Tim's Blog

Drift Atlanta 2011

2011-05-10T15:11:00.012-05:00

Matt Waldin's #23 Helix 350z

Last Friday and Saturday was the 8th annual Drift Atlanta event at Road Atlanta. This event brings in the big guns of drifting from the Formula Drift series. Road Atlanta is round 2 of this series. Each day was also mixed with some F2000 Championship Series racing. Those were short but enjoyable open-wheel races with some decent passing action in the turn 10a/b chicane. I didn't get a lot of photos of the F2000 races but I did manage to catch an incident that happened right in front of us. From what I saw the #14 of Jose Gerardo made contact with the #29 of Ardie Greenamyer, putting Ardie into the pebbles.

We made it to the track around lunchtime on Friday - just in time to catch the start of the Pro/Am qualifying. These aren't the "big guns" of the main Formula Drift series but they are still incredible drivers with serious skills. Unfortunately I can't find any info on these guys. They were a lot of fun to watch!

More photos in my Drift Atlanta 2001 Gallery

Later the Formula Drift Pro drivers took to the track for practice and qualifying. These guys are amazing! Here are a few photos from the Day 1 action:

Kenneth Moen's #76 350z

Tyler McQuarrie's #17 350z kicks up some dirt

Conrad Grunewald's #79 Camaro qualifies 1st

Saturday we were a little later getting to the track and the place was packed already at lunchtime. We parked way up the backstretch and lugged our stuff down to the fence outside of turn 10b. We ate our McDonald's food while watching the second F2000 race of the weekend. In the afternoon the top 32 Formula Drift drivers came out for open practice and they didn't hold anything back. Lots of off-road excursions and fantastic driving before the main event began around 7:30PM. The drivers paired up for the main competition, taking turns being the leader. The field was whittled down to Daijiro Yoshihara and Darren McNamara fighting for first place in some of the best head-to-head action we saw. Daijiro ended up with the win while Toshiki Yoshioka rounded out the top finishers in third. We came back with sore muscles, dark tans, and lots of photos. We'll definitely be back next year!

Daijiro Yoshihara battling for first place

Darren McNamara taking his turn

Toshiki Yoshioka takes the lead for third place

More photos in my Drift Atlanta 2001 Gallery

New Website

2011-04-06T15:16:00.001-05:00

I started building a photography website over at Smugmug. Check it out here.

I still have some work to do on it and need to learn more about CSS.

Our Taiwan Vacation - Day One

2011-02-16T19:07:00.010-05:00

12/25/2010 - Our first full day in Taiwan. We awoke Christmas morning somewhat rested and still dehydrated. Breakfast at Chinatrust was decent but not as good as it’s been in the past. Many years ago when I was in Taiwan working for Caterpillar I spent weeks staying at this same hotel and the food was definitely better back then. After eating and reorganizing our luggage we were ready to hit the road and head to Taichung, where my wife’s family lives. It was still rainy and dreary, so we walked over to the 7-11 on the next block and pickup some sports drinks and an umbrella. The drinks helped our dehydration. We made it out to the freeway and encountered a minor traffic jam. People were probably headed out for the weekend and all the construction around Jhongli did not help. We stayed in the middle lane most of the time, keeping out of the way of fast drivers on the left and slow trucks on the right. Heck, we were even passed many times on the right. We kept to the speed limit and everyone else seemed to drive at least 10km/hr over, if not faster. It’s better to get there safely than quickly in my opinion. As we approached the outer parts of Taichung we were greeted by brighter skies. Not really sunny, but at least brighter than the area to the north. I don’t think we were using the GPS yet at this point – I had maps printed out of all the locations in Taiwan we planned to visit. We were able to find my in-law’s house without too much difficulty. But then comes the fun part – finding a parking space. My in-laws do not have a car and rent out their parking space, so we must hunt around the city streets looking for a spot. We parked illegally at first to unload luggage then drove around until we found an opening. Throughout our trip parking would always be a challenge. Sometimes we parked at the McDonald’s which is right across the road from the in-law’s building. We were buying coffee there every day, so we felt entitled to use their parking lot temporarily (later we noticed a sign which allowed temporary parking with a purchase of 50NT or more).
With the parking situation settled we spent the day hanging out with family and enjoying a real meal around the dinner table. It was good just to chill out for a while and relax. Jet lag was hitting me all afternoon but I tried my hardest to stay awake. Late in the day we decided to get over to our hotel and check in. We reserved 4 nights at the In One City Inn near FengJia night market. Getting there was quite a challenge. The area around FengJia night market is crowded with people, cars, buses, taxis, scooters and more people. The roads near the hotel are very narrow and just wide enough for our car in most places. People are everywhere and it is like navigating an obstacle course. Thankfully the hotel has parking in the basement levels so that was one less thing to worry about. Arriving in the hotel lobby we immediately noticed the colorful and trendy decor. Very modern and cool! As you walk around inside the hotel there is art and color everywhere. I am really kicking myself now for not getting photos of the hotel interior. The room we had was narrow and long, but the space was sufficient. The bathroom was glass-enclosed so there was not a lot of privacy but the lower sections have frosted glass. The close proximity to FengJia night market is great as you can walk out of the hotel, go to the end of the block and you are basically at the north end of the market. As you walk further down it gets busier, more crowded, with more and more food options. We had some wonderful stinky tofu with quite a spicy kick – served differently than we have had in the past. Later we bought some more typical stinky tofu served with cabbage. Overall the food was OK, not spectacular. We really did not explore everything due to being so tired. We found a cell phone shop in this area and purchased a SIM card for my phone. We could not figure out how to get it working but the next day we noticed the phone was suddenly working. I guess we just needed to wait for the activation to take effect. We went to bed a little early and with the help of Advil PM we both slept great.

Below: 臭豆腐 stinky tofu at 逢甲夜市 FengJia Night Market

Our Taiwan Vacation - The Flight, and The Arrival

2011-02-13T19:56:00.004-05:00

Our flight, Delta 281 ATL-NRT, departed very close to on time and we settled in for the long 14 hour, 50 minute flight. This was our first trip on a Boeing 777. Our previous trans-Pacific flights were always on the old 747’s (like the one we would not enjoy on our return trip through DTW). In comparison the 777 looked nicer inside and featured a personal TV screen in every seat. But I thought the seats were a bit harder than the old 747’s. I couldn’t help looking forward in envy of the business class travelers in their huge lie-flat seats with thick quilted blankets and a full-size pillow. Meanwhile we are all crammed like cattle and I am using my pathetic blanket and pillow to support my back and my butt on these damn rock-hard seats. As usual I picked an aisle seat so I can easily get up when I want to. My wife sat in the middle and a rather tall gentleman, who was a really nice guy, sat by the window. My wife and I each brought noise-canceling headphones to drown out the steady roar of the engines. Those things are essential for long-haul flights. I was looking forward to watching all the movies I loaded up on my laptop, but unfortunately the power plug under the seat would not work. Oh well, at least we had a decent selection of movies and TV shows on the on-demand system. I watched 3-4 movies but for the life of me I can’t remember them all now. The entire flight seems like a blur. I never can sleep on any flight which makes it extremely tiring and explains why I can’t remember much. What I do remember is looking at my watch frequently (perhaps too frequently) and staring in disbelief at how little time had passed since the last time I looked. We both drank lots of water, quickly depleting the 6 bottles we had brought with us. Dehydration is always a problem on these long flights and we could never seem to get enough water. As far as the food goes, it was OK but nothing fancy. More like the average frozen TV dinner you buy at the supermarket (and not the good ones either!). Time kept moving slowly, we kept asking for more water, and we got more exhausted as the flight went on. Occasionally we would stand up by the galley for a while, stretching our legs and trying to keep our moods up. We talked about how we would most likely fly to the west coast on our next Taiwan vacation before making the flight to Taiwan. It helps to break it up into shorter segments. Sitting on this plane for a solid 14-15 hours is almost more than we can take! The last part of our flight as we got close to Japan was rather bumpy and did not help us feel any better. We safely landed in Narita pretty much on time as the sun was about to set – which seemed pretty early for 4PM in the afternoon. Now we needed to get through the Narita security before doing anything else at the airport. Why we need another security screening, after going through a more exhaustive examination in the USA, is beyond me. A waste of time in my opinion but at least they are quick and efficient at it. No removing of the shoes here, expect for my wife who had a little too much metal decoration on her boots. We gathered our stuff on the other side of security and made our way into the terminal, first in search of a toilet then in search of the Skyclub. We had a couple of hours to kill again and I couldn’t wait to see the NRT Skyclub which I had heard so many good things about. My overall impression of the airport was not great as we walked through the terminal. It looked old, tired and outdated. The bathrooms were not in great shape with lot of broken parts here and there and dingy tile that looked 30 years old (and very well could have been!). This is the main Japan hub for international travel? When we finally discovered the Skyclub location we were pleasantly surprised. It was large, clean, and comfortable. The food selection was not bad and there was a decent choice of drinks, even self-serve beer machines! I want one of those at home! But sadly I didn’t partake of the beer because I think it would have made me feel worse at that point. I went straight for the coffee in a vain attempt at waking myself up. Didn’t help much, but at least I was comfortable for a short time in the cushy chairs while browsing the internet (checking Facebook of course). I wish I would have taken some photos but I just did not have the energy to mess with it. When it got close to boarding time we repeated the same process as Atlanta. This time my wife got snagged for a security check on the walkway to the aircraft. This was something I have never seen before and yet again seemed like a silly waste of time. I was worried about overhead bin space so I grabbed her roller bag and went on to our seats. Getting that bag into the small bins of this ancient 757 was a challenge. I managed to cram it in sideways and the girl already seated in our row was nice enough to move her bag back so I could fit my backpack up there. My wife eventually joined me a few minutes later and we wedged ourselves in another uncomfortable aircraft. Leaving NRT seemed to take forever. We taxied for at least 30 minutes while my wife was in dire need of using the lav. After takeoff the wait was too much to bear for her and she got up long before the seat belt sign was turned off. When you gotta go you gotta go! The flight to Taiwan was rough, adding nausea to our exhaustion. I couldn’t even think about eating the meal they served. We made it to the gate slightly early but still at a late hour of nearly 10PM. With a little second wind of energy we sped through customs and out to the arrivals area. Now we faced the challenge of contacting the rental car company. We had no phone (I brought my GSM-capable phone but we needed to buy a SIM card first) and no Taiwan money for the pay phones. My wife went over to a little shop and bought a couple of drinks so we could have some coins for the phone. While she called I stood by our luggage fending off half a dozen cab drivers who wanted our business. We got our directions where to wait for them and proceeded outside the terminal and across to an island in the middle of the roads in the cool and wet night. It felt good to be outside, even if we were surrounded by a chaos of cars, taxis, and shuttle buses. Our rental company van eventually arrived and we were told we had too much luggage to fit in one van. They suggested I go first and my wife follow on the next van. She was not too pleased with this arrangement but reluctantly agreed. The trip to the rental car office seemed like a crazy maze of incomprehensible logic. I remember at first we made a big loop around to the left and drove right by the very place we were just standing, but from the back side. All that way to go around just to make a right turn! Great planning there. I was dropped off at the office along a dark, dingy road and stood there feeling a bit lost and disoriented. A couple more vans came in but still no sign of my wife. After what seemed like an hour, but was really only about 20 minutes, my wife arrived and stepped out of the van looking a little displeased. I found out later that the van had nearly passed her by and she yelled out some obscenities before another company’s driver assisted and got the van to stop (kudos to that guy!). After a few minutes our Nissan Livina arrived and we were ready to officially begin our vacation in Taiwan. We liked this car from the beginning, with ample space for all of our luggage. It was a little hard to get used to at first and being so late and dark it did not help us to locate all of the controls. We cautiously made our way out to freeway #2 and immediately got a strong dose of Taiwanese driving. Cars flew by us on both sides and, as we merged onto the freeway, they even came by on the right side long after the lane ended. We made it to Jhongli where we had a room reserved at the Chinatrust Hotel. Once we got into Jhongli my wife’s memory kicked in and she knew her way around. We arrived at Chinatrust close to midnight and parked in the sidewalk/courtyard area right in front of the building (with their permission of course). Once we made it to our room we were tired but strangely not ready for sleep. We were hungry and decided to venture out and see what we could find. One thing I love about Taiwan is always being able to find some street food when you are out late at night. We found a corner shop serving a variety of soups, noodles, and dumplings. That really hit the spot! Later we walked down to a nearby night market and everyone was closing up shop already. Too bad, back to the hotel! We hit the bed very late and managed a few hours sleep before another day would begin.

