From: Ray Byrne <ray@in4media.co.uk>

Date: December 3, 2006 10:24:14 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Ray - First Light

Hi All,

The weather in the UK in general has been awful since a gathered all I need together to use AstroIIDC. A few UK die-hards have managed to get up before dawn and image the rather low Saturn but they are made of sterner stuff than me, having said that the ease of use and set-up I have now makes this option more appealing. Over this weekend we've had a couple of storms coming over from mid Atlantic and in between there has at least been clear skies. Although the skies are clear there is blustery winds (the sudden gusty sort) and the seeing has been the worst it can get. On saturday afternoon an hour before Sunset I noticed a gibbous moon rising and decided to "go-for-it" and was set-up in 15 minutes.

The process was totally simple with no hurdles at all and I was imaging features on the Moon immediately. Focusing was the only real problem as the Moon was boiling like a "good'n", it was in constant motion with no respite in motion at all, normally I would have packed-up straight away but this was all about getting used to AstroIIDC's features and filtering with a mono camera. I found that imaging in IR gave the best result - i.e. the live video seemed the steadiest, but the resultant stacked and processed TIFs were pretty poor.

There was something I noted, it has been suggested that one should leave the gamma setting at 1.00 but I wanted to have a contrast to the movies that didn't have crater wall highlights fully saturated (i.e. totally white) so I played with the setting and got better results by bring it down to the left (under 1.00). The more pleasing images I see from the likes of Alan F for example seem to have a less dramatic contrast that looks far more natural and this is my goal.

I wont waste your time or the group's disc-space with my images but if you are curious email me off list and I'll send you a sample:

ray[at]in4media[dot]co[dot]uk

To sum up - lovely easy to use software that "gets out of the way" which allows me to work in a very familiar environment I love Macs (I own 6 I've kept some old ones like the little Mac Classic, 1st gen. iMac and the G4 I'm writing this on plus the family have an iPod each so that's 4) to be honest apart from the seeing I couldn't be happier

Clear skies and good seeing to you all

Ray Byrne