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Remote imaging M16 - My first attempt


Star101

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I am about to ship my kit to a hosting service in Spain. Expensive but I will get more data in the next few years than I could possibly get here however dedicated I might be.

Last year I only got 5 decent sessions. I want to do studies that require considerable cloud free periods which just don't  happen in Cheshire, very often.

It is up to individuals how they enjoy out hobby, visual, own kit, hosted or service.

Maybe, Olly could provide a processing service as well as astro holidays?

Regards Andrew 

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Thinking ahead (A long way ahead I hope), should I have to go into sheltered accomodation or a care home, then the occasional remote image acquisition might be all that I could manage. Assuming I still had enough marbles left (Not a joke).

That's one of the instances I had in mind when I might consider doing it, but all the time I am capable of doing it myself, I would not consider using data I had not captured.

 

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I've posed this before, so I know what the response will be,  but it bears repeating. If you went to Olly's and used his equipment, but uncollimated and unPAd his perfectly collimated and PAd scope, just so you could say you had set it all up yourself, imagine his reaction.

Lol, yes I have seen Olly's reaction when this was mentioned before, it was hilarious.

I have in fact been to Ollys back in 2013 when I was still learning.  He is a great teacher and the skies are wonderful.  I chose to use Olly's equipment because I could not face the long drive to the South of France, but I still have pangs of guilt over calling the images I got when I was there - "mine" even though I did all the capture myself, as I did not set up the quipment.  Olly tells me they are my images but in my heart I feel they are only "loosely" my images.  

Carole 

Edited by carastro
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Here is my two penn’orth analogy:

Who won last year’s F1 Championship, Lewis Hamilton or the CEOs of all the sponsoring companies who sunk money into the team? I think the driver and the team who built and raced the car deserve the credit, rather than those who bankrolled it.

Any UK based imager knows how frustrating this hobby can be so if I comment on an image that happens to have been captured from our cloudy climes rather than, say, New Mexico, Arizona or Spain, I try to acknowledge the fact in the post, because in my opinion that makes it that little bit more special.

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This debate will run and run. It is my good fortune to know Paul so that his comment below is even funnier than it would be to someone who didn't know him:

I think that if you don't collect your own sand and trace minerals, build a kiln, produce your own blanks, grind and polish your own mirror...

Carole is right to point out that that de-aligning my mounts and rotating my cameras to random angles might go down badly. She's entitled to feel that what she did here isn't entirely hers but I'm entitled to feel that it is. If you rent a hire car, do you expect to reset the tappet clearances, align the tracking, regulate the fuel injection and balance the brakes before setting off? 

I find imaging an interesting business, which is just as well since I do it, one way or another, for a living. But how interested can I be in polar aligning, setting up guiding and filing subs in a coherent manner? In the last ten years none of these activities has changed at all. Capture is a mechanical business. It's rendered more interesting when you start to analyse your results and experiment with changing your exposure times, RGB balance, proportion of Lum, proportion of Ha, etc etc. But this is based on feedback from the real business of imaging - which is processing. I have two jobs, Night Assistant in which I help make sure the stuff works and, if guests want it, Processing Assistant. If anyone would like to apply for the first of those jobs I'd be glad to hear from them, but the pay would be lousy. :icon_mrgreen: The second of those jobs is mine all mine and it isn't up for grabs!

After a while we all capture the data our sky and our patience and kit will allow. But what do we do with it? For me, that's where the fun begins.

Olly

 

 

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19 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

This debate will run and run. It is my good fortune to know Paul so that his comment below is even funnier than it would be to someone who didn't know him:

I think that if you don't collect your own sand and trace minerals, build a kiln, produce your own blanks, grind and polish your own mirror...

Carole is right to point out that that de-aligning my mounts and rotating my cameras to random angles might go down badly. She's entitled to feel that what she did here isn't entirely hers but I'm entitled to feel that it is. If you rent a hire car, do you expect to reset the tappet clearances, align the tracking, regulate the fuel injection and balance the brakes before setting off? 

I find imaging an interesting business, which is just as well since I do it, one way or another, for a living. But how interested can I be in polar aligning, setting up guiding and filing subs in a coherent manner? In the last ten years none of these activities has changed at all. Capture is a mechanical business. It's rendered more interesting when you start to analyse your results and experiment with changing your exposure times, RGB balance, proportion of Lum, proportion of Ha, etc etc. But this is based on feedback from the real business of imaging - which is processing. I have two jobs, Night Assistant in which I help make sure the stuff works and, if guests want it, Processing Assistant. If anyone would like to apply for the first of those jobs I'd be glad to hear from them, but the pay would be lousy. :icon_mrgreen: The second of those jobs is mine all mine and it isn't up for grabs!

