Ad Astra Observatory

Art Morton wrote:

> The silly little galaxies are quite visible too.
(: I hardly ever see shots of M51 with the little guys showing. Also, I
*never* see shots with that bright-ass star in them. I need to figure
out what star that is; I can probably see it in the finder, if I know
which one it is. That will help with framing.
> Come on, you have to be dancing around.
I’m pretty pleased with the results of flat-fielding.

I feel like I’m progressing by leaps and bounds. Now that I have the
ability to produce some fairly clean data, I think that my next step is
to learn more about processing. I think that there’s detail that I’m
leaving on the table. I mean, all I’m really doing to my images is
contrast stretching right now.

I was amazed to see those dust bunnies disappear. I really felt like a

“real imager” when I saw that calibrated stack. (:

I still have to figure out my whole workflow; I had to reprocess the
flats several times (did I mention that I ended up re-shooting the flats
as Raw Color to match the rest of the stuff?), and doing any step wrong
really screwed the image up.

So I have to learn exactly what I need to do in order to get the
calibration right. Once I get a good set of master frames, I am off and

running. By the way, do you:
1) shoot darks every session
2) have a pre-shot set of “master darks” of a variety of exposure
lengths (or the one exposure length you always use)
3) have a pre-shot master dark that has been bias-subtracted so it can
be scaled

If it’s 3), how long are the subframes? AIP book suggests 5x longer than

your normal subframes, but that just seems silly.

I thought it was pretty funny that I could do some real astronomy on a
cloudy night last night, shooting some flats and flatdarks.

I’m very pleased with my M51. I’m ready to start whacking away at the
rest of the sky. Heck, I can probably start doing mosaics now that I can
correct vignetting. w00t!

I need to get anything useful off my hard drive, and then reformat it. I

keep running out of space. The raw flats (x30) and flatdarks (x10) are
1.5Gb. Ouch.

J