For a while anyway.
Have packed up the scope and mount in the wee hours - thankfully before it started snowing.
I'll wait to hear from AstroPhysics Inc. on what I should do about the non-functioning declination motor. Or I should say motor controller as when I swap cables I can drive Dec. motor when connected as R.A. motor (but not RA from Dec control) The options seem to be:
1) send the GTOCP2 control unit for repair
2) upgrade to GTOCP3 unit
3) upgrade one or both of the motors
Could end up pricey but without Dec. motor working you end up pretty limited in what you can do.
Meanwhile I heard from Mike Unsold that new ImagesPlus v3.75 is going to be released at the end of the week which he'll then send so I have a lot of image processing stuff to learn - and try out on those images I got last week.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Astro Image Processing
So I have quite a few good shots of the moon and Orion nebula in RAW .NEF files but I need to do some serious image processing on them to improve image quality
Some obvious steps to do :
Stretching dynamic range
Noise removal - I did in-camera Long exposure noise reduction (NR) on D3 which tends to be considered inferior to PC based NR. Maybe more I can do on pc after stretching though
Gradient subtraction - should be able to remove sky glow and any vignetting by doing some Gaussian frames and subtracting them from images
Stacking - combine multiple shots to improve signal to noise ratio and level of detail.
Registax or ImagesPlus should be able to help with these tasks - Registax v5 is in the works so I'm trying the free v4 on the moon shots - not much of a noticeable improvement so far though. Waiting for my upgrade to ImagesPlus 3.5 to arrive in the post from the US.
Will update blog with progress reports.
Some obvious steps to do :
Stretching dynamic range
Noise removal - I did in-camera Long exposure noise reduction (NR) on D3 which tends to be considered inferior to PC based NR. Maybe more I can do on pc after stretching though
Gradient subtraction - should be able to remove sky glow and any vignetting by doing some Gaussian frames and subtracting them from images
Stacking - combine multiple shots to improve signal to noise ratio and level of detail.
Registax or ImagesPlus should be able to help with these tasks - Registax v5 is in the works so I'm trying the free v4 on the moon shots - not much of a noticeable improvement so far though. Waiting for my upgrade to ImagesPlus 3.5 to arrive in the post from the US.
Will update blog with progress reports.
Trying out BlogWriter Lite
Though I can email text and photos to my blog easily enough I wanted to try a dedicated blog posting app - especially if it is possible to read and edit posts as well
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Friday, 2 January 2009
Orion Nebula
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This is the first shot I have taken with my DSLR in prime focus on Orion. This is from one shot - may try Registax on multiple to see if I can improve it.
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