powerlord

oh, sorry. maybe I should do a few tutorial videos. not that much out there, so could be useful to others.

Obviously there are loads of way, but here's one I found works quite well: - get your star mask layer as a seperate layer (starnet2, starXterminator, etc) and compose this as you would usually - as an 'add' layer on top of your starless image. duplicate this. Now, make only the star layer visible do a filter, frequency seperation and adjust so that only the centre brightest part of the star is in the high frequency layer - zoom in here so you get it right Now you can bin the low frequency. Now, change the blend mode of this layer to add. Now with the high frequency, do a curves adjustment to make the background black, and the star centres nearly fully white. (i.e. S curve) - try using a contrast adjustment if not very good with curves. turn your old star layer back on, and you can now flip between them and adjust until happy. You should find that you can nearly half your star sizes while still keeping them graduated and clean. stu

Seriously though, my thoughts have always been that time travel is only possible within the many worlds/parallel universe theory (at least more possible laws of physics wise). Since this has it that any and all decisions/changes down to the subatomic level lead to the spawning of another universe, then travel back in our universe would immediate lead to a universe spawning off when you 'landed' at that point in time. Hence no paradoxes. You are no longer in Kansas Dorithy. To get back to your original universe, going forward wouldn't work - that'd be forward in the new universe.. you'd need to go back to that branch point and follow the branch of your universe back to the present again. makes it less fun as nothing you do in the past is 'your' past.. but would still be fun. I suggest tattooing a date in the future on your forehead.. oh wait.. I've covered that. stu

Tattoo a date a year in the future on your body. I suggest sole of foot rather than forehead... Decide in yourself that should time travel be possible in your lifetime you'll come back to that date and tell yourself. Look forward to this coming date when all will be revealed* stu *or not for one of enumerable reasons, but at least you will have a conversation starter for parties (provided you went with the forehead options)

Took out of box and collimation showed I could only see 1/2 the primary... so not good. Was late and wanted to get it out for first light, so did a very quick collimation which is far from perfect, but good enough for a go. Here's the first results - tadpoles in SHO. Looking at the stars I'm not too far off i don't think.

I got an astrionomik 6.5nm oiii this week to replace the zwo one. I felt I wasn't getting as much oiii as I should. Definitely feels like an improvement with the asteonomik. Still having no joy capturing the illusive squid in sh2-129 but I suppose a full moon doesn't help. 🤔

yeh, Im still struggling to get the backfocus right on the 80ED. tried a bit less as pattern seemed to suggest it was too far away, but that made it worse (last night session). So as of yet not found the perfect distance. Still tbh I'm not really a star peeper, I will keep trying to adjust it and get them better. I also just found tonight that the main part about half way up scope is loose.. I'm not sure if it screws tight or has some other fixing, so I left it for tonight, but it may be that it's that rather than backfocus issue. One to investigate.

I've done close ups of the animals on parade before, and an OSC for the whole Rosette, but not a narrowband SHO with my asi1600. So this is that. With Altair 80ED+0.8 F/R. So 400mm. Shot over the last 3 or 4 nights. 130 mins of 10 mins subs Ha, 240 mins of Sii, 230 mins of Oiii. So, 10ish hours. Processed in Siril and Affinity Photo and starnet2++ stu

yup. I was surprised how much smaller the 150 was when I got it.

Just had plumbers in for new boiler. First thing they asked was what the big black thing in the garden was (the obsy). questions started. when I showed them pics on my phone they couldn't believe i took em from the back garden. that's a typical reaction. I've found most folk are interested enough to want to see my photos. But not interested enough to want to sit up at 2am watching me take them! 🙂

Telescope number 7! Would have been 9, but gave away 2 yesterday. Nice 200 PDS. and here it is with the rest of its newtonian family. Now down to 3 newts, 1 SCT, 1 MAK, 2 fracts..and a partridge in a pear tree.

what do you use now ? I can recommend affinity photo for mac. great package and lots of astro features. 64 wise - tbh if was adobe that was at fault not apple - apple had been telling them to get with the 21st century and make their stuff 64 bit for 10 years. they were about the only major bit of software that wasn't 64 bit. And unless apple could dump 32 bit legacy support (which as I say.. they had supported for 10 years), they couldn't really go forward with stuff like the M1, etc. Yer better out of the Adobe racket imho. Took me a while to be weaned off, but now I wouldn't ever stick anything adobe on my mac - nastly code, helpers, updaters and all sorts everywhere. yuck.

starnet is available as command line, and even now (shock!) as a gui for windows. all free. https://www.starnetastro.com/download/

will do, I've disassembled it, and the protocol is pretty simple. what i need to work out now is what hw i can get that lets me spoof vendor ids. esp32 looks promising. I think this will be a back burner project though - not summit I'g gonna be knocking out in a few weeks if I'm honest - low priority. stu

