ASTRO: M3

For some reason this didn't come through the first time I tried. If it did,
sorry about that.

Hi all:

I took this image last night from the LAS observatory before the clouds
rolled in.

Hutech Canon T1i
1x3-minute exposure, dark subtracted,
gradient removed with GradientXterminator,
levels and contrast adjusted in Photoshop CS3

Konus 200 mm
Losmandy G-11 Gemini, autoguided

I'm slowly getting better at this.

George

George wrote:
Hutech Canon T1i
1x3-minute exposure, dark subtracted,
gradient removed with GradientXterminator,
levels and contrast adjusted in Photoshop CS3

Konus 200 mm
Losmandy G-11 Gemini, autoguided

I'm slowly getting better at this.

George

Keep up the good work George. I ran a very similar setup. I'm living
vicariously through your efforts. High end results from folks like Rick et
al, are awesome, but those earliest results from budding astro-imagers have
a different feel to them. A raw pioneering dedication that ends in the
thrill of first results. Results by the way which are better than the
professionals could get just a few decades ago.

--
Steve Paul

On 5/6/2010 9:05 AM, Glowrider wrote:
George wrote:
Hutech Canon T1i
1x3-minute exposure, dark subtracted,
gradient removed with GradientXterminator,
levels and contrast adjusted in Photoshop CS3

Konus 200 mm
Losmandy G-11 Gemini, autoguided

I'm slowly getting better at this.

George

Keep up the good work George. I ran a very similar setup. I'm living
vicariously through your efforts. High end results from folks like Rick et
al, are awesome, but those earliest results from budding astro-imagers have
a different feel to them. A raw pioneering dedication that ends in the
thrill of first results. Results by the way which are better than the
professionals could get just a few decades ago.


We all have to start as a beginner. No way around it. Digital
technology plus today's mounts make it far easier than it was in the
50's when I started down this road. George's images are better than I
could get for many years. I started with a camera on a two hinge barn
door platform run by a wind up alarm clock. You had to invent your own
gear back then. Later I moved to AC motors which were a pain in the
field as you had to control the frequency very precisely, temperature
falling made that "interesting". Mounts without PEC and with far more
PE than today's mounts have before PEC and guided manually kept you
glued to the eyepiece for hours at a time while you froze from
inactivity. Only a couple negatives could be stacked in the enlarger
before no light got through. So you used 2 hour exposures and at the
1:50 mark you were dead tired and suddenly hit east when you meant west
to make a correction and all was ruined. Or the neighbor kid leaned
against the scope and asked; "whatcha doin'?" I saved his life by not
killing him. Those were the "good ol' days" today's imagers,
fortunately, don't have to endure. Today the skills learned on simple
equipment will pay big dividends as better gear can be afforded. When I
started I had no hope of ever taking images like I can as the needed
equipment literally cost millions of dollars. Now it costs no more than
a basic new car. So it comes down to, do I survive with one car and a
good imaging set up or continue with my simple stuff and have the
convenience of another car? Once the kids were out of the house I chose
the former, sort of, I bought a $1000 245,000 mile pickup, That's the
cost after I rebuilt the engine and manual transmission. All those
years of film work made the transition rather easy. Well not the change
to digital darkroom, I'm still climbing that learning curve. I do miss
the fun of concocting new developers and dark room techniques but not
getting sick from the fumes even with a good exhaust fan. Or the
stained fingers I always had because I just had to touch the prints
rather than use tongs like a sane person would.

Rick

Rick

--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

"Glowrider" schreef in bericht
...
George wrote:
Hutech Canon T1i
1x3-minute exposure, dark subtracted,
gradient removed with GradientXterminator,
levels and contrast adjusted in Photoshop CS3

Konus 200 mm
Losmandy G-11 Gemini, autoguided

I'm slowly getting better at this.

George

Keep up the good work George. I ran a very similar setup. I'm living
vicariously through your efforts. High end results from folks like Rick et
al, are awesome, but those earliest results from budding astro-imagers
have a different feel to them. A raw pioneering dedication that ends in
the thrill of first results. Results by the way which are better than the
professionals could get just a few decades ago.