Our Taiwan Vacation - Departure Day

2011-02-10T17:26:00.000-05:00

We arrived at the airport in Atlanta very early to beat the morning traffic. I’d much rather relax at the airport, even if it’s for 2-3 hours, than sit in rush hour traffic and worry about making our flight on time. And, being so close to Christmas I fully expected a huge amount of people flying today as well. We parked off-site to save some money and rode the shuttle bus in to the terminal. As we made our way into the terminal our bags were already starting to feel a little heavier. We each had a large rolling duffel packed to the limit (just shy of 50 lbs. each). And we each had slightly smaller duffel bags which were also stuffed to the breaking point but fortunately much less than 50 lbs. For carry-on luggage I had my Tamrac Expedition backpack for all my camera stuff and a messenger bag my dear wife made for me. She carried the ubiquitous black rolling carry-on bag as well as a matching messenger bag (with a little more girly flair of course!). Overall we were each loaded down with nearly our own body weight in luggage! As I write this in hindsight now I know that I will never, ever pack so much stuff again.
As we entered the terminal (sometime between 6-7AM, I can’t remember now) there was already long lines of travelers queuing up at the various check-in lines and baggage drop off line. Since we had used online check-in we headed straight for the nearest baggage drop-off only to be told to go to another area all the way at the end. The long line moved fairly quickly and in about 20 minutes we were finally free of our heavy bags, for now at least. We made our way through security, which was quick and painless as it often seems to be at Atlanta, and took the underground train out to the international terminal. The international terminal at Atlanta has, in my opinion, the best selection of food anywhere in the airport. But with all those choices we always seem to end up at McDonald's! Today was no different, and it seemed to be the popular choice as there were several long lines of people waiting for their greasy breakfast too. We sat in the food court and enjoyed our high-calorie high-fat breakfast while sipping on piping-hot coffee (McDonald’s coffee is one of our favorites). After we finished our breakfast I decided to make a quick visit to our gate to make sure we had an aircraft sitting there. It was, so now I could really relax. At the same time I looked out the large windows and noticed it was getting close to sunrise and our gate was facing directly east. With the sun rising further to the south this time of year I could see it would come up right under incoming flights. Sounds like a prime photo opportunity! I rushed back to the food court to get my wife and my gear and headed back to the gate. I snapped off several photos of the rising deep-orange sun while trying to get the timing right with the incoming flights. I had to keep the lens hood against the glass to avoid reflections. I got a few decent shots before the sun starting getting too bright.
At this point we still had a couple of hours to kill and fortunately we each had one-day Delta Skyclub passes courtesy of our bank, Suntrust. We had previously signed up for their Skymiles debit card and were each given a one-day pass as a thank you. There are two Skyclubs in Terminal E, one small club open in the morning and a much larger club than opens later in the day. We headed over to the smaller club and first verified that we could use our passes on our connection in Narita, Japan. They said we could and we proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes or so enjoying free wireless internet and free drinks & snacks. I wish we could always enjoy this privilege but I doubt we will ever get the opportunity on future trips. The time went rather quickly and before we knew it, it was time to begin boarding. Boarding a flight is always a fun social observation for me. You always have the people with status at Delta standing right up front long before the flight begins boarding (called “gate lice” on a certain discussion board). They are easily spotted usually wearing a sport-jacket, holding their roller bag with their proud Delta tags attached while talking loudly in their cell phone. The rest of us common folk queue up in the area near the gate, all taking small steps forward as they progress through the boarding sequence. Usually by the time they call our zone I have already quietly & stealthily made my up towards the front. Overhead bin space never seems like enough so it always helps to get to the seats as soon as possible. We took our seats on the 777 and prepared ourselves for the long journey to Japan.

Our Taiwan Vacation - The Plan

2011-01-30T19:41:00.004-05:00

We started planning our vacation to Taiwan about a year before the actual departure date. We really didn’t need to start so early, but once we decided to go the excitement got the best of us. Researching locations, reading restaurant reviews, and viewing photos online from scenic spots was too much fun to put off until later. It was a difficult balancing act between seeking out great food and picking the best locations for photography. Originally my wife focused more on food while I did a lot of research on where & when to go for the best photos. As the year went on, my wife took an interest in photography and her priorities shifted slightly, but food was still a very important part of our plan.
We knew we wanted to leave around Christmas and come back in early January. My company typically shuts down for a week during the holidays, or at least operates with a fraction of the regular staff. The advantage of planning around this time is that the week between the holidays does not count against my normal vacation time. We had hoped that this would outweigh the disadvantage of being in Taiwan during winter (i.e. bad weather). With that plan in mind, we waited for the important 331-day mark from our return date to begin searching for flights. That’s the earliest date Delta will allow you to book a flight. And why did we decide Delta? Over the years I had built up a huge stash of Skymiles, some from business travel but the majority from using our Delta Amex card for everything we can. We even switched our banking over to Suntrust to take advantage of their Skymiles debit card and the bonus miles for signing up. They also gave us a couple of Skyclub one-day passes which would be very useful for our flight out. Getting back to the schedule, I waited until we were 331 days from January 10th (our best guess for a return date) to start checking for available award tickets on Delta.com. Delta has low, medium, and high award levels and it can be tricky sometimes to find anything in the low level. Sometimes low level award tickets open up right before the travel dates, but we did not have that kind of flexibility of making plans at the last minute. When I began my searching I was disappointed to see only a few medium and mostly high award tickets available, but around the holidays that’s to be expected. The only dates I could find that fit in with my work schedule was a 12/23 departure and a 01/09 return. At a medium award level we were looking at 120,000 Skymiles per ticket plus about $63 in tax. Not a bad deal for a ticket that usually costs well over $1,000.
With our dates set we could now start planning a formal trip schedule. At first we, of course, tried to fit everything and anything into our trip. We went through many revisions, adding things, removing things, moving things around. Sometimes we put the planning aside for a few weeks to take a break. At some point we realized that we just did not have enough time to fit in everything we wanted to do. So I began searching the Delta award calendar for a new return flight. It didn’t take long for some medium level awards to pop up in that second week of January. These award calendar changes may last weeks or they may only last a day or two so I jumped on a new return date of 01/13. Of course we paid a fee for that change but still overall much, much cheaper than buying a full fare ticket. But we could not get the same route on the return flight and ended up with Taiwan -> Narita -> Detroit -> Atlanta with an old 747 for the Narita to Detroit leg.
Now that we had a few more days in our trip we could spread out our schedule a bit and fit in a few more things to see & eat. We continued revising our schedule over the next few months. We came to our senses eventually and cut out several things from our schedule. It became too busy and not really like a vacation at all. With a little over a month to go we finally had something we were happy with and began making all the hotel & rental car reservations. Now the excitement was really building! We had to shuffle a couple of days around in our schedule due to hotel availability around New Year’s Day, but managed to make it work.

This is the final schedule we came up with:
12/23: Leave Atlanta 11AM, connect through Tokyo

12/24: Arrive in Taiwan at 9:40PM, pick up rental car.
Stay at Chinatrust Hotel in Jhongli.

12/25: Drive to Taichung, relax and eat with family.
Maybe get some Taichung night view photos from 台中望高寮夜景.
Stay at “In One City Inn” near FengJia night market (in-laws’ house is full for a few days).

12/26: Big lunch with family and other relatives. (mother-in-law’s 60th birthday).
Shopping for our road trip at Costco & Watsons.
Stay at “In One City Inn” near FengJia night market.

12/27: My wife needs to renew Taiwan ID, driver’s license & visit bank.
MiaoDong street market in FengYuan.
Visit ShengShin train station & old bridge ruins (龍騰斷橋) in SanYi.
Stay at “In One City Inn” near FengJia night market.

12/28: Drive up to Taipei.
Visit Dihua Street and fabric market.
Beef noodles at 林東芳牛肉麵 and 穆記小吃牛肉麵館.
Visit Bellavita Mall and Taipei 101.
Hike up to Elephant Mountain for sunset photos of Taipei.
DinTaiFung & other stuff around Yongkang Street for dinner.
Some night photography at CKS Memorial.
Stay at Hotel 73 in Taipei.

12/29: Get to 金華街燒餅油條 very early for clay oven rolls.
Drive to Houtong to see the cats, the town, and old train tunnels.
Lunch in Ruifang then drive over to Jiufen. Stay in Jiufen until after sunset.
Miaokou night market in Keelung.
Stay at Blue Ocean Hotel in Keelung.

12/30: HePing Island photos at sunrise.
Drive to Shifen Waterfall.
Stop for lunch near Keelung then take Hwy 2 around north coast to Danshui.
Sunset photos at Fisherman’s Wharf (Lover’s Bridge) and some 小吃 in Danshui for dinner.
Stay at Fullon Hot Springs Hotel in Danshui.

12/31: Spend the morning around Beitou and visit library. Hike up 軍艦岩 if we feel like it.
Drive down to Taipei in the afternoon. Park near 彩虹河濱公園.
Visit Raohe night market.
Get photos of Taipei 101 fireworks from the riverside park.
No hotel, drive to Yehliu area and get ready for sunrise photos (maybe catch a nap in the car).

