Astrophotos
2009-11-21 05:30:44.71555+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments
2009-11-21 05:30:44.71555+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments
[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]
comments in descending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2009-11-24 15:55:06.119761+00 by: Dan Lyke
Yeah, Jeff, the "upload this to Flickr and the bot figures it all out" is one of those "I might even subscribe to Flickr for this" things. I've got the source for Astrometry.net on one of my computers, but haven't downloaded the database and got that ironed out yet, and the way it "just works" currently is pretty nice, even for a do-it-yourselfer like me.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-11-24 14:25:04.696957+00 by: jeff
Nice images... http://astrometry.net looks very useful.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-11-21 15:51:32.324766+00 by: Dan Lyke
As you can see from the trees in the foreground on the one of those, lens length is way overridden by imager sensitivity and mount capabilities. I think there's a bunch we could do with the gear we've got, and the next steps forward with that would be a more sensitive body and a tracking mount.
However, as I'm packing up for a day at Thunderhill to see 24 Hours of Lemons right now I'm just grabbing the small point-n-shoot, so the more sensitive camera body would also have to be balanced with other uses: the budget for more whale watching or similar stuff.
For deep sky (ie: big magnification) there's also a hell of a lot of data out there already that people are asking for volunteers to sift through. For what we could spend on building longer glass that we'd have to truck around we could spend a lot of time helping improve the facilities at Robert Ferguson Observatory.
And for the record, those were all shot on film, and the tracking for the higher magnification stuff was done manually, albeit on a motorized mount.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-11-21 13:10:20.021495+00 by: Chris
wonderful images, things are moving along now, this line of activity/effort is worth pursuing, new long lens in the budget?