I would not call someone with an autoguided G11 a "beginner". I started with
a manual guided scope and a self-modified webcam, imaging planets and the
moon.....

I like your M3 george, good work.

--
Martijn
www.xs4all.nl/~martlian

Rick Johnson wrote:

We all have to start as a beginner. No way around it. Digital
technology plus today's mounts make it far easier than it was in the
50's when I started down this road. George's images are better than I
could get for many years. I started with a camera on a two hinge barn
door platform run by a wind up alarm clock. You had to invent your
own gear back then. Later I moved to AC motors which were a pain in
the field as you had to control the frequency very precisely,
temperature falling made that "interesting". Mounts without PEC and
with far more PE than today's mounts have before PEC and guided
manually kept you glued to the eyepiece for hours at a time while you
froze from inactivity. Only a couple negatives could be stacked in
the enlarger before no light got through. So you used 2 hour
exposures and at the 1:50 mark you were dead tired and suddenly hit
east when you meant west to make a correction and all was ruined. Or
the neighbor kid leaned against the scope and asked; "whatcha doin'?"
I saved his life by not killing him. Those were the "good ol' days"
today's imagers, fortunately, don't have to endure. Today the skills
learned on simple equipment will pay big dividends as better gear can
be afforded. When I started I had no hope of ever taking images like
I can as the needed equipment literally cost millions of dollars. Now it
costs no more than a basic new car. So it comes down to, do I
survive with one car and a good imaging set up or continue with my
simple stuff and have the convenience of another car? Once the kids
were out of the house I chose the former, sort of, I bought a $1000
245,000 mile pickup, That's the cost after I rebuilt the engine and
manual transmission. All those years of film work made the
transition rather easy. Well not the change to digital darkroom, I'm
still climbing that learning curve. I do miss the fun of concocting
new developers and dark room techniques but not getting sick from the
fumes even with a good exhaust fan. Or the stained fingers I always
had because I just had to touch the prints rather than use tongs like
a sane person would.

Thanks for sharing that. Sounds like you really had to pay your dues. I'm
one of the "lucky" ones who walked into imaging with a large enough fistful
of dollars to afford modest beginnings, and enough experience with observing
gear to have a good idea how to get results. A G-11, DSCs, ST-4, DSLR w/Bulb
Timer-Controller, and a short rack of 25AH SLA 12V batteries. I initially
tried using a laptop at the scope, but it didn't take long before I was
using the standalone ST-4 and the TC for subframe collecting on the interal
memory card. I really liked that setup. Probably more work to actually
aquire a guide star and the target, but not having a computer at the scope
is a huge boon for those of us without a permanent setup in a roll-off or
dome. I'd roll the entire setup from the garage, out and around to the south
facing backard on a ScopeBuggy, get polar aligned, setup a shot, fire off
the timer controller, then go observe stuff with my Dob while listening for
the shutter clicks to stop. Then I'd pop out the memory card, go into the
house through the ground floor slider which opens into the den, and check
the immediate results on the computer. Once I got pretty proficient at it, I
stopped checking the results until the night was over, which kept me from
losing my dark adaptation for observing with the Dob. Made for an enjoyable
evening on the too rare occasions when skies and temperatures (read that,
bugs) were cooperating, and gave me some data to play with at the computer
on the nights when I didn't want to be outside.

I managed to inadvertantly capture a before and after of the SN in M51 from
my driveway out front, whenever that was some years ago. Wish I had realized
it before I heard about it on the internet. Still, I was pretty thrilled to
see that I had captured the B&A of that. The images aren't great, but it
does prove that great images aren't needed to capture significant events,
and that can be fun in and of itself.

Haven't been keeping abreast of recent developments, but I think it would be
great to have a true astro CCD imager with internal memory card and an
exposure timer-controller like the one I had for my Canon 300D (TC-80?) so
you could operate untethered from AC power and computer.
--
Steve Paul