1/1: Sunrise at Yehliu area (probably 龜吼)
Walk around Yehliu park for photos in the morning.
Take Hwy 2 east and stop at Nanya Rock, Bitou Cape, and keep going towards Yilan.
Dinner at Luodong night market.
Stay at Hotel in Luodong (羅東西樺商務客棧).

1/2: 五峰旗瀑布 waterfalls & 林美石磐 trail in the morning.
Lunch & dinner in the Yilan/Jiaoxi area. Also night market (宜蘭東門夜市).
Stay at hot spring B&B in Jiaoxi (奇立丹品田雙人房).

1/3: Sunrise photos at Beiguan Ocean Park.
Drive to Hualien in the morning.
Relax at 七星潭 in the afternoon.
Dinner at 賀川日本料理, night market (自強夜市).
Stay at Hotel Bayview in Hualien.

1/4: Sunrise photos at 嶺頂日出.
Night market (自強夜市).
Stay at Hotel Bayview in Hualien.

1/5: Get plenty of food to last the day, drive into Taroko Gorge.
Visit the usual places in Taroko Gorge and continue to HeHuanShan.
Go to HeHuan main peak for sunset photos if we make it in time.
Stay at the Songxue Lodge on Mt. Hehuan east peak.

1/6: Hike up HeHuan east peak very early to get sunrise photos.
Drive down to Qingjing for photos & lunch.
Go to HeHuan main peak for sunset photos if we missed the previous day.
Stay at Sunnydale B&B (日光青境雲頂南) in Qingjing.

1/7: Sunrise photos in Qingjing, then drive south to Puli.
Visit Chung Tai Chan Monastery in Puli and then lunch in the area.
Dinner in Taichung at 風尚臭豆腐, and other 小吃.
Stay with wife’s parents.

1/8: Spend some time with family.
Visit temple (大甲鎮瀾宮) and then the coast for sunset (高美濕地).
Stay with wife’s parents.

1/9: Take HSR down to Kaohsiung.
Spend the entire day there and head back to Taichung late.
Stay with wife’s parents.

1/10: Out with family to Changhua, Lugang, & west coast oyster farms.
Stay with wife’s parents.

1/11: More family time.
Lunch at the awesome DongShih Beef Restaurant (東勢李炒手).
Stay with wife’s parents.

1/12: Leave Taichung and drive up to Jhongli.
Dinner at the night market (中原夜市).
Stay at Chinatrust Hotel in Jhongli.

1/13: Return rental car and fly home in the morning

Getting back to blogging

2011-01-29T17:41:00.005-05:00

After a long absence I have decided to try to update my blog more often. My wife took up the photography hobby last year and we are getting out of the house much more, which is a good thing! So much I want to share, so I'll try my hardest to keep this thing updated. Also, we recently returned from a 3-week vacation in Taiwan. I have a lot to share about that trip and many, many photos yet to be processed. Stay tuned...

Fireworks!

2009-07-25T20:11:00.002-05:00

I haven't posted in a long, long time so I will try to get some new stuff on here soon. I've temporarily gotten out of the astronomy hobby so I can concentrate more on photography. I can only afford one expensive hobby right now so some equipment was sold to fund new camera equipment purchases. More on that later. In the meantime, I'll share some photo slideshows from two fireworks shows we attended on the 3rd and 4th.

First is the Sugar Hill fireworks held on July 3rd and it was our first time attending this show. This location is just about two miles from our house which makes it easy to get in and get out. This was a pretty good show - we were quite impressed. The shells were mostly spaced far enough apart to allow for some easy photography. The wind was also in a favorable direction.

The next night we drove down to brave the huge crowds at Lenox Square Mall in the Buckhead area. We've been to this show a few times and it never fails to disappoint. A shorter show than Sugar Hill, but probably five times as many shells fired in the air in a fast and furious pace. Great for the die-hard fireworks fans, but challenging for photography. Along with that slight difficulty, the wind wasn't moving the smoke very much and towards the end of the show the wind was blowing the smoke right at us. Overall I was happier with my Sugar Hill photos but still glad I went to Lenox. The only downside to this show was the 2-1/2 hours to get home. A total traffic nightmare getting out of there!

Tamrac 5586 Expedition 6x Backpack

2008-12-13T18:55:00.010-05:00

With some new gear comes a need to store it all safely away. Previously I wrote about my Lowepro 200AW and how uncomfortable it was for me, as well as being too small for the amount of stuff I've accumulated in the early stage of this obsession, er...I mean hobby. The Lowepro is long gone, having fetched a decent price on Ebay. Since then I've only had the Crumpler Six Million Dollar Home (6MDH) for day trips. That bag has been perfect for its purpose so far and I definitely call it a keeper. For long trips and flights, I needed something to carry everything from home to my destination, while also bringing the 6MDH for walking around once I got there. As usual, I researched the crap out of everything, looking at all the backpacks out there in my desired price range. I read reviews, discussion boards, and read reviews again. Among the brands I looked at were Tamrac, Tenba, Crumpler, and even Lowepro again (a different one of course!). There may have been others but it's all a blur now. I finally decided that the Tamrac model 5586 in the Expedition 6x series had everything to meet my needs right now and allow a bit of extra room for future stuff.
I just received the 5586 a little over a week ago and I can't help smiling and feeling impressed every time I look at it. The build quality is outstanding. Let's start on the outside and work our way in:

On the outside are two "wing accessory" pockets for memory cards, batteries, chargers and any other small knick-knacks you want to put in there. I can stuff a lot of compact flash cards in there and they even have a management system with red flaps to let you know which memory cards are empty and which are full. The lower pocket is meant to hold part of a tripod's feet while two straps in the middle hold the tripod secure. There's another strap on the top that wraps around the upper part of the tripod for even more support. My Slik Sprint Pro tripod with Flashpoint F-1 ballhead fits nicely here. You can't see it in the photo above, but there's a padded laptop compartment right behind all those front pockets and it is sized for a 14.1" screen. I don't plan on taking my laptop with me, so I stuff this pocket with my Cokin Z-Pro filter holder, a pouch holding some 4"x5" graduated neutral density filters, a B+W 77mm MRC UV filter, and a B+W 77mm Kaesemann circular polarizing filter.

Moving on to the inside:

The Tamrac 5586 is capable of holding two DSLR bodies with medium-sized lenses mounted and six additional lenses in the main interior compartment. I suppose you could get one DSLR body with a long telephoto zoom along with another body sans lens too. I don't know that I'll carry all these lenses on a long trip, but it's nice to know I can fit them all in. Everything is well padded and well supported. On the inside of the front flap are two large transparent pockets that I use for my remote switches, USB cord, miscellaneous filters, adapters rings, and my Whibal card too.
The shoulder straps seem very sturdy and feel comfortable, even with 21 lbs of camera gear hanging off my back. A sternum strap provides even more adjustment and support to the shoulder straps, and a waist strap rounds out the great support package. I'm probably not in shape to carry this pack a long distance, but that's not Tamrac's fault. I'll get back into the exercise routine right after the holidays, I promise!

The Cokin Z-Pro Filter Holder

2008-12-09T17:32:00.003-05:00

I researched a few filter holders in my quest to come up with a decent landscape photography kit that wasn’t too ridiculously expensive. It pretty much came down to the Cokin P and Z-Pro holders, as well as the Lee foundation kit. The Lee seemed very nice but the price with a wide-angle adapter was pushing my budget a bit too much. The Cokin P holder was the cheapest option but I really wanted to avoid any potential vignetting with an ultra-wide angle lens like my new Canon EF-S 10-22mm. I ended up purchasing the Cokin Z-Pro as a combo from 2filter.com with some Hitech graduated neutral density (GND) filters. The combo kit comes with the Z-Pro holder, an adapter ring (you order by size to match your lens filter threads) and one Hitech GND filter of choice. I also added two more GND filters to my order so I have a few selections for different conditions. Below you can see the filter holder adapter ring mounted to a lens (77mm filter size):

The filter holder slides over this adapter and is held on the top and bottom by little plastic push pins. These little pins are a major design flaw which I will get into later. Below you can see the holder mounted on the adapter:

And here is a side view showing all three filter slots mounted:

What I like about the Z-Pro is that it is configurable for 1, 2, or 3 filter slots. The construction is plastic, but seems pretty durable and very lightweight. In the default configuration with three filter slots, I noticed part of the third filter slot becoming slightly visible in the frame at 10mm. I removed the third slot and did not see any vignetting at all. Since I will most likely only use one filter until I get more experience, I removed the second filter slot and then ran into a serious design problem with this filter holder. Those two little pins on the lower part of the filter holder stick out and prevent a filter in the first slot from being pushed down. You need to be able to move the filter up and down to adjust for the horizon. Here you can see a filter mounted in the first slot, and only about a quarter of the shaded portion can cover the lens due to the pins:

While the pins are removable, they are necessary to keep the holder in place on the adapter ring. Eliminating them was not an option. After examining the pins I realized that they could be modified to sit flush and still hold in place. Below you can see my modified pin sitting in front of the unmodified pin. I simply cut off the end so I am left with the groove running the entire length of the pin:

This allows the pin to be pushed flush either way, and still has enough friction to stay put. I rapped the filter holder on a table a few times and the pins didn’t budge. Here you can see the filter holder again, but with the lower two pins sitting flush:

And here you can see the GND filter mounted in the first slot.

As you might notice above, I reinstalled the second filter slot since it does not get in the way at wide angles and I might get some solid neutral density filters in the future to use along with the GND’s. For the price I am pretty happy with what I got, even with the design flaw. The Lee filter holder has a much better design and better construction. Maybe one day I will upgrade, but for now, and for someone just starting out in landscape photography, the Cokin Z-Pro should suit my needs just fine. Now I just need to get out and take some photos!

Tasty China - Marietta

2008-10-17T15:43:00.004-05:00

Last weekend we were over in Marietta for a fabric warehouse sale, and it just happened to be right down the road from Tasty China. We've heard a lot about this restaurant on Atlanta Cuisine, often touted as the best Chinese food in the Atlanta area. However, our first impression does not agree with that statement at all.
The inside of the Tasty China is nothing fancy and pretty typical of the strip-mall Chinese restaurant.

Service is no-nonsense and the main hostess will impatiently help you with your order. The menu is pretty long and you'll see many items crossed out and a few prices changed. We stayed away from the American menu and stuck with the traditional Chinese dishes.
First up was the Hot & Numbing Beef Rolls.