I doubt it's that simple. your expecting record/playback to work. anything that is temporal - time data, temp variable, nonces, etc, etc would all screw that up. I think it's very unlikely that would work imho. happy to be proved wrong, but it's not a direction I'm gonna go in - I think your best bet is to see one side of the conversation in code (the decompile), and what it is doing with the responses. and go from there. even then, I'm not sure if the HID idVendor/idProduct are controllable via software of any kind.. if not then yer on a hidin' to nothing as us scots say. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck.. . then it's probably one of the 166 different species of Anseriformes.

yeh they are HID, but that doesn't tell you much really. it's a pretty wide family. HID sniffing wouldn't get you a compatible device I don't think. And it's very low level. I think, if there's not an easy way in via decompiling it's probably more hassle than it's worth. it still needs an ascom driver, which is on that same page. And again, that is zwo code - basically the same thing as the C SDK I was looking at, but with the ascom interface in front of it.

nah, they just use the zwo SDK. i.e. the public bit. you can't see the driver code. And it's that bit that talks to the HW. i.e. checks it matches the relevant product IDs, etc. the automatic bit would come from being zwo compatible as it'd just look like say an 8 filter wheel and you'd use first 2 slots. and my thing will be arduino, mimic zwo, and flip between 2 filters. ignoring the interface, and looking at HW/electronics - it's a choice I reckon between either a cheap chinese 5 filter manual thing and modifying it, or building from scratch - seeing as chinese ones are 1.25 thread, etc and I'd really want a 42mm in/out - as i can't see a way of doing that easily with this sort of thing as it's not even clear if the ends screw in or not: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/125044577130 If I was designing, was thinking some sort of slide with the 2 filters in, and then a wee rc servo to move between them. make it all contained so no light gets in. that sort of thing? as just two, it could be stop to stop, so not need for fancy positioning. back to interface, if can't act like zwo, itd be easy to work like an ascom job, but that's of no use to me, so wouldn't bother - I'd just expose my API either as an http api and have the thing on my network, or maybe just basic 433mhz control as its just '1/2' commands and then wouldn't need anything else - but it would need me to trigger the filter move rather than asiair via autorun or plan - which is far less good, but still a lot easier than having to go out at 2am and change the filter. Surprised there's not a market tbh - maybe the easier thing is to suggest it to ZWO - with the popularity now of OSCs it's crying out for a simple 2 position slide/wheel - that'd cover 99% of the use cases most of use need. stu

Hi chaps, I could have sworn I downloaded a java driver for the mac for the ZWO EFW, but it now appears to be native - c code. Can't find the java one anywhere - and annoyingly I seem to remember coming across the decompile of it I did last year a few weeks ago and thinking 'don't need that - delete'. However I now do - I really want to make a basic 2 filter drawer for my asi533 (lextreme/uvir) and try to make it zwo compatible to work with asiair. Before I start down this, I though I'd ask if this is a journey already walked ? Ideally I'd love the java version again, as that can be decompiled much easier. However if not, I'll have to try and decompile the c. And again, if someone has done that before all the better. Ideally I'd love it to be compatible with asiair and for that it needs to look like a zwo efw. If that's not a goer, I'll make it anyway, as it's still easier building something and making it controllable as a seperate iot device or 433mhz RF or summit. Use case here is galaxies mainly - where I wanna shoot with my OSC asi533 - uvir, and alsoo Ha. And don't really want to have to use my zwo 8 position efw for this, because then I can't use it on the other mount with my asi1600. stu

Shot with asi533. Just playing with processing and marks really. overdid the masks, but hey - there u go.

DSLRs Usually have 2 filters. An LPF1 and LPF2 for canons. For astro modification the LPF2 is removed. NOT the LPF1. The LPF1 cuts uv and ir. The LPF2 IR into red - hence that is removed. Not being funny, bit the folk who commented do know what they are talking about. You would NEVER* want to shot astro with no uv/ir. maybe the moon, but then it would usually be either a uv/ir blocker or a uv/ir pass. stu *except - add exception here. but pretty much never. guidecams is another exception.

fitted a fan to the monster after dew on primary yesterday.. bit of a ballet getting it to play nicely with others as you can see...

The monster doesn't like sharing..

Omg.. If by some miracle this materialises its gonna be a very productive week!! 😀

Has anyone seen @vlaiv and @ONIKKINEN in the same room ? Are they twins seperated at birth ? I think we should be told. 😁

Thanks. Good to know. Have you any examples that show a direct comparison with RCD to show it's better and if so, how much ? stu