday looks so bad I had assumed you meant saturday 23 anyway! DOH!

My generation learnt photography using 35mm cameras. Knowing the 35mm equivalent lens is very useful, especially with something like my bridge camera. It zooms from 4.3 to 180mm. Looking at random picture, its properties say I took it at 12mm which is meaningless to me, but it also lists the 35mm equivalent as 70mm, which lets me know I took it with something rather longer than a 'standard lens' and mentally place it in the range of the camera's capabilities. The fundamental issue, for conventional photography at least, is there is no accepted language for the field of view of a lens beyond the vague 'wide', 'standard', 'portrait' and 'tele'. At least these tell you something based on the principle that a standard lens gives what we perceive as a 'normal' perspective. If we want to compare the perspective and field of view of a range of lenses in practice, then we need a yardstick. If you have a camera, it is useful to know roughly what a lens will show you without having to use it or fire up the terrestrial equivalent of Stellarium and fee din your focal length and sensor size. The alternative would be to use the field of view in degrees, just like binocular users do, but would you use the short edge, long edge or the diagonal... useful for astrophotographers who know the angular sizes of their targets, but how many degrees do I need to take a picture of my kids or a bird up a tree? The standardisation to 35mm equivalent does this, and if it didn't we would have to use some arbitrary number that did the same thing. Perhaps the answer is simply to multiply the 35mm equivalent by 2 so a 'standard lens' becomes 100, smaller numbers are wide angle lenses and longer ones teles. Call this number the 'standardised focal length' and stop wingeing...

Probably but its still along way out!

Lots of nice nebulosity. That is very fine grained noise, a quick experiment here suggest you can make a big improvement even with the most basic of noise reduction.

Some time I will do some REAL wide field with this: I used to have a green teapot with wings painted on the side etc. I once saw Gong supported by Here and Now. I think the only difference was that the Divided Alien didn't appear with the latter. very different music but incredible musicianship.

Your best images will be taken with the kit you enjoy using and are motivated to set up and use enough to get used to using it.

Neat :-)

Does anyone know if/when this will be announced?

oops... 0.9 times as dense (unlike me, who is clearly very dense).

Far and away, but it was interesting to see what it could get using video, but the resolution was a lot lower, even drizzled by 1.5.

It might keep teh temperature down, but it will impede the cooling as the air is only 1/9 as dense :-)