Moved from Vista to Windows 7 and added Samsung SSD’s

Well that was a short life for Vista on my observatory PC. I only upgraded from Windows XP Pro to Vista Business in January, but I wanted to add an SSD (Solid State Drive) to my observatory PC to speed things up, so now was a good time to install Windows 7 Professional.

Why Professional? Well, so I can control the observatory PC from the house using the in-built Remote Desktop Connection software.

I have already installed SSD’s in both my laptops and the speed increase is amazing, no more noisy spinning hard drives for me. The price of  SSD’s has also decreased. I bought a Samsung SSD 240GB for my home desktop PC and a Samsung SSD 120GB version for the observatory PC. They cost (in 2014) £85 for the 240GB and about £50 for the 120GB version.

I have decided to keep the previously used hard drives inside the PC but use them for storage of the images and video when they are being recorded by the telescopes, so leaving the SSD drives with just Windows and my astronomy programs on.

CAA Webcam Imaging Talks

If anyone missed the talks that Mick and I gave at the Cambridge Astronomical Association on 16th July 2014, then you can download them in PDF format below:

Webcam and Lunar Imaging Talk

Solar Webcam Imaging Talk

They cover the basics of webcam imaging and the webcams that I have used together with some tips on lunar and solar imaging.

Scientific Astrophotography Book Review

Scientific Astrophotography – How Amateurs Can Generate and Use Professional Imaging Data

A chunky book in the Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy series at over 330 pages, as this is a serious subject of contributing to the science of astronomy.

The book is split into three main sections. The first section takes you through your equipment required for making scientific findings. This section takes you through the telescope, mount, cameras, filters and on combining the right telescope with the right CCD camera. There is also a chapter on external factors, namely the weather.

The second section talks about the areas you may be interested in following, whether its lunar imaging, deep sky imaging, planetary imaging, solar imaging or minor planetary imaging. There is then a chapter on planning your observing and imaging session. There is also a chapter which discusses imaging file formats, and how to collect and calibrate your images.

The final chapter in this section is about putting it all into practice and it lists various procedures for collimation, polar alignment, setting up your guidescope, how to focus and about getting your dark, flat, bias and light frames. This chapter also lists the procedures for imaging deep sky and solar objects – large and small.

Now once you have acquired your data part three covers processing and analysing your data. This includes astrometry, photometry, spectroscopy and planetary topography and feature analysis.

There is then a chapter on how to submit your findings to scientific organisations. The last chapter is quite nice as it talks about amateur astronomers getting access to the professional level observatories.

There are five appendices; the first covering acronyms used in the book, the second is a training syllabus, the third contains photometric uncertainty calculations, the fourth is good as it gives you example imaging setups, with a cross section of the authors imaging setup. The fifth appendix lists where to find software on the web.

Scientific Astrophotography is available at Amazon

One Shot Colour Astronomical Imaging Book Review

The book begins describing in detail what a colour CCD is and how it works. The next chapters then go through all the equipment you will need to undertake astronomical imaging. including mounts, telescopes, dew prevention, light boxes.

The next chapters go into detail about planning your imaging sessions and getting your equipment setup. There is then a chapter on focusing and framing your objects. The book also gives a chapter over to calibration which includes taking dark frames and flat frames. How to take exposures and auto guiding is covered.

The next couple of chapters then go into some detail on how to process your images. Histograms, stacking images, luminance layers, calibration, and sharpening, blurring, deconvolution and digital development are all covered.

The final chapter covers imaging other objects including solar imaging, comets, asteroids, photometry, astrometry and hunting for supernovae. There is a nice glossary at the rear of the book together with a list of the Messier and Caldwell objects and how to find them.

It’s a shame the images in the book are in black and white, as having colour images would be a lot better. I also had a number of pages in my version of the book with badly printed images; a number of images had lines across them.

This is quite a new book published in 2012, but it does feel slightly dated in some places. The author has used a Meade LX200 in his images with screenshots from the Meade DSI software. I don’t think a lot of people use this camera anymore other than as a guider, as there are a lot better cameras now on the market. Another point that when talking about taking Mosaics, Photoshop is mentioned, but not that there is an automatic piece of software called ‘Photomerge’ that can create mosaics for you, or there is the free Microsoft ICE software.

But please don’t think One Shot Color Astronomical Imaging is just for people with colour CCD cameras or those with DSLR cameras, as the book contains lots of good advice and tips for any imager – even if you have a mono CCD camera. This is a great book for imaging as it takes through all the steps required in order to generate pleasing images.

One Shot Colour Astronomical Imaging is thoroughly recommended if you want a good overview of how to get into imaging no matter whether you have a mono or colour camera.

One Shot Colour Astronomical Imaging is available at Amazon

3000 Deep Sky Objects – An Annotated Catalogue Book Review

In this book from Springer part of the Patrick Moore series, Ted Aranda has chosen 3000 objects that he viewed over a number of years using his own homemade binocular telescope.

The book contains a number of different objects including bright stars, double stars, variable stars, galaxies, globular clusters, nebulae, open clusters and planetary nebulae.

The book begins with an introduction on how to use the book, what the author used to view the objects and what each parameter means in the book and how to use the catalogue itself.

The main catalogue of objects is in the second part of the book, where you will find the objects divided into the seasons.

Each deep-sky object entry shows you the classification of the object e.g. ga for galaxy. You then get the astronomical catalogue number, the RA and Dec co-ordinates and in what constellation the object exists. Depending on what object you are looking at there is then more information. This may include visual magnitude, size, separation sizes for double stars etc.

Under each object there is then a description and further notes on the object written by the author.

At the rear of the book is an appendix about how to make your own star atlas, as well as a nice chapter on how to build your own binocular telescope with some good colour images of the author’s telescope. An index listed by object is also included at the end of the book.

Overall this is quite a thick book at over 550 pages and it contains many objects, it’s very thorough and nicely laid out. But this book is not really for me, I like a lot of colourful images to see what it is I should be looking at. I would have liked to have had less objects in the book but instead have images with most of them, even if they were just black and white images.

3000 Deep Sky Objects is available at Amazon