The planetary equipment, used these month mainly to hunt down binary stars, turned to Venus this time, barely visible from the buildings blocking the western horizon.
HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher
Venus – 2020-01-24
Binaries, third balcony survey
Trapezium Region, with planetary gear
It has come to my attention that English doesn’t really have a word for self irony. Well, Hungarian does, and it is a word needed when mentioning balcony-observatory-survey all together. So this is my home observatory I really like, but due to several factors, it’s all I’ve got. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher
So, I continued looking at binary stars, after the first and second surveys. This third post comprises of the observations made since the second one. The processing is the same, some artistic license is applied, so the vibrant colors and the shape of the stars is the result of editing – those colors are there though, just not that vibrant.
Though the Trapezium started out as a „binary” ie planetary-technique, it has become deep sky, but with the very same gear.
And all the binaries I have photographed so far are these.
Trapezium Deepsky with Planetary Gear
Trapezium Region
So I’ve been hunting binary stars, because reasons. The Trapezium Cluster fits nicely into the field of view of the gear I put together last year for Jupiter. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher so I turned my tube and… as usual, I play around with exposure, and I noticed that, in spite of the urban, heavily light polluted sky and the ginormous-for-deep-sky effective focal length and thus f ratio of the scope, colors start to show up in the background. So I gave it a try, till the clouds came, oh yeah, so basically half of the mosaic I planned didn’t get recorded. Here’s the half that’s been.
My encoder based focuser
So after I built a focuser controlled by a joystick, and considered it a usability failure, I built one based on an encoder, and modified the soapbox accordingly, maintaining backward compatibility. This encoder based hand controller has its own arduino, and connects to the soapbox, and through it to the PC to receive commands from the desktop app — but this connection is optional, it is fully functional as a standalone device. Below is the block diagram, explaining how it optionally fits into the soapbox daisy chain. Most variables are hand tuned for the DC motor + reductor gear box in use, as the source code reveals.
Rupes Recta 2017
Found this picture in my archive, 2017-09-29
My Astrophotos 2019 – Barangolások a végtelenben
I didn’t include the videos, see my channel: http://youtube.com/user/varadinagypal/videos
A shell script to help the mortal photographer
When working with registered and aligned images that are of different size, I use imagemagick to frame the 16 bit tiff files, with this little script:
#!/bin/bash
OUTPUTRES="4300x2900"
mkdir output
for filename in *.TIF*; do
convert "$filename" -background black -gravity center -extent $OUTPUTRES output/"$filename".out.tif
done
for filename in *.tif*; do
convert "$filename" -background black -gravity center -extent $OUTPUTRES output/"$filename".out.tif
done
Szaturnusz 2019-10-24
HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher
Sun – 2019-12-22
After a longer overcast period, I managed to image the Sun in Hydrogen alpha, using my solar setup: HEQ5, Lunt LS60T Hα, B600, ASI 120MM
HD 33802
I had both some time and clear skies to image yet another colored binary. I used the HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher setup well known by those who follow my posts, and the heavy processing described here. The main issue with these binary stars is that they are faint, and their companions are even more so, so even my mountpusher has a problem following the target — the mountpusher needs at least two-three frames per second to not beep and have the time to apply the needed corrections.
HD33802, HIP 24244 [* in Lep] 3Iot Lep, B8V, 232ly 4.45m [simbad] [photo-planner]