After a while we all capture the data our sky and our patience and kit will allow. But what do we do with it? For me, that's where the fun begins.

Olly

 

 

Does the night assistant job come with accommodation?

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Up here at 60° North there will be about 4 months each summer when the sky is too bright and I still need to keep my processing skills up (and my processing fingers soon start itching badly). But so far I found that there is enough free data out there, everything from the Liverpool Telescope to data given out on Astrobin and SGL, that I have not yet started with remote imaging. However, I cannot see any moral issues about it. This summer I have so far been totally occupied with building a second obsy so I can double my data collecting during those few clear nights I get when astro darkness is here. Here is the new one next to the old obsy - I will make a thread about the building process soon on the DIY Obsy pages.

20190615_163744_resized.jpg

Edited by gorann
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32 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

This debate will run and run. It is my good fortune to know Paul so that his comment below is even funnier than it would be to someone who didn't know him:

I think that if you don't collect your own sand and trace minerals, build a kiln, produce your own blanks, grind and polish your own mirror...

Carole is right to point out that that de-aligning my mounts and rotating my cameras to random angles might go down badly. She's entitled to feel that what she did here isn't entirely hers but I'm entitled to feel that it is. If you rent a hire car, do you expect to reset the tappet clearances, align the tracking, regulate the fuel injection and balance the brakes before setting off? 

I find imaging an interesting business, which is just as well since I do it, one way or another, for a living. But how interested can I be in polar aligning, setting up guiding and filing subs in a coherent manner? In the last ten years none of these activities has changed at all. Capture is a mechanical business. It's rendered more interesting when you start to analyse your results and experiment with changing your exposure times, RGB balance, proportion of Lum, proportion of Ha, etc etc. But this is based on feedback from the real business of imaging - which is processing. I have two jobs, Night Assistant in which I help make sure the stuff works and, if guests want it, Processing Assistant. If anyone would like to apply for the first of those jobs I'd be glad to hear from them, but the pay would be lousy. :icon_mrgreen: The second of those jobs is mine all mine and it isn't up for grabs!

After a while we all capture the data our sky and our patience and kit will allow. But what do we do with it? For me, that's where the fun begins.

Olly

 

 

I’m sorry Olly, but I’m  not with you on this one. I might agree if I routinely collected quality subs every session, but until I do, processing for me is very much a ‘trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ type of activity, from which I rarely derive much enjoyment. That much repeated phrase from the early programming days ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ keeps ringing in my ears.

There are a number of posts on SGL where very accomplished imagers have said something like “the data made processing a breeze”, or words to that effect, that’s where I want to be.

Unfortunately, I still want to do it from the UK, that’s the challenge for me.

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45 minutes ago, tomato said:

I’m sorry Olly, but I’m  not with you on this one. I might agree if I routinely collected quality subs every session, but until I do, processing for me is very much a ‘trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ type of activity, from which I rarely derive much enjoyment. That much repeated phrase from the early programming days ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ keeps ringing in my ears.

There are a number of posts on SGL where very accomplished imagers have said something like “the data made processing a breeze”, or words to that effect, that’s where I want to be.

Unfortunately, I still want to do it from the UK, that’s the challenge for me.

I don't see why you think you're disagreeing with me! Think about it with brutal honesty: all data is garbage, even Hubble's. With the exception of some nearby stars Hubble data should record most stars as single pixel point sources, but it doesn't. As amateurs we are in the same boat but at a different point on the 'continuum of garbage.' (😁 I wouldn't want to be remembered for this phrase!) 

I hope that I have never said anything like, 'The data made processing a breeze,' though with 32,000 posts I fear I might have forgotten myself on occasion! Processing for the Hubble team, as for us, is about getting the best out of the available data. It is never a breeze. I honestly don't think I've ever found an image easy to process. If the data is really good you raise the bar. But I've certainly found some data abominably difficult to process precisely because it was good. That's to say that it contained tantalizing hints of the very faint.

However, the best data comes from the best skies as your last point rightly implies. Without new technology (not inconceivable) that won't change.

Olly

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1 hour ago, Anne S said:

Does the night assistant job come with accommodation?

:D Not at the moment! (Well, I guess we could run to a plastic bag...) However, as we head deeper into our dotage, who knows?