These were not what we expected at all. It looked more like Mexican food but we were pleasantly surprised by the flavor. Not too hot, but there was the numbing flavor of Sichuan peppercorns that I love so much. These are easy for leftovers too - you can just take them out of the fridge and eat immediately. A bit messy, but I would order these again for sure.
Then we had to try their Dry Fried Eggplant:

This was always well-recommended on Atlanta Cuisine and it did not disappoint. It reminded me of thick-cut sweet potato fries. Crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside - these would be even better with beer. These do not turn out so well when reheated, so try to eat them all at the restaurant.
Next, we tried the Steamed Chicken in Spicy Oil:

This is also called kou-shui-ji (mouth watering chicken). The color of the oil was much more red than my photo shows. It looked very spicy but the flavor was actually pretty mild and light. The chicken was incredibly tender and the pieces buried deep in the oil are the most flavorful.
Then we had a dish called something like Fish with Pickles:

I am not sure what this dish is supposed to be but it was rather bland, with an occasional punch from a scattered peppercorn here and there. Not spicy, not sour, not really anything. This is not something we would ever order again.
We hoped that things would look up with the Twice Cooked Pork:

Wow - talk about a salt overload! This could have been good, but it was too salty to be edible by our tastes. Some will claim they do not use MSG, but my body was giving me the signs of an MSG reaction for most of the day after eating here. This dish needed a lot of bulking up with vegetables at home to reduce the saltiness and make the leftovers last a little longer.
Finally we tried the Home Style Tofu with Pork:

Again, here was a dish that could have been very good but was made too salty to eat by most human standards. We were also disappointed that the chef did not make the extra effort to use silky tofu. They used regular firm tofu, which is the easy way out for this dish, but lacks the texture that you would expect. We added lots of cabbage, water, and some black vinegar to make a decent stew from this dish.
Overall this was not what we would call the best Chinese food we have had in this area. Much closer to us we have Sichuan House and China Master which I would put above Tasty China any day. We did get a lot of food for our money at Tasty China, but it's a waste if the food is not even edible. Maybe people think all Chinese food should be this salty? I disagree and do not have the same issues with many other restaurants I have tried. If we happen to be in the area again, we might give them a second try. I give Tasty China a "C" for their food, and a "B+" for their prices. But it would take many more visits to form a better opinion.

Looking for a camera "day bag"

2008-09-23T17:14:00.002-05:00

After carrying my Lowepro SlingShot 200AW bag around for just a few hours in downtown Atlanta one day, it became obvious that this was not the right bag for me. The Lowepro is a nice bag and seems to be built very well, but the design puts the weight in an awkward position and resulted in a lot of neck and back pain within the first hour of wearing it. I even took out most of my gear, just bringing my Canon 30D, three lenses, a spare battery and some filters. Fully loaded, there's no way I am carrying this around.

It was probably more a case of my equipment outgrowing my bag much more quickly than I thought. I decided that I would need a larger backpack to carry everything when flying or taking a road trip, plus a smaller bag for short day trips and walking around town. The backpack can wait a little longer so I went on the hunt for a comfortable, good-looking camera bag that could hold my 30D plus a couple of extra lenses. After looking for days and days I made a decision to get the Domke F-2 bag in the cool olive-drab color. I loved the military look and the F-2 seemed to get nothing but good reviews. But the day after I placed the order I discovered the Crumpler line of bags. These looked too good to pass up, so I ordered one to compare, knowing that Amazon would accept a return for the bag I didn't want.
First to arrive was the Domke F-2:

This bag fits the requirement of cool looking, and will easily hold my 30D and 4 extra lenses with lots of room in the pockets for other stuff. The inside has a 4-hole padded divider that can move anywhere in the bag from side to side.

The first problem I have with this bag is the two metal hooks that secure the top flap. They are kind of hard to open and close with one hand and a little sharp on the bottom. The flap has some Velcro to hold it as well, so I suppose you could leave the hooks unfastened when walking around. The other problem I have with this bag is the way the divider makes the interior space a bit awkward for putting my camera in. You really only have the choice of putting the camera in the end not taken up by the divider.

It just didn't feel right trying to get my camera in and out when pushed all the way to one side. I was afraid of hitting the metal hardware that holds the strap too. I would prefer to have two separate dividers so that the camera could sit in the middle. The only other issue I have with the Domke F-2 is that it is just a little too big for what I need. I like that it's made in the USA and I am sure it would be a great long-lasting bag, but once I received the Crumpler, my decision became pretty easy.

I opted for the Six Million Dollar Home model after reading reviews and discussion boards. It seemed to be about the right size I was looking for, and it was. The exterior color scheme is great but I am not 100% crazy about the interior green. But I can live with it.

What I love about this bag is that I can put my 30D right in the middle and still have plenty of space on either side for two larger lenses or 4 smaller lenses. With my longest lens, the Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro, the bag has plenty of depth. It could probably handle a larger, longer lens too.

I like the single quick-release latch on the front flap. It only takes one hand to get this bag open. The strap seems strong and comes with a matching pad that wraps around the strap wherever you want it. The build quality seems very good and a little stiffer than the Domke. I feel a bit more secure carrying around the Crumpler.
So the Domke is headed back to Amazon and my barely-used Lowepro SlingShot will be up for sale soon. Now to pick out a backpack!

China Master, a.k.a. Lin's in Duluth

2008-09-09T14:57:00.004-05:00

After a trip down to Stone Mountain last Saturday for the Yellow Daisy Festival, we stopped on the way home (well, sort of on the way) for some Sichuan cuisine at the new home of China Master in Duluth. The sign in English still says Lin's but in Chinese the name "Chuan Ba Wang" signifies that this is indeed the China Master restaurant. We had never been to the old China Master further down Peachtree Parkway but we had always heard good things about it. Just when we wanted to finally go there many months ago, they shut their doors and closed shop. Last month the chef opened back up at the Lin's location off State Bridge and Medlock Bridge roads. What makes this location really interesting is the close proximity to Sichuan House, which is located right across State Bridge Road. Two Sichuan restaurants so close - which one to choose? This was definitely a test of sorts.
First up was "wu geng chang wang" which was also one of our first dishes at Sichuan House.

If you are not a big fan of intestines this dish might change your mind. The intestines were prepared perfectly and so was every other component of this wonderful dish. Of course, you would expect perfection from the chef who invented it a few decades ago in Taiwan. Chef Liu (not to be confused with Chef Liu's restaurant) came up with this dish a long time ago in Taiwan. He took an existing beef dish and replaced the beef with intestines and pork blood. The combination of all the flavors is wonderful.
Next up was their hot spicy beef, also commonly called hot boiled beef:

There are two items on the menu called "hot spicy beef" in English but they are not much different. One uses chili powder, and one uses actual chili peppers. We opted for the latter. The addition of cilantro is a typical Taiwanese touch. The broth is much more flavorful than Sichuan House, and without the starch that SH uses in their version.
Our third dish was braised tofu:

This dish is fairly simple but yet so savory. The gravy is rich with flavor and the silky tofu melts as you bite through the denser, fried outer layer. Wish they had more of a "house tofu" type dish like Cafe 101 but maybe it's called something else. There's quite a few tofu dishes and, just like the beef, there are two with the same name.
Our final dish was deep-fried chicken wraps:

This is a crunchy treat that would go great with some cold beer. The sauce it is served with is a very old-school Taiwanese style miso-based cold sauce. It's a great combo and something we have rarely seen outside of Taiwan.

Overall the food was great, so good you didn't notice the so-so decor and somewhat dingy ceiling. SH has the decor advantage but so far I am making Lin's my preferred choice for Sichuan food in this area (like we have a lot of choices!). Price-wise it's about the same, maybe a buck or two cheaper per dish.

The basement work continues...

2008-09-05T17:26:00.003-05:00

Eventually I'll get done with this darn project! It's getting very close now - just down to lots of little details. The major work is done.
I finally got the boards sanded and stained that serve as a sort of shelf for the three arches in my wife's sewing room. Here's a pic of one of the arches:

Here's a closeup of the shelf:

The basement is fully powered up now that the subpanel has been connected to the main service panel. My Cutler-Hammer panel has plenty of room for expansion:

The home theater still has some details to get done before the big-screen TV moves down. Our oak entertainment center was sanded, primed and painted to match the rest of the trim. I am going to frame up some fabric speaker grills to hide the speakers and subwoofers in the cabinets.

This pic is looking back the other way in the home theater. My computer is set up in the corner on the left and you can also see that we finally painted the ugly door.

My wife's sewing room is really looking good now. Lots of Ikea cabinets for all her fabric.

Looking the other way down the sewing room. The doors in the back lead to my workshop. The workshop is a mess right now so no pics of that until I have some time to clean up & organize.

I sanded and stained some birch plywood to make a large cutting table & work surface that sits on top of a pair of Ikea HEMNES 8-drawer dressers:

My wife did a great job sanding and painting her sewing table. It used to be wood colored but now fits in much better with the same paint color as the trim:

The French doors that will divide the home theater from the sewing room still need painted and hung on the sliding rail system. The rail guides are in place and some trim work needs done around the floor after the doors are in place.

Our Crate and Barrel sofa has been on order for almost 2 weeks with 8-10 more weeks to go. We really can't wait to get it so our basement will feel totally complete. Until then we'll use one of our existing sofa pieces. That's all for now.

More basement progress

2008-08-24T19:56:00.004-05:00

This weekend we continued to take care of the finish work as we get very close to the end of this long, long project. While I installed the baseboard and quarter-round trim, my wife assembled a bunch of Ikea cabinets for her sewing room.
Here are some of the cabinets going together in the sewing room. The two dressers in the middle will have a large tabletop placed over the top for a large working surface.

Here's a pic of the home theater with all but a couple of small pieces of trim installed. Also shown is a large 8x10 shag rug we purchased online from NaturalAreaRugs.com

A closer shot of the rug next to the wall. We really love the color and soft feel of this rug. Definitely a bargain for the price we paid.

An even closer shot of the shag rug:

I also wired up the subpanel and started ripping out drywall under the main service panel in the garage. Next weekend I'll connect the main panel to the subpanel to finish up the electrical work. I already installed a 2-pole 40A feeder in the main service panel. The French doors I mentioned in an earlier post still need painted, as does the ugly door that leads outside. With the holiday weekend coming up augmented by a vacation day, we have a long 4-day weekend to hopefully finish up the basement and begin moving in.

Astro Motion Technologies takes off

2008-08-13T18:49:00.003-05:00

A while back in this thread I talked about the work that Tom at Astro Motion Technologies did on my EQ6 mount. Since then many people have asked me when this modification would be available to the public. Today I just happened to check Andy's Shot Glass to see if there was anything new and I was happy to see an article about AMT and an ordering page. Looks like they finally got it going and I am glad to have been a part of the beta testing of this process. I can attest to the improvement in my mount's performance. You can see my test data in the FAQ section of the article. If you are interested in getting this work done on your mount, head over to the following link:
http://www.andysshotglass.com/astromo_mod_store.html

Now if I can ever get my basement finished I'll get back to astrophotography.

