I’ve seen some really nice prominences and, well, a dolphin :) I mean I was stunned to see a feature just disappear in front of my eyes while chatting (8 hours long recording sessions have their boring parts).
Instruments:
Optics: Lunt LS35T for hydrogen alpha, N 150/750 for Calcium K line
Camera: ATIK 314E 16 monochrome camera
Software: Artemis, AS!2, Registax 6, GIMP
The previous raw material reprocessed.
M31, 30x90sec, ISO 800
It has been the third time the Borealis Astronomy Club organized its camp in Alba county, Negrilesii Valley. The area is a treasure for astronomy since it lies in a virtually black spot of the Romanian Light Pollution map. On the other hand, by day it is a pitoresque landscape with tourist attractions like the Detunata cliff and, well, another kind of tourism, the disputed mining area of Rosia Montana.
We were 8-14 people in the camp doing mostly visual observations the main instrument being a 30 cm (12″) newtonian on a dobsonian mount. Among others I myself did almost exclusively astrophotography using a motorized (but unguided) EQ3 mount and an unmodified Canon 1100D enhanced by Magic Lantern and various tele- and wide angle lenses my primary target being the Veil nebula using the Canon EF 200 mm lens at F4 or F4.5.
Here are some of the photos I captured and processed. While the Andromeda and the veil came out quite decent, I am a bit disappointed by the overall quality of the pictures. Maybe I will reprocess the raws some other time.
The Sun in Hα
I imaged the Sun using a Lunt LS35T Solar Scope combined with a webcam for hydrogen alpha and a MC 102/1300 with ND3.8 and K-line filter combined with a Canon 1100D, both mounted on an EQ3. While far from ideal setups (like full spectrum sensor), I managed to capture some nice shots.
The Hα disk is a mosaic of 8 frames: the solar scope has a very annyoing vignettation. A total of 20 GiB video data was filmed. Eruptions come from the same raws, edited separately and then added to the disk.
The K line images are a stack of 15 photos shot with the DSLR powered by Magic Lantern.
I detail the process below showing the stages of the imaging session in pictures. Processig was done in Canon Digital Photo Professional (raw->tiff16), Registax6 and GIMP.
Moontrail with rpi
After quite a few successful attempts at imaging trails using rudimentary equipment, I decided to put my Raspberry Pi B+ and its camera to work and image a moontrail.
Past attempts include a set of sunrises at both solstices and at equinox, some sunsets, an analemma and some startrails. For these I used a Canon A800 enhanced with CHDK or a FujiFilm HS20EXR unmod. The CHDK was needed to access otherwise unaccessible options like manual focus, manual shutter speed and… well, an intervalometer. But this time a cron job did the work on my little buddy, the pi.
Below I describe the process in detail which lead to the final pictures. If you wish to skip it, click here.
(tovább…)
From time to time I go through my access log to see what’s the net up to about or against me/csillagtura. Besides the automated attacks a wordpress site usually has to face, there is the referrer spamming of which I wrote last time. Now, at least one of my visitors have the 
malware. This just makes me sad.
Learn your ways around the net, use adblock and if you suspect something, ask around. Don’t let malwares take away your user experience, steal your passwords, privacy… f. your life. Just don’t. :(
I just wanted to write a short note about how much referrer spam hits my website.
What is referrer spam? My access log is not public. When checking my access log I see visits coming from variuos websites as referrers, but these websites turn out to cointain nothing about my website. So I as a webmaster was practically lured to look at a website.
So I deployed a script that reads the referring address and looks for a link to my website (which would explain the referrer). I obviously had to whitelist some domains like known search engines, webmail providers and a few private forums I know my website might get mentioned in.
Here’s what I found after a special SELECT in my log:
count of spammy visits = 265
from unique web addresses (claimed by the visitor) = 116
(I leave out the addresses for obvious reasons)
from these tld’s (claimed by the visitor): ru (41), com (40), net (9), org (8), ua (3), biz (2), tv (2), su (2), xn--p1ai (1), guru (1), in (1), au (1), ae (1), uk (1), it (1), info (1), ro (1)
Each and every black hat practice makes me sad :(
Jupiter, Io’s shadow, Io, Europa, Ganymede
On the night of February the 12th-13th, 2015 I recorded how Jupiter and its moons have danced. I used a 150/750 Newtonian mounted on a motorized EQ3 mount, a 2x barlow, extension tubes (about 15cm) and a 640×480 @8bit webcam (Scopium) (see my setup here).