Olly

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15 hours ago, Jkulin said:

If I went to Olly's (Which I would love to do, then I would take my own kit and use my own processing, but would listen and learn from Olly to make my own images better.

A response which nicely ignores the point of my question.

I note from your signature that there are a lot of scopes, mounts, cameras and accessories that you presumably consider to be "yours" because you have given money to the person who did the work of making them. You also presumably consider the results gained by using this equipment to be "yours" (despite having not manufactured the chip in the camera you are using?). Indeed, the question arises, did you write all the software that you are using to process "your" picture? If not, it isn't really "yours" ...

So where does one draw the line?

If I give money to someone who has done the work of setting up a scope to buy an amount of time on that scope, the time and the results gained (using my skill - such as it is - of selecting & framing my object, and selecting settings, including filter choice) are similarly "mine" as long as I do not claim to have done something I haven't.

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2 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

A response which nicely ignores the point of my question.

I note from your signature that there are a lot of scopes, mounts, cameras and accessories that you presumably consider to be "yours" because you have given money to the person who did the work of making them. You also presumably consider the results gained by using this equipment to be "yours" (despite having not manufactured the chip in the camera you are using?). Indeed, the question arises, did you write all the software that you are using to process "your" picture? If not, it isn't really "yours" ...

So where does one draw the line?

If I give money to someone who has done the work of setting up a scope to buy an amount of time on that scope, the time and the results gained (using my skill - such as it is - of selecting & framing my object, and selecting settings, including filter choice) are similarly "mine" as long as I do not claim to have done something I haven't.

One draws the line wherever ones wants to because the line's jurisdiction applies only to the person who draws it.

Olly

 

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Exactly my point, Olly.

All imagers are, to some extent, totally reliant upon what somebody else has done/is providing. I would guess that most people who insist on using all their own gear, set up and maintained by themselves (which I would agree is a totally valid option) probably neither write nor maintain the software they use to process the raw data. And, as more software packages become "pay every year" packages, the distinction between "paying to use software x for a year" and "paying to use telescope y for an hour" becomes ever fuzzier ...

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I'm sorry but this is now getting way off the point.  to be a good photographer (i.e. non asto photographer) it is not a pre-requisite that you made the camera yourself, it is how you use that camera.  

The whole point of this thread is what is your opinion on using remote telescope to capture data, and the replies are regarding whether you actually set up and operate the equipment yourself, or whether that is done for you, not whether you made the equipment yourself.  

I agree with Olly that processing is a very important part of the process, but I also agree with Tomato:

Quote

I’m sorry Olly, but I’m  not with you on this one. I might agree if I routinely collected quality subs every session, but until I do, processing for me is very much a ‘trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ type of activity

Many of us don't have the luxury of copious clear and dark skies, and it is what we do with planning capture and how we process to get something reasonable in dire circumstances that decides what the final image will look like.  If we simply downloaded data already captured with great equipment, from pristine skies and just processed it, how can that be comparable? 

Carole 

 

Edited by carastro
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Personally for me it depends on what you want from the hobby, for me I love the chase, and the fun of choosing an object, getting all my kit set up for the night, powering on and then hoping that I can get said object focused and framed nicely, then the CCD cameras and guiding all play ball, USB issues are zero, and then when that first image shows up on screen, there is nothing more satisfying, and I feel good with myself, and I get this feeling every time.

There are so many things that can go wrong with out own imaging rigs, that when it all works it’s a real sense of achievement, sometimes even more so than seeing the actual finished image, so you get none of that with remote hosting set ups, it’s all about mouse clicks on a screen, and a nice fat wallet...don’t get me wrong, everyone to there own....but for me the fun is in the chase... :)

Oh and I could find some nice new shiny kit to buy with the £30 and hour I would save, that would last a very very long time, not just an hour... 😉

Edited by StarDodger
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7 minutes ago, carastro said:

If we simply downloaded data already captured with great equipment

But wouldn't I be making the same decisions? What am I going to capture? How am I going to frame it? How many subs of what length and using what (if any) filters am I going to take?

True, I may have fewer clear skies here and have to contend with a lot more light pollution (so are images taken at star parties cheating?) imaging from home. But are self-imposed difficulties for their own sake a contributing factor in the achievement. If I choose to manually guide my subs instead of using PHD2, does that make the result any more worthy of credit? I could equally argue that the result obtained by people who set their automated observatory going and then go to bed rather than standing out in the cold for hours on a winter's night is less worthy of credit.

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But wouldn't I be making the same decisions? What am I going to capture? How am I going to frame it? How many subs of what length and using what (if any) filters am I going to take?