Floor progress - Day 2

2008-08-10T18:40:00.003-05:00

It was painful, and we moved a little slow today, but we managed to complete the rest of the laminate floor installation in the basement. Even though the home theater is a little smaller than the room we did yesterday we still took about the same amount of time. It's a great feeling to have this done, even with the pain we are feeling right now after two days of this stuff.
Here's the view as you come down to the bottom of the stairs from the 1st floor:

Looking from one room into the next:

Another view of the back of the room:

The cats seem hesitant to explore this new world, except for Cho-Cho:

Base molding and quarter-round will be installed in the next week or so to finish off the rooms. Next weekend we'll head down to Ikea to pick up some cabinets for the sewing room and a computer table for me. Our current entertainment center, which is oak, will be refinished to better match the room. And the stairs need sanded and stained/painted. Hopefully over Labor Day weekend we will be "moving in" to this new space.

Floor progress - Day 1

2008-08-09T20:46:00.003-05:00

Today we installed the laminate flooring in my wife's sewing & crafts room - the largest room in the basement. It was over 6 hours of hard work and we are hurting a bit tonight while we sit and watch the Olympics.
Here is what is looked like this morning with the FloorMuffler padding down:

The flooring sits ready in the home theater:

After a couple of hours of work, we are making pretty good progress:

Finally, the room is done:

A closer shot of the finished floor:

Tomorrow we'll tackle the home theater, which is only slightly smaller. Hopefully we will make better progress if we are not slowed too much by sore muscles and painful joints.

Flooring is here!

2008-08-07T16:34:00.003-05:00

We picked up our basement flooring yesterday from the Atlanta Flooring Design Center in Suwanee. We ended picking a Shaw laminate with a very rustic look. The design center let us take some large display samples home last Saturday and we immediately loved the Shenandoah series 9mm laminate in the Goldenrod color. We headed back there the same day and placed our order. It didn't take long to come in, which I would expect when Shaw is just right up in Dalton, GA.
We haven't installed it yet - that will begin Saturday morning. But we couldn't resist putting some planks on the floor to see how it looked. This is some of the most realistic looking laminate flooring we have seen. I think it really fits in with the relaxed country look we are going for. My wife started making some great curtains in a shabby chic style that will go very well with everything. Here's a photo:

Getting closer to the finish line

2008-07-27T11:45:00.006-05:00

We are getting much, much closer to the end of this basement project. The flooring will be the next big purchase and the final big task to call it complete. This is an example photo of our favorite floor so far - a Shaw laminate in a Victorian Pine style:
We love the color of this floor and it seems to work very well with our color scheme, which is very similar to the sample photo from the manufacturer. We originally were looking at bamboo flooring but after a week or two of looking at other floors, the bamboo didn't look so good anymore. We've changed our minds a few times and there's always a chance it will change again once we actually go to a store and look at the flooring firsthand. We'll be heading over to the new iFloor store after it opens up this week in Buford.
There's not a lot to do right now while we are waiting on the floor. This weekend I put up the sliding rail that will hold a pair of French doors that divide the home theater from the sewing/crafts room. These doors are in a bypass configuration so you can slide one over and walk through. This is to keep pets out of the sewing room. These doors are pretty heavy but they slide smoothly on the rail from Johnson Hardware. Here's a photo of the doors hung up to check the fit:

There will be a guide rail for the bottom of the doors attached to the concrete floor. We found out that the doors will need to be trimmed on the bottom to clear the guide rail. Then they will be painted to match the trim. The back door will also be painted the same color, which still hasn't been done as you can see.

The can lights in the above photo were connected to an existing lighting circuit that was there when the house was built (and the only lighting circuit down there). The other circuits have not been connected to the panel yet. That's a task for another weekend. I'm taking it easy today!

Sofa Shopping

2008-07-20T19:01:00.004-05:00

We've been doing a lot of research lately regarding sofas and went out today to see our top picks firsthand. Our original budget for a small (120 inches long or less) sectional was $1500 which pretty much limited us to Ikea. After looking around at other brands the Ikea sofas didn't seem so appealing anymore and we raised our budget. We then looked into West Elm, La-Z-Boy, Pottery Barn, and Crate & Barrel. While looking into some of these we heard about Lee Industries' sofas, which can be found at Crate & Barrel. Lee was one of our top picks, along with the Potter Barn PB Square series, and the Crate & Barrel Troy series.
We first headed over to Crate & Barrel in Alpharetta to check out the Troy and also see if they had any Lee sofas in the showroom. We immediately liked the Troy when we saw it, and it was very, very comfortable. I'm not a big fan of sofas that you sink into and the Troy was somewhat firm and perfectly supportive - just what I was looking for. We tried several others in the store but none felt as comfortable as the Troy. With the help of a sales associate there we found a Lee sofa but it was not comfortable at all. The associate was really helpful showing us all the available fabrics and also let us know of a sale coming up at the end of August for all custom orders. The lead time is up to 12 weeks but we can live with that to get just the sofa we want.
Here is the display model Troy sofa which shows the exact configuration we want:

It has a left-hand chaise and a right-hand loveseat combined. We'll also get a matching ottoman. We decided on an off-white natural fabric with chocolate colored wood legs (the photo is a little too red):

We headed over to a few more places even though we were nearly dead-set on getting the Troy sofa. We visited Macy's Furniture Gallery, Thomasville, La-Z-Boy, Havertys, and Pottery Barn. Nothing compared to the Troy. Most of the places were too old-fashioned or too formal for our style. We'll wait until the end of August for the Crate & Barrel 25% off sale, then we'll try to patiently wait up to 12 weeks more for our sofa to arrive.
Next weekend it's time to pick out the wood floors!

Another basement update

2008-07-13T15:29:00.003-05:00

This weekend I wired & installed the can lights and fluorescent fixtures in the room that will become my wife's sewing/crafts room. A total of eight can lights and three fluorescent fixtures were installed. Next weekend I'll finish up the lighting on the other side in the home theater. Then we'll be ready for flooring.

First photo:

Second photo:

Last one:

I forgot to mention that we also installed plantation shutters on the two windows. We really like how these add to the feel of the rooms.

Happy July 4th!

2008-07-04T13:11:00.003-05:00

While the weather is hot and dry outside and my brown yard continues to get browner, we worked in the cool basement and finished the ceiling. It's a good feeling to have that done. Today we cut and installed all the border panels around the perimeter of the room. While I cut each piece, my wife installed them in the grid. The pieces that border the wall can be rather time consuming to cut due to the recessed edge on these type panels. The recessed edge gives more of a three-dimensional look to the panels and is much more stylish than the typical office type panels that sit flush with the grid. Each border panel must be cut by hand and it takes 3 cuts to make the recessed edge (6 cuts on each corner panel). Needless to say, after hand cutting 36 border panels in 3 hours my hand is hurting.
This first photo looks down the room towards the doors that lead into my workshop. I left a panel out where the old light fixture is mounted. I've ordered three 2' x 2' fluorescent fixtures that will be mounted down the center line of the ceiling. Then I will install about 8 can lights around the perimeter.

Here's a view looking back the other way down the room.

And another one..

Last one...

More basement work

2008-07-03T17:35:00.003-05:00

Today I took a day off work to have some extra time to finish up the suspended ceiling over the long holiday weekend. Turns out that I really didn't need all that time. In less than 4 hours this morning I had all the grid installed and all the panels placed except for the perimeter panels that need trimmed. The Armstrong ceiling system is very easy to install as long as you take careful measurements and plan everything ahead. Once you have the first few pieces of grid squared up, the remaining pieces literally snap together in minutes. It also helped a lot that my wife was handing me the grid pieces as I installed them.
Here's a photo of the grid in progress, nearly complete at this point:

Here I am snugging up the wires that support the main beams. This room has three main beams running the length of the room (25-1/2 feet) and they serve as the backbone of the entire ceiling.

This photo is how it looks like now. I could have spent the rest of the day cutting the perimeter panels but yard work needed to get done this afternoon.

Tomorrow I will finish up the ceiling and maybe we can actually sit back and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

What have I been doing lately....continued

2008-06-29T16:55:00.012-05:00

This weekend I made some great progress on the basement and am happy to report that the home theater ceiling is done. My plan for a simple perimeter of Armstrong ceiling tiles around a curved tray ceiling turned out to be much more work than I thought. Part of that difficulty was due to this being my first experience with any sort of suspended ceiling system. Once I got the hang of it, it wasn't so bad. Then I put some crown molding on the inner edges of the two long sides of the tray ceiling with rope lighting hidden behind. This should cast some soft light up on the curved ceiling for a subdued lighting effect when watching movies.
This first photo is looking down the room from where the TV will be placed. On both sides you can see the in-wall speakers for surround sound, as well as the sconce lights from Ikea. The ugly door will be repainted another color, or possibly replaced.

This next photo looks down the opposite direction and shows where the TV & entertainment center will be placed. The opening is sized just right for our existing entertainment center, which will sit flush with the wall for a built-in effect. You can see the access from behind via the small closet under the stairs.

Here's a closer look at a little area on the right side of the home theater room. The basement wall has this small inset area under the front porch. We decided to add some storage with the two large Ikea cabinets below, and "day bed" type area above it where we can take a nap, read a book, or whatever.

Over on the other side of the basement is a larger room which will become my wife's sewing & crafts room. This room is over 25 feet long, so it has plenty of room for all her fabric. The perimeter wall molding is installed for the suspended ceiling. Next weekend I plan to finish this ceiling - thanks to the longer holiday weekend.

Here's another view of the sewing room looking in the opposite direction. The double doors at the back lead to my workshop, which is pretty much complete except for the suspended ceiling (See other blog post here). The small door you can barely see at the back right side is the access to the closet under the stairs. The two French doors you see leaning against the wall will be mounted in the passageway between the home theater and the sewing room. These will be mounted on a sliding rail system in a bypass door configuration.

Assuming I get the ceiling completed next weekend, we will go out to purchase the flooring the next weekend. We are looking at an engineered bamboo that can be used in a floating floor installation. If all goes well we will have the floor installed by the end of July. After that, I estimate 2-3 weekends of work to connect the main electric service, install all the outlets & switches, and install the remaining lighting. Our goal of completion by the end of summer looks very attainable at this point.

What have I been doing lately?

2008-06-15T18:56:00.007-05:00

I've been working pretty much every weekend on my basement with a goal to complete everything before summer is over. A lot of progress has been made lately, and a lot of money has been spent. My astro equipment has sat idle for many months but I hope to get back into it once the basement work is finished. I'll post more progress photos and details sometime. Here is a shot taken today of the home theater room:

Painting is 99% complete with just a little touch-up required here and there. The ceiling will be the next part to complete, then the wood floor. Electric service is still pretty limited in the basement but I plan to connect the basement subpanel to the main service panel in the coming weeks. That's all for now...

P.S. - I also keep busy taking product shots of my wife's handmade bags, wallets, & pouches for her Etsy shop. Check it out here.

