From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>
Date: December 4, 2006 10:13:48 AM MST
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Ray - First Light
Hi Ray -
You should post those images -we'd love to see them.
The gamma setting can be adjusted - I have increased it up to 1.30 for low contrast subjects (H-Alpha solar surface in average to poor seeing) - It can sometimes be easier to focus with a higher contrast image. I don't remember setting it below 1.0- though...
Remember that when the seeing is poor you can reduce the focal length and keep on shooting! I think Dodi's nice full lunar disc mosaic was shot with 110mm scope.
best -
Alan
On Dec 3, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Ray Byrne wrote:
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
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