Not in the case of purchasing downloaded data from places like DSW, it's all done for you, you just process it.  But I concede that is not what the original poster was asking.  

Quote

are images taken at star parties cheating?

Absolutely not, going to star parties involves a huge amount of effort to take all your equipment to a location away from home and re-set it all up from scratch (not to mention the amount of other stuff you have to take to live there for a few days), takes much more effort than having a permanent PA'd rig already set up.

As I say, IMO using a remote rig you have set up yourself whether it be at home or away from home is not cheating the art of AP.  But using downloaded data already done for you is only doing half the job, so how can you claim it is your own image? 

Using a remote telescope you did not set up yourself and do not own the equipment but you operate it all yourself is for me a sort of halfway house but personally I would not feel comfortable with claiming images as my own even if I did declare the source. 

Each to his own, but I could not live comfortably with that unless I was no longer capable of doing it myself.

Carole 

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4 minutes ago, carastro said:

Not in the case of purchasing downloaded data from places like DSW, it's all done for you, you just process it.

OK, just had a look at their website and in the case of DSW I would agree with you. I believe you can do the same thing with some of the Hubble data. Possibly good for honing one's processing skills, but not for claiming the picture was yours.

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3 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

A response which nicely ignores the point of my question.

I note from your signature that there are a lot of scopes, mounts, cameras and accessories that you presumably consider to be "yours" because you have given money to the person who did the work of making them. You also presumably consider the results gained by using this equipment to be "yours" (despite having not manufactured the chip in the camera you are using?). Indeed, the question arises, did you write all the software that you are using to process "your" picture? If not, it isn't really "yours" ...

So where does one draw the line?

If I give money to someone who has done the work of setting up a scope to buy an amount of time on that scope, the time and the results gained (using my skill - such as it is - of selecting & framing my object, and selecting settings, including filter choice) are similarly "mine" as long as I do not claim to have done something I haven't.

Your suggestions are taking things to the extreme, so: -

Racing a car in F1 doesn't count if you haven't made every part!

Racing a bike in the Tour De France doesn't count if you haven't welded and made the bike yourself (although at one time you had to be your own mechanic)!

Archery doesn't count if you have n't made the bow!

And God forbid, flying to the moon doesn't count if you haven't made the rocket yourself!

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

One draws the line wherever ones wants to because the line's jurisdiction applies only to the person who draws it

Olly quantifies this nicely, you draw your own line and one of which you are comfortable with.

The OP asked for opinions and that is how I replied, I'm not going to string a noose around his neck and lynch him for using commercial facilities, it's just not for me.

Like many others, I spend hours, nay days making up everything to connect faultlessly, even more time capturing the image with my own equipment and then processing the image myself. I have a number of friends who have processed my images to show me the error of my ways, including my mate Peter Shah, but I have never published or publicly shown these images as they are not mine, as once they leave my control they cease to be. I could show you some absolutely stunning images I took, but was struggling to get the processing right and which my mates sorted, but I would never dare to show as it goes against my own line in the sand.

Edited by Jkulin
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What's emerging as the key phrase here is  '...and claim the image is your own.'  But this claim isn't just one claim because it comes in several versions. I claim it's mine with my own gear, I claim it's mine with someone else's gear operated by myself, I claim it's mine with some else's gear operated by them, I claim it's mine from downloaded data...'  I would think it remiss to choose the wrong version when posting the image but does anybody do that? A few people steal images but how many actually lie about acquisition? It can't be many. We'd know - and sometimes when we see the odd image we do know.

Olly

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The things I did learn about using the  T30 Telescope at Itelescope was the sensitivity of the camera. 

I did have to test the scope/camera first to get a feel for how M16 would look. Here are the test shots. Had I done 300 second subs then the image would be poor. So there is a little bit of work required ;) 

Personally, I cannot afford to purchase such a great scope as T30. I don't have a spare £60K, I have also been to Ollys place and what a lovely part of the world he lives in and yes, I am envious of all the wonderful scopes he has there. I would love to have clear skies every night where I live but its not going to happen....So should I be ashamed of using other scopes? Does this mean only the rich, who can afford expensive scope setups, should be allowed to image and submit those images?......Of course not!! 

For me, I agree with Olly above, It all comes down to how its presented. Which category etc. Show where it is captured and just be honest.  

T30 M16 60s Lum.jpg

60s

T30 M16 120s Lum.jpg

120s

T30 M16 300s Lum.jpg

300s

Edited by Star101
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