Spring is here!!

2008-03-28T21:42:00.004-05:00

The weather still has not cooperated for astronomy, but at least spring is finally here. After a beautiful week of sunny skies and warm temps, this weekend will be full of cloudy skies and cool temps. Makes me wish I still had the dob again for quick setups on week nights when I can't stay up too late. It's now been over five months without touching my scope! But I haven't been wasting my time. I've gotten a lot more work done on my basement (Tim's Basement Blog) and there's another blog that needs updating. And I have been getting more interested in regular photography after acquiring a Canon 30D in January and picking up a few more lenses. I am actually (gasp) enjoying photography more than astronomy.
Here's a few photos of springs first flowers:

Spicy Hot Pot

2007-12-25T16:07:00.000-05:00

When the weather turns colder nothing warms you from the inside like a big bubbling pot of fiery broth loaded up with meat, veggies, and whatever else you want. This is not a dish for the 100-degree summers of Georgia - it is best enjoyed on a cold winter's evening. The broth is made up of a store-bought hot pot soup base and either water or chicken stock for flavor. In this case we chose a Taiwanese soup base in a jar. Some beef tendon was pre-cooked in the hot pot base using a pressure cooker to soften the tough connective tissue. When cooked for a long time, beef tendon takes on a wonderful gelatinous texture and absorbs the rich flavor of the broth.
The hot pot ingredients can be quite varied and up to your own particular tastes. Usually there's thinly-sliced meat and/or seafood, vegetables, tofu, and tofu skin at a minimum. The great thing about hot pot is you can have whatever you like. On the side there's usually a sauce into which you can dip the cooked bits of stuff. My favorite is sa-cha sauce mixed with a raw egg yolk and a little soy sauce. The other sauce we like is a simple mixture of sliced scallions and vinegar. The vinegar sauce compliments pork very well, but I prefer the sa-cha sauce on everything else. I think I am a sa-cha junkie - I love it with stir-fried beef and I always use it to make a sauce for pan-fried dumplings.
For our hot-pot meats, we took the easy route of buying pre-sliced pork belly and ribeye steak at the local Super H-Mart. The pork takes a little extra attention to make sure it's cooked properly, but the beef only needs 30 seconds or so to preserve it's tender texture. We try to load up heavy on the vegetables and this time we used sliced king oyster mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, brown & white beech mushrooms, and bok choy. We also added tofu that had been previously frozen. The freezing process changes the texture and creates some holes which allow the tofu to soak up the broth. Tofu skin, purchased as dry sheets, is another tasty item which softens up in the broth and soaks up lots of spiciness. Frozen fish cakes and imitation crab meat were added for some seafood flavor, although scallops would have been good too (but so expensive!). At the end of the meal we put in some tang-oh (Garland chrysanthemum - Chrysanthemum coronarium) which soaks up a lot of the spicy oil floating on top of the broth.
This is not a meal for everyone - you have to really love spicy food. This one burns coming and going! But you can always opt for a regular soup base and enjoy it just as well. After two days in a row of this spicy stuff, we are taking a break tonight with some Peking duck (more on that later).

Pictures from the past

2007-12-23T09:31:00.000-05:00

The weather here has been awful for astronomy or pretty much anything else you could do outdoors. To ward off cabin fever I have been digging through some older pictures and picking the ones I felt could be improved with a little processing.
Here's one from the not-too-distant past. It was taken in October of 2006 at Brasstown Bald, Georgia. This is the highest point in Georgia at 4,784 feet. At the time I had just started using my Rebel XT with the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens. These are berries on a mountain ash tree:

Outdoors with the WhiBal Card

2007-12-09T19:33:00.001-05:00

Today I went outside and took some shots of what few plants still seem alive right now. OK, I didn't quite make it to the "great outdoors" but I did manage to walk out the back door, stand on the deck for a few minutes, and walk back in. What a shame being so lazy when it's 76° in December! It'll probably be cold and raining next weekend. Oh well...
We have some hen & chicks (or is it hens & chicks?) growing on the deck in little "mini rock garden" containers. Everything else has pretty much died off, but these little plants are doing just fine with almost no water.
First photo, cropped just a bit:

Next one, a full-frame photo:

Last one, another full frame:

These were all taken with my Canon Rebel XT and Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens. I really love that little lens - very cheap and very sharp! I set the WhiBal card over one of the plants for the last image I took, then used that to set the white balance for every other image. The WhiBal makes my workflow extremely easy and efficient. I won't be leaving home without it!

Photography with a modified DSLR camera

2007-12-08T13:24:00.000-05:00

A modified DSLR camera is a powerful tool in the hands of any astrophotographer. Depending on the model, it’s a fairly low-cost method to obtain results close to that of the big, expensive CCD cameras that are made just for astronomy. You can save even more by doing the modification yourself. My first modification, as described in this post, was completed one year ago and I have done several more since then. My goal at that time was to have two cameras – one unmodified camera for normal photography and one modified camera for astrophotography. That goal didn’t last long once I realized the value of a nearly-new modified DSLR and needed some money to buy other astro equipment. Before long my unmodified camera was modified and quickly sold. After modding a couple more cameras and selling them, I was left with one modified Rebel XT. I installed a Baader UV/IR cutoff filter to replace the stock Canon filter in front of the sensor. This filter passes much more of the red spectrum, including the all-important 656nm H-alpha wavelength. This gives all images a red cast.
At first, normal photography was not a problem as long as I was using my X-Nite CC1 filter from MaxMax.com. This filter closely mimics the spectral response of the stock Canon internal filter and does a wonderful job of bringing the colors back to normal. Without it, my white balance is always wrong. But, as I have acquired more lenses and become much more interested in photography, the CC1 filter becomes more of an issue for a couple of reasons. First, my lenses have different filter sizes and it is inconvenient to change the filter with step rings if I need a quick lens change. Second, the CC1 filter increases my exposure time and makes hand-held photography in low lighting impossible without a tripod. It’s marginally acceptable with my Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens – the only fast lens I own (because it’s cheap). My zoom lenses are f/3.5-4 at the widest, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on fast zoom lenses.
I tried shooting without the CC1 filter and correcting the white balance when opening the RAW file in Photoshop. This works sometimes, but other times I just can’t seem to get the while balance right. Here’s an example of getting it right (or at least pretty close):

The left image uses the “As Shot” white balance setting in Photoshop RAW. A custom white balance was set from the inner lip of the white dish. It worked well in this case, as seen in the right image. Unfortunately I am not always going to get this lucky and find a nice neutral color in every situation. I could spend an hour trying to adjust levels and all sorts of other things to get the balance right, but I don’t want to do that on every photo I take!
I searched around on Google and read through dozens of websites discussing white balance. This seems to be a big topic of discussion for photographers based on what I found. There are so many products out there to help correct white balance, but which one to choose? After reading several reviews I finally decided on the WhiBal card from RawWorkflow.com. This little card is made of a neutral material that they check with a GretagMacbeth SpectroEye Spectrophotometer just to make sure it’s really neutral. It has a black & white label on one side that serves dual purposes – setting black & white points in Photoshop, and also telling you if you are getting glare by looking at the black portion (it’s reflective, so if it’s not black, you got glare). The WhiBal card arrived quickly and I immediately began taking some test shots. The WhiBal card is very compact and made of a sturdy foam-like material. It comes with a similarly-sized piece of black foam with a slot cut in it to serve as a stand. Also included is a lanyard with a quick-release clip and a carrying case made of very light material (feels like tent fabric).
The card takes a bit of getting used to at first. Finding the right angle to eliminate glare was tough at first, partly due to the so-so viewfinder of my Rebel XT, and partly due to shooting in a room with multiple light sources (overhead incandescent light and two windows). Below is a comparison of the “As Shot” white balance vs. the Custom white balance set from the WhiBal card:

The top image has the usual reddish cast that one gets from a modified camera. The bottom image appears natural and normal. Below is a comparison of the histograms from the Photoshop RAW editor. The left image shows the As Shot white balance with the red channel clearly exposed more than the blue and green channels. The right image shows the Custom white balance obtained by using the white balance eyedropper tool and clicking on the WhiBal card in the image. You’ll see that the individual color peaks are not aligned, but the image appears exactly as it looked to my eyes. The red channel is brought down and more in balance with the other two channels. As an experiment, I aligned the three channel peaks manually in Photoshop, but the resulting color did not look right at all. Therefore, I feel the WhiBal card performed perfectly.

Here’s another comparison taken in my wife’s sewing room. At the time this was shot, there was a mix of incandescent, halogen, and natural lighting coming from all sorts of different directions. Not the most ideal situation for the WhiBal card, or so I thought. I simply held the card right over the middle of the pens (where my camera autofocused the first time) and snapped a photo. I used this image to save a custom white balance setting in Photoshop RAW, and then applied that setting to my first image. Below is the comparison:

The left image is of course the As Shot white balance. The right image is the Custom white balance setting derived from the WhiBal card. So far I am pretty impressed. Next I'll need to get outside and see how the WhiBal performs in the great outdoors. I'll be sure to post my results here when completed.

Some other stuff....

2007-12-05T18:04:00.000-05:00

As the change in my blog title reads, I am going to be expanding my blog from astronomy-only to pretty much everything in general. Astronomy will still be the main topic here, but I'd like to share some of my other interests like food, (non-astro) photography, and more food.
A few weeks ago we drove over to the parks around Lake Lanier, the reservoir that supplies drinking water to us and most of north metro Atlanta. The lake is just a mile from my house and many parks are close by. Due to the drought we have been experiencing since 2006, Lake Lanier has now reached the lowest level since it was originally filled with the water of the Chattahoochee River back in the 1950's. As of today it was around 1051-1/2 feet in elevation, a long way from the 1070 foot full pool level. Many interesting things are being exposed by the receding water, from old tires & fishing equipment to old house foundations and even a small racetrack. Unfortunately the racetrack is a long drive away (it's a big, big lake) but I'll get up there pretty soon. Back to our visit a few weeks ago - I took a lot of photos but I just wasn't happy with most of them. I am still learning a lot about photography and figuring out the right exposure, focal length, and composition. Here is one of the few (two actually) that I felt were interesting enough to spend some time processing in Photoshop:

I liked this one because a small tree is growing from the base of an old tree stump that should usually be several feet underwater. This was shot with my ultra-cheap Sigma 18-50mm lens that actually does a pretty good job. The raw image didn't look great, but after some processing I am pretty happy with the result. Keep in mind this is the first time I have ever tried to process a non-astro image in Photoshop.
The other image I felt was worthy of a little more processing was yet another tree stump. For some reason I find old tree stumps really interesting:

I think I might have over processed this image. But that's the good thing about saving things in Photoshop format - all my adjustment layers are intact and I can go back any time and tweak it. So far I am only doing a few simple adjustments like curves and levels on selected areas of each image. I try to work on each area separately and use masks to isolate whatever part is to be affected. Thankfully there is so much information out there and great photographers to learn from. Being out with the camera was a lot of fun and I can't wait to get out again. Hmmmm...I think I just got hooked on another expensive hobby!

