# Image of the month AAS



## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Just came home from a week in Houston hanging with my brother. Opened up my e-mail today and found out my picture of the 7 sisters had won image of the month in the Austin Astro Society newsletter.










Weather sucked so I didn't get to do any deep sky pics. Although the sky was clear enough to get the goto system all tested out. Teased me every night getting clear then clouding right back up.

So I went to Fry's picked up an Arduino and some sensors and built a weather station for it. Does temp humidity and dewpoint now but I have sensors on the way for barometric pressure and to monitor the voltage and amps going out of my battery pack. Also an ultrasonic critter radar to warn me of deer around my gear. When one is detected it will turn on the light and buzz a buzzer to warn them off. The light is also to get enough illumination out there so I can watch the slews from inside via a wifi camera. I'm going to add in a camera more suited to the night in a week or so. Trying to find the right one that is small enough and most important cheap enough. The weather station will report to me and also turn on the dew heaters when the dewpoint gets close. The display will also display other parameters from the system RA and DEC of the camera voltage and amps from the battery pack weather information and any errors the electronics might spew out. All in all a productive week the Arduino boards are pretty sweet. Takes all the drudgery out of prototyping microcontrollers. Didn't have to solder a thing really although I did make some headers for the final install. Haven't done anything like this in years it was a lot of fun. So many sensors and other things available now cheap too. The most expensive piece in the whole system was 40 bucks. Hopefully the weather will clear up soon and I can get some imaging done.



















And a couple of shots of the rig with the goto installed first night out with it.



















I have the Ha filter now so next time be prepared to be amazed. You won't believe how much stuff is really out there.

Griz


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## MichaelW (Jun 16, 2010)

Congrats on the photo. Looking forward to more of them.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*The sky has cleared here*

Can't believe it but the sky is perfectly clear. Wasn't supposed to happen till early in the AM. So I'm all set up ready to do some Ha imaging tonight. The rig is fully robotic now just click on a star or object on the map and the rig will go right too it. Quick too 8 degrees a second. So we'll see in a few hours just how good it is. From the testing I did in Houston it tracks even better than the steppers did. A nice tight grouping on a 40 minute tracking session before the clouds came in. I'll need every bit of that and more as the Ha images are all very long exposure up to and over an hour in some cases.

Griz


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## MT Stringer (May 21, 2004)

That's awesome.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Well it didn't take long for the dew to coat everything so it wasn't a long session but I did verify everything is working perfectly. The tracking is even better than with the steppers. Managed to get some 20 minute Ha images. Looks like I'm going to have to surrender the 7D to the modders and have them take the Ir filter off for the Ha stuff. Just not enough signal in the IR regions. No biggie I'll work on it some more it takes very long exposures so maybe I'm just not going long enough yet. Hard to focus as well you have to pick a very bright star to do it with the filter in. Going to try it with the filter out next time since its a manual focus I can pull focus then take the body off and put in the filter then reattach. Should be in focus from what I've read. So now I have that totally satisfied feeling all my stuff works and works well. I drove it all over the sky took up most of my session time just watching it go from object to object. Now to get the weather station and critter radar finished up. The other sensors I need are backordered of course but it won't be too long according to the e-mail. Brings back fond memories of back in the day when I had a droid that followed me everywhere. It was a Heathkit Hero 2000 with the arm and wireless keyboard etc. All the goodies. Took me a whole week to build it. Some of them had been at it a month when I showed up the next weekend with mine already working. I miss Heathkit. Built lots of their stuff some of it I still use. I still use the digital scope and logic analyser from time to time. My coding skills are slowly coming back. Actually with the Arduino you don't have to write that much code only the init and actual loop for your stuff the IDE fills in the rest. Pretty sweet development system. I did a lot of work with chips put out by Rockwell that had a language called Forth on them. Originally for programming telescope mounts its a 4th gen language that has a dictionary and instead of creating procedures and functions you create new words for the dictionary. Used it on several projects for BF Goodrich among others. If you use their tires chances are they were tested with one of my creations. It was a blast working on projects with them. The test track out by Pecos is pretty amazing. 8 mile perfect circle. You can get a car up to 120mph in the outer lane and take your hands off the wheel and it will just go round and round. Tethered tractors and all kinds of other oddities are there. Road surfaces that will flat tear a tire up in days. I used to get a fresh set every time I went to test new code. They would run them down the skid pad once. So they had a little flat spot on them at first but it wore away by the time I was back in Ft Worth. The guy I worked for developed the plastic cans full of sand you see on abutments these days. He was a prof at A&M before getting the director's job at the track. Good times fond memories.

Griz


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## DA REEL DADDY (Jun 7, 2005)

Wow, a beautiful pic. Looks like an angel.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

I've always thought of it as the Main Brain. Kinda looks like a huge brain and spinal column. First object my dad showed me in the night sky. Used to love to go to Okla to visit my grandmother so we could see lots more stars. Even back then the light pollution was getting bad in Ft Worth. He knew all the objects learned them in North Africa during WWII from the Arabs. Most places it looks like a fuzzy patch in the sky but if you look at it out of the side of your eye (averted vision) you will see the 7 stars. The atmosphere was way too wet last night to get any decent pictures but it was sure nice to finally spend a few hours using my new scope. Kept loosing my guidestar in the clouds that were floating by so I turned it off and just surfed around a bit taking single shots to see what was there. I'll be using the EF400 when the wind is up though. That big refractor is a pretty good sail. Doesn't really move it around but it sets up vibrations that make the stars fuzz up and get big and kills the detail in the other objects. A lot of people use a couple of poles and a thin tarp to make a windscreen but I think on those nights when its clear but windy I'll just use the camera lenses. This is a link to what it looks like when you do all the colors plus the narrowband. Really brings out the true colors of the object. Red overpowers them all so most of he nebula pics you see are mostly red but thats not the case in reality. Lots of color in the sky.

http://www.astrobin.com/148140/

Done with a scope smaller than the one I have. So I should expect similar results once I go to a mono cooled camera and filters. Even if you mod a DSLR and take the IR filter off to increase the red response when you shoot a narrowband the bayer filter makes 3 of 4 pixels on the chip ineffective Only the pixel that has a red lens over it will gather the Ha data. At some point the cumulative periodic error that any mount has bloats up the stars and ruins the detail. So you want max sensitivity with minimal dark noise so the exposures are as short as you can make them. When I tested the filter with my DSLR I calculated it would take hour or longer exposures to get the kind of signal I wanted but then the dark current is so much more of a problem. The better images I see on Astrobin keep that down to about 20 minutes. Same amount of useable data with a third of the noise. Soon I'll be controlling my mount with this touch pad.










Griz


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## stargazer (May 24, 2004)

Very Kewel, Congrats


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