From 19:28 to 0:36 (local time, UTC+2) I recorded 234 GiB of raw video (93 files between 1 and 3 GiB) trying to emphasize the key events rather than just record at a given speed – making the animation speed up and slow down accordingly.
Individual frames of the animation are each a result of stacking the best 185 frames of each video (Registax 6). These results have been aligned with PIPP then touched up with IrfanView’s batch processor. Since three setups have been used, the resulting frames had to be resized and rotated to match up in the final output.
Due to a minor hardware failure and/or equipment change (adding an extension tube) recording had to be stopped – out of the 84, 6 frames have been generated using recorded data to fill in these gaps (by derotating Jupiter’s disk and manually adding the moons). I also dropped frames so frame numbering is not incremental.
Io’s shadow on Ganymede (rendered in 2016 from the original data)
A solar eclipse on Ganymede
Me, looking at how me and my friends are connected. Only 284 people, but 4052 lines
We tend to call the collective of our friends a network. A social network. We tend to go networking – meeting people. What does my social network mean? I investigated a bit.
For some years it seemed debatable whether social networking sites were private or public space. One might have argued „I am among friends and only friends (those I accepted and they have accepted me) so it is a private matter whatever I do.” Now there is at least one case in Romania when the court ruled that one’s social networking profile is public space and all laws are applicable as such.
This issue made me wonder how private or public is my (or anybody’s) profile depending on the privacy settings applied. So I checked it out and tried to find some other interesting stuff too.
Results in short
I have 283 friends (in a technical sense). My friends have friends anywhere from a few dozen to close to the facebook limit (5000). The count of my friends’ friends is 131,338 individual profiles – so much for the privacy provided by the setting called „friends of friends”. If all my friends who are friends of eachother’s shook hands, that meant 4,052 handshakes. The number of people who are potential audience may easily dwarf that of a regional newspaper and is comparable to the reach of nationwide media products in spite of the seemingly limiting privacy settings of a particular post. (tovább…)
Words stating these pictures are composites (my website)
A while back it came to my attention that one of my pictures depicting the crescent Moon and the crescent Venus is being shared
– again – across the internet, via social media. The problem is people just left out the fact that it is a composite.
So I hereby state to have nothing to do with those misleading shares as I shared my pictures with captions/descriptions both in English (spaceweathergallery) and in Hungarian (my homepage).
About a year ago I photographed a not so close conjunction of the crescent new moon and a similarly thin crescent of planet Venus. Although the article I wrote and published on my website is in Hungarian, it is clearly stated which pictures are the ones recorded and which are edited (montage, composite) in order to emphasize something: relative surface brightness and angular size. The picture I shared (grey frame added just a bit later for the same reason I write this notice) was an obvious montage and had the obvious caption clearly stating that I put the Moon and Venus together for comparison.
Noteworthy that due to the misleading shares, I had to have a very awkward dialog with Emily Lakdawalla from The Planetary Society. So yes, sharing/redditing/tumblring/tweeting part information hurts people.
I have two messages for the people sharing my pictures: 1) RTFM. Always. 2) If it’s about sharing a really close Venus-Moon conjunction (which I just wasn’t lucky to photograph myself due to reasons like the movement of the celestial orbs…), share Iván ÉDER’s picture made from the right place and at the right time. Or share anything from me READING AND KEEPING THE CAPTION that explains what the pixels are on the picture.
Some of the pictures I publish here, on my personal website, are raw photographs. Some are developed through the long process of stacking multiple frames or many gigabytes of videos. Some are the result of compositing like 35 GiB raw data. Some are composited due to obvious reasons and through well explained methods. Some are mosaics. Some are developed from raws in the Hubble archive. Some are generated with 3D animation based on my photos. Some are more like paintings because why not? I mean this is not a scientific journal lacking artistic impressions: I am a creative person confined by the single rule of being fair and honest about what and how I do in order to obtain something.
Fly Me to the Moon – picture of the day on space.com. I am lucky to have witnessed this with my scope and camera at hand.
The Moon is a stack of about 20 frames. The silhouettes are a drawing of mine.