"Starfinder" from DK Publishing

2007-12-03T13:02:00.000-05:00

I was recently offered a copy of the book "Starfinder" from DK Publishing to review. I have quite a few Astronomy related books sitting around already, many of which are collecting a bit of dust right now. But it's always interesting to read something new, so I quickly accepted the generous offer. The book arrived and I was immediately surprised by the size. The "book" is actually a multi-functional case for it's contents. It is different & interesting with it's rounded shape, interior compartments, and a planisphere built right into the cover. While the size makes it stand out among other books, it is also slightly inconvenient since I don't have any shelves to accommodate it's 12+" by 12+" dimensions. I prefer the typical 8-1/2x11 size book, although making "Starfinder" any smaller would probably make the planisphere very difficult to read.
The cover opens up to reveal some how-to information for using the planisphere, as well as a guide to using the included constellation charts, found in little compartments on the interior of the book. Also inside the book is a small red LED flashlight. I must admit I laughed when first seeing this diminutive device, but it actually performs pretty well under total darkness. Most of us already involved in this hobby will have a good red LED flashlight, but for beginners this one will do just fine.
There are 44 double-sided constellation charts included made of sturdy high-quality card stock measuring 5-1/2"x3-3/4" each. They are divided up into 22 northern hemisphere cards and 22 southern hemisphere cards. Each card has a chart of the constellation showing the brighter-magnitude stars and Messier/NGC objects. There's a brief description of interesting objects which indicate if the object is visible by naked eye, binoculars, or telescope.
Tucked inside the back is a similarly-shaped reference book which is 72 pages long. This book is divided into three sections: Finding Your Way, The Solar System, and a Monthly Sky Guide. Finding your way has a lot of good information for the beginner explaining the vast distances involved in the universe, how our view of the sky changes with the seasons, basics of constellations, the mechanics of the solar system, objects of our Milky Way and beyond, basic info for getting started viewing, and an overview of "star-hopping." The Solar System section takes you on a tour from the Sun all the way out to Neptune, and even beyond that with comets, asteroids, and dwarf planets.
The final section is a Monthly Sky Guide which takes the reader month-by-month through the sky, describing interesting events & planetary positions over the next five years. A handy chart shows where the planets can be found among the constellations, and if they are in retrograde motion. The Monthly Sky Guide section includes information for both northern and southern hemisphere observers.
Besides the physical size issue I mentioned, my only other minor complaint would be the planisphere. While it is a very nice planisphere, it is built into the front cover and cannot be removed. I would love to be able to take just the planisphere outside without having to hold up the entire bulk of this book. Overall I found the content to be appropriate for the beginner while still being a handy guide for the seasoned observer. This book will give anyone a good start into astronomy without a lot of technical talk. The price is not bad either, just $18.40 from Amazon.com.

M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy (in progress)

2007-10-25T18:57:00.000-05:00

Now that the full moon is blazing brightly in the night sky (made even brighter by being in perigee) I am taking some time to go back over the images of M31 collected two weeks ago under the dark skies of the new moon. I spent two nights in a row collecting 5 minute, 3 minute, and one minute exposures at ISO 800. In hindsight I should have just taken a lot of 5 minute exposures and a few short ones, but I was curious if I could get close to the same result with a lot of 3-minute exposures. There was no contest - the 5-minute subs resulted in a much better image than lots more shorter subs. Eventually I will work up a comparison. I got to a stopping point last week with the stack of 5-minute subs, and decided to take a break for a while and come back later with a fresh start. Here's the result of that previous work:

It's a pretty good image, I think, but maybe it could be better? Maybe I've been looking at it too much and noticing all the flaws. I'll keep reading "Photoshop Astronomy" and going through the tutorials provided with ImagesPlus to get some ideas. I still have lots to learn about image processing. The above image was mostly the result of a few Levels and Curves adjustments in Photoshop, along with a high-pass filter mask.
Looking back at where I was a year ago while just starting out, I believe I have improved quite a bit. Here is last years M31 - my first:

The crescent moon passes near Jupiter

2007-10-17T18:19:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday evening I just happened to glance outside and see a thin crescent moon low on the horizon with Jupiter beginning to shine brightly above it. The color of the sky was interesting and I quickly grabbed the Rebel XT and the tripod for a few quick images.

The next evening the moon was even closer to Jupiter. Clouds were rolling in and I managed to find a break to capture this view. The bright star Arcturus is visible to the right of the moon.

The Moon, Saturn, & Venus Get Together

2007-10-10T19:29:00.002-05:00

Finally fall is here and the muggy skies of summer are clearing out to reveal deep black skies with stars seemingly shining brighter than ever. The clear, drier air really makes the stars pop - a welcome scene after months of heat, haze, & humidity. On the morning of Sunday 10/07, the Moon teamed up with Saturn and Venus to make a nice grouping in the eastern pre-dawn sky. I was excited the night before with the thought of viewing this event and capturing it with my camera. I was a little less excited when the alarm went off at 5:30AM, but I crawled out of bed and got set up outside, still partially asleep. This was a good opportunity to try out my new Sigma 55-200mm zoom lens. At about 147mm everything framed up nicely and I snapped several images at various exposure times. I combined four images ranging from 0.4s to 2.5s to make the above image. After just watching this beautiful alignment for a little while, and catching a few bright meteors whizzing by, I headed back to bed for more sleep. I'm so happy "imaging season" has returned to Georgia.

Another night in about a minute

2007-08-12T18:39:00.001-05:00

Saturday night I set up the camera again, this time pointing more towards the northern part of the sky. Exposures were set to 16 seconds with a bit higher gain than before. You'll notice the top of the chimney flashing in the lower left corner. That's my neighbor's motion-detecting light coming on every time a car passes by on the road in front. One of the lights on his front corner points straight back into my backyard - very annoying!
Anyway, I think I caught one meteor - pretty disappointing.

One night in about a minute

2007-08-11T12:06:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about building an all-sky camera for a while now. It's not something I really need but it seems like a fun project. I recently received a small optical dome from Surplus Shed. I don't know what camera I will end up using for the final version. Last night I set my DMK21AF04.AS camera up on a tripod with a Fujinon 2.8mm lens attached. I taped a Baader UV/IR filter on front of the lens and pointed the camera straight up. The exposures were set to about 20 seconds each with the gain set fairly low to reduce noise. I let it run from 10PM to 6AM and used the Y800 mode for recording the video in IC Capture. The video starts with Vega shining brightly just above left of center, and ends with the Pegasus moving off to the right as the Pleiades and Mars approach on the left before dawn. I was hoping to catch a few Perseids but I think I only caught air traffic going by. Here's the result, converted to 15 frames per second:

I will eventually get a wider angle lens since the 2.8mm Fujinon only has about a 90-degree field of view. There's a more expensive varifocal lens that covers nearly 180 degrees. A little more saving will be required before I get that lens. But then my birthday is coming soon!

My first Jupiter in LRGB with the DMK21AF04.AS

2007-08-06T18:10:00.001-05:00

My new Astronomik LRGB filters came in last Friday and I was just itchin' to try them out. Saturday night seemed like my best opportunity in a long time - the skies were about as clear as it's gonna get in summer. In other words, hazy and humid. The seeing was just OK but that wasn't going to stop me.
I had a couple of other new "toys" - the Atik manual filter wheel and a Televue 2X barlow. I also picked up a C-mount to T-thread adapter to mount my DMK21AF04.AS camera to the male T-threads of the filter wheel. The other side of the filter wheel uses a T-thread to 1.25" nosepiece adapter.
I started out by slewing to a medium brightness star and checking focus using Metaguide. I've used Metaguide a lot for autoguiding, but one feature I really like is the FWHM measurement. That gives me a quick way of dialing in the right focus without messing around with a mask or any other focusing aids.
Once centered on Jupiter I fired up IC Capture and adjusted for the right exposure. I should have taken some screen shots here, but what I did was open up the histogram and adjust the exposure & gain settings to get the maximum spread of the histogram with each filter. The luminance filter required a shorter exposure and less gain while the color filters needed longer exposures. The blue filter took the longest exposure and as expected, due to atmospheric turbulence, it produced the worst quality image. The atmosphere affect the longer wavelengths more than the red (shorter) wavelengths. I only took no more than one minute of each color and luminance at 15 fps. Jupiter rotates very fast, so you must move quick. I was pleasantly surprised to find Io transiting across Jupiter's disk when I got started. The moon Io is similar in size to our own moon. I took a couple of quick LRGB sequences and worked on the results in Registax. The resulting images were saved in TIFF format, then some minor adjustments were made in Photoshop. I then used ImagesPlus to align the images and combine as a LRGB image. Here's the result which also shows the separate channels:

I am very happy with the result, especially since I really don't know what I am doing with Registax, and have only been at this for less than one year. I still have a lot to learn but I am enjoying it and taking things slowly.
After taking some AVI's with the DMK camera, I decided to pop in the SPC900NC webcam before Io was gone to make a quick comparison. I took a few one-minute videos and tried my best to squeeze out some detail in Registax. This is the best I could get, and it's definitely not even close to the quality of the DMK:

Now I need to find a good home for the SPC900NC. It doesn't look like it will see much use anymore.

First light with the DSI Pro

2007-08-05T13:46:00.001-05:00

Saturday night I headed out for a quick test of my new Meade DSI Pro. The weather finally cooperated on a weekend - first time in 3 months. Even after 10PM it was still pretty hot outside, and I had to wear long pants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt to keep the mosquito bites to a minimum. I was sweating, uncomfortable, and busy swatting the skeeters away from my face & ears, but I managed to capture a quick set of images. After taking a few test shots to tweak the focus, I set the long exposure mode to 60 seconds and let the software take it from there. Looking at the individual frames was not that impressive, but there was something there. Here's a single 60-second image of M27 - the Dumbbell Nebula:

I chose the option to save all raw images to FITS format. Since the DSI Pro has non-square pixels, the raw format file actually comes out "squished" horizontally to 508 pixels wide instead of the full format of 648 pixels wide. When using Envisage to do all the combining it automatically corrects the image scale. I am comfortable with ImagesPlus, so I just transformed the horizontal dimension in IP after alignment and stacking. I also took a few dark frames - here's one 60-second dark frame at around 80 degrees:

Having only 20 exposures I wasn't expecting much, especially after seeing the noisy single frames. But I was pleasantly surprised after a median combine and a quick DDP adjustment in ImagesPlus. The outer faint details in M27 were clearly evident in the resulting image. Next time I will try with my new LRGB filters. Overall I am very impressed with the DSI Pro and looking forward to much more imaging, weather permitting. Here's my result of 20 exposures at 60 seconds each:

The DSI Pro arrives!

