The main piece of hardware, along with its testing devices

So here’s the problem: I like redundancy and I like control, fine grained, precise control of my devices. These are obviously not the aspects that drove me to choose the EQ3 mount when purchasing it, but since it is the mount I have at hand, and no physical room nor real opportunity for something better, I decided to hack this mount.

Independently of Hernán De Angelis who looks like he did a great job, from the same starting point — so kudos –, I got my hands dirty and my screen full of code. (tovább…)

There’s a legend among amateur astronomers that, without derotation, Jupiter supports only 90 seconds of raw video. Anything above it: derotate.

It always felt fishy to me, even before I started doing planetary photography. Due to other reasons, like capturing the moons’ movement, and the interplay of shadows, I always tried to keep the videos short.

However, the subject is evergreen wherever there are newcomers. So, now I made the math, and since we are people, not mathboys, here’s a handy little table one can play with or scroll below, the same calculator loads into this article.

(tovább…)

So I’ve been thinking about this: what if I want target proposals for objects that have a nearby neighbor. Like the Double Cluster, or  M81 and M82, or M35 and NGC 2158. So I came up with a generic filter in the photo planner that narrows the search results based on whether a particular result has a neighbor. The search switch is conjunction, and the unit is degrees, defaulting to 1 degree. Some searches (like an unpolite naked :conjunction) may still result in a server error (low memory), so the switch works on already specific queries.

Examples:

Galaxies that have an obvious nearby friend:

Open clusters and/or globular clusters that are near each other:

Open or globular clusters or planetary nebulae with at least one planetary nebula in the pair. The curious cases of M46 and NGC 2818:

The results are some pretty nice vistas.

(tovább…)