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Ian King Imaging Course - Review for future Info

daz

By daz
in The Astro Lounge

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daz

daz

Posted
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Sat 4th Nov 2006 - St Michaels Church Hall, St Michaels Road, Hadleigh, Essex

Travelled down to Essex today to attend the CCD imaging course from Ian King, Tommi Warton and Nik Szymaneck. The course was billed as for beginners to intermediates and will allow for tutors to break into smaller groups for specific topics raised by course attendees. Maximum attendees of 25 should ensure enough tutor attention time. The price was £35 and included all refreshments and a buffet lunch.

On arrival, it seemed to me that there were more than the 25 attendees, but to be fair, I was a few minutes late and it was dim!! Anyway, a cup of tea was produced and I paid attention to the speakers :)

Ian kicked off with a talk on the various bits of equipment - scopes, mounts, cameras, etc. and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Tommi came next with two presentations on focusing, guiding, auto guiding, image acquisition. Finally Nik presented on Image Processing and Digital SLR's.

Throughout the presentations, the software used was MaximDL and Photoshop, although Nik did do a quick demo of Deep Sky Stacker. Tommi produced a set of handouts with his presentation, which was useful, and everyone got a CD with various bits of software, links, etc on it.

For a course being billed as beginners to intermediates, I found the content leant more towards the latter, with assumptions that everyone was guiding in some fashion or other, and that CCD cameras were in common use. In fact, a show of hands in Nik's talk showed that over half of the attendees had a DSLR, but only a few actually used a cooled, dedicated CCD.

Although the content was interesting, Tommi's presentation contained sections that were not relevant to me as it concentrated on things like auto-focusing (and setting up Maxim to use auto-filter wheels), auto-guiding (and setting up Maxim to handle it). That said, the section on narrow band filters and how to measure the focus results were interesting and I made plenty of notes (I will try and write these up into legible form over the next few days!!)

Nik's presentation concentrated on Photoshop and he showed us a couple of nice tricks to removing noise, combining RGB images, using layers and the DDP function in MaximDL (very powerful!!). He finished up with a slide show of images taken with a DSLR - Canon 20d, Canon 5D - using different exposures in different situations. Of course, he came up with some cracking wide-fields that caused the majority of people to go "oooo!"

Everyone had plenty of questions, which caused a bit of over-run, which was not an issue, but meant that there was not time to break into smaller groups and look at specific issues.

I found the day very interesting overall, it gave me a wish list the length of your arm and I could hear the Bank Manager locking the vault from all that way away!!!

I think I would have preferred they split the talk into 2 sections - beginners and intermediates, and each section had the relevant content and some hands-on material - but that's just my opinion. Still, the day was good value, everyone was friendly and the speakers knew their stuff!!

If you want to know more about CCD imaging in general, including where you might aspire to be, then go to one of these. If you want to do more specific stuff, keep looking!!

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CELESCOPE

CELESCOPE

Posted
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Hands on Hips , sooo why did u not call in a see me DAZ i was only 5 miles away lol , i thought the same Daz when i went on their last visit here , but as you say it was based alot on for one sales of telescopes etc , nothing for beginners i dont think , and geared more for the hand in the pocket job , but it was very interesting as you say , food was excellent ,

Rog

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daz

daz

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:oops: Sorry Rog - I completely forgot that you were that close!! I have heard about your legendary hospitality and I have a nasty feeling I'd still be there if I had popped round!!!

Next time I'm down that way, you're top of list!!!

Forgiven ???

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Ant

Ant

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He came to see me instead :)

Sounds like a good day, as always though when you have people of different levels they can never be that specific. I would suspect that these guys (being as good as they are) won't need much encouragement to move towards the more advanced levels..

Sound worth £35 though.

Ant

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