2007-07-31T18:07:00.001-05:00

Today my new DSI Pro arrived from the fine folks at Astronomics. I bet they were pretty busy shipping out loads of these cameras. There's going to be hundreds and hundreds of happy new DSI & DSI Pro owners all across the country. I opted for the DSI Pro to get more sensitivity. I had previously ordered an Atik filter wheel and a set of Astronomik LRGB filters for planetary imaging, so getting a monochrome CCD camera was a "no brainer."
The first order of business was to install the Meade Autostar Suite software. Installation went without a hitch on my Dell laptop running Windows XP. As many people have recommended, I rebooted after the installation and then installed the Autostar Suite Update 4 from the Meade website. Once the software was all squared away, it was time to get my hands on the camera. I must say I am pretty impressed with the overall build quality of the camera. It feels solid and heavy in my hands, not unlike the feel of my DMK21AF04.AS firewire camera. For some reason, the heavier something is, the more robust and well-constructed it seems. It's a world of difference from the cheap feel of my Philips SPC900NC camera with it's plastic housing and next-to-nothing weight. Getting back to the DSI Pro, I had already ordered a low-profile adapter from Scopestuff. This replaces the filter holder nosepiece, which is of no use to me. Here's an image of the DSI Pro next to the Scopestuff adapter:

The nosepiece is easily removed by loosening the four small screws at the four corners. The Scopestuff adapter comes with new screws that are much shorter. The adapter simply mounts to the same four holes and that's it. Now you have a female T-thread connection for whatever you need:

The DSI Pro now fits nice and snug to my Atik filter wheel:

Here's another view:

The new setup is almost ready to go. I'm just waiting on the Astronomik LRGB filters to arrive. They should be here on Friday, and if the weather cooperates I just might get some imaging in this weekend. I'm not too optimistic after two months of hazy skies, but I will keep my fingers crossed.

New stuff on the way!

2007-07-20T15:36:00.000-05:00

Boy, I sure do love getting new stuff. I sold a few things I had sitting around which were all not getting used much. I think astro equipment needs to be used, so I just can't see letting it collect dust (so to speak of course - I keep my stuff covered or stored in cases). One of my two modified Canon Rebel XT's also needed to go. There was no point in keeping them both any longer when I was just itching to get some new gear. I don't have an unlimited budget so I usually have to sell something to buy something else. Anyway, here's a list of what will be coming soon:

Televue 2X barlow

Atik manual filter wheel

Astronomik LRGB filter set

Losmandy mounting rings (getting rid of the fixed mounting rings)

And, one more thing I wasn't planning on: a Meade DSI Pro monochrome camera. Meade marked these down to $129 and I could not pass up that price. It should go well with the filter wheel and filters. I also ordered the DSI low-profile adapter plate from ScopeStuff (gotta love ScopeStuff!). This should keep me very busy as the (hopefully) clearer skies of fall and winter approach in a couple of months.

I am not enjoying summer!

2007-07-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

For astrophotography, that is. It was September last year when I bought my mount, scopes, & camera, so I had just missed the soupy skies of summer. The fall and winter skies really spoiled me with many nights of crisp, clean, steady air. Now, even when you think it is clear, it's not really clear. I'll peek my head out and there will be a light halo around Jupiter, or maybe a thin layer of high clouds covering the sky. That's been the story pretty much every night this summer. Too much water vapor in the air, which just seems to make the light pollution even worse. I can't wait for fall to come!

A couple of videos

2007-06-04T18:56:00.001-05:00

I thought it would be interesting for anyone who hasn't yet tried lunar/planetary imaging to see what the raw video looks like coming out of a DMK21AF04 camera. You can get an idea of how much things move and shimmer around. The first video is the area of the moon around Tycho and Clavius. This video was taken in my Celestron C8 at the native focal length of 2032mm @ f/10. Things look pretty steady at this focal length:

Now let's crank up the magnification by adding a 2X barlow with a 2" extension between the barlow and the camera to increase the overall magnification to about 3X. At around 6000mm focal length, things start moving around much more and the tiniest little bump of the tripod or scope shakes the image pretty badly for 2-3 seconds. Also, the image becomes darker, requiring longer exposures and some extra gain:

Another Saturn

2007-06-02T07:55:00.001-05:00

This is from last week and it's a slightly better image of Saturn than my first attempt. I was using the DMK21AF04 along with my 2X Siebert barlow in the C8. Saturn was getting a little low in the sky at the time, but the great transparency helped me get a little more detail:

Then I swapped out the DMK for my Philips SPC900NC webcam and tried to get a color image. The images I get from the SPC900NC always seem to have some banding that I haven't quite figured out yet. I removed most of it in Photoshop using Noel Carboni's Astronomy Tools plugin "Vertical Banding Noise Reduction."

Then I tried to manually add the DMK image above as a luminance layer to the color image. This was difficult since the two images did not line up and I could not get ImagesPlus to align them using the auto planet align function. A slight improvement, maybe??

That's probably it for Saturn attempts this year. Next on the list will be Jupiter, then maybe Mars.

More lunar imaging with the DMK camera

2007-05-27T18:48:00.001-05:00

Last Friday night, under good transparent skies, I tried my hand once again at lunar imaging with the DMK21AF04. This little camera continues to impress me. It makes it so easy to get great results. Of course a properly collimated telescope and good focus helps too. I think I got the collimation spot-on but focus is always tricky.
I started the night with the slightly-more-than-half-full moon directly overhead, which is a prime spot for getting good images. The Tycho & Clavius area was my first target. Below is my first image, recorded at the Celestron C8's native focal length of 2032mm at f/10:

To get closer in, you need to increase focal length. A barlow is the most common method of doing this and they come in various power ratings and quality levels. My barlow is a 2" Siebert telecentric model with a 2X power rating. This doubles my focal length and allows some really close-up viewing of the moon. The power can be further increased by adding an extension between the back of the barlow and the camera. Here's a close up of Clavius using this method with a 2" extension:

As you increase focal length, the image becomes darker and movement from atmospheric distortion gets magnified even more. It gets really difficult to capture a good image at this focal length. Below is another extreme close up, this is Tycho:

Without the extension the same area looks like this:

The same effect can be seen here on the crater Plato. Here's an image with the 2X barlow and 2" extension:

Removing the extension increases the field of view as seen below:

Next, I recorded several AVI's around the crater Copernicus and created a mosaic in Photoshop:

Here's some other highlights from the evening:
Craters Walter & Lexell:

Craters Stöfler & Faraday:

Craters Saussure, Orontius, Huggins, Nasiredden, & Miller:

Rupus Recta:

Craters Purbach & Thebit:

Craters Ptolemaeus & Herschel:

Craters Pitatus, Guaricus, Wurzelbauer, & Hesiodus:

Craters Fra Mauro, Bonpland, & Parry:

Craters Arzachel, Alpetragius, & Thebit:

Caught an asteroid in M16

2007-05-23T18:07:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Mike Broussard over on the Cloudy Nights board for pointing out the passage of Asteroid 202 Chryseïs through M16 on Sunday morning. Seems we were both imaging the same thing at the same time. His image turned out a lot, lot better. I intentionally overexposed the close-up view below to highlight the asteroid. I was wondering what that little streak was! Thanks Mike!

M13 - the Hercules Cluster

2007-05-22T17:11:00.001-05:00

This is another one from last Saturday night. The Hercules Cluster, located in the constellation Hercules of course, lies about 25,000 light years away and contains hundreds of thousands of stars. The image scale is obviously way too small for my William Optics Zenithstar 80FD at 444mm focal length (with the flattener/reducer).
Below is a close-up crop of the full-frame image. I didn't get a lot of detail but I think it's OK for my first try:

Here's the full-frame version. You can see how small M13 is in this image.

M16 - the Eagle Nebula

2007-05-21T18:09:00.001-05:00

Last Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning) I waited for the Milky Way to rise to image some of the great objects located there. I was really trying for M20 (Trifid Nebula) and M8 (Lagoon Nebula) in the same frame, but I just couldn't find them after taking several test shots. So, I moved over to M16 and managed to find it quickly and get a guide star located. I was almost able to fit M17 (Omega Nebula) in the same frame, but that put both objects close to the edges of the frame. By this time it was nearly 2:30AM and I wanted to get this sequence started. Using ImagesPlus I set up a sequence of 100 exposures at 90 seconds each with an ISO of 800. By 5:30AM I was done and ready to tear down my equipment as dawn approached.
About 20 dark frames were acquired earlier in the evening and another 10 were taken as I was tearing everything down. The next day I used the t-shirt method to acquire my flat frames. Some older bias frames were use to round out my calibration sets for ImagesPlus.
The image below is only about 1/3 the total area of the full frame size. The Eagle Nebula is pretty small for my imaging scale when using the William Optics Zenithstar 80FD. With the flattener in place I am at about 444mm focal length. Eventually I will try this with my C8 and the 0.63 reducer. As I do more imaging I am finding what focal lengths I really need. Now I realize that something around 800mm would be a good complement to my collection. Currently I have my eye on the Vixen R200SS. Lots of saving to do for that one!

EDIT: I did some quick processing of the full image and posted it here just to give you an idea of the object size as compared to the camera's sensor size:

My first lunar mosaic with the DMK

2007-05-20T12:30:00.001-05:00

Last night I took about 22 AVI files of the moon, which was only 3.6 days old at the time and a very pretty crescent sitting right next to Venus. Each AVI was separately processed in Registax and saved as a TIFF file. Then the files were opened in Photoshop and manually pasted into a large new image. Registax will usually leave a little border on the image or you will be able to see the overlapping edges of many individual frames. What seemed to work best for me was the following:

1. In Photoshop, click Select > All, or CTRL+A
2. Click Select > Modify > Border, and specify a border of about 10 pixels
3. Click Select > Inverse to select everything inside the border.
4. It also helps to specify a feathered border of about 5 pixels. Click Select > Feather and enter the pixel value.

Do the above for every image that makes up the mosaic. Photoshop will try to fit them together as you move each image with the mouse. Usually it gets it right every time. I only had one image out of 22 that required me to manually adjust the image to get it to line up properly.
It's a good thing I was doing this with a young Moon. I couldn't imaging having to do this with a larger area. Just these 22 images took a long time to process and piece together. But I am pretty happy with the result and I am really loving the DMK camera. Below is the result of all the work:

My first attempt at Saturn with the DMK

2007-05-19T17:00:00.001-05:00

I shouldn't call this a real attempt, more of just a quickie try before I packed up early last night. Had to call it a night pretty early because I needed to get up early this morning. Saturn was moving all over the place due to less-than-average seeing conditions, but I figured what the heck. With the 2X barlow in place I was now at over 4000mm focal length with the C8 at f/20, so any little movements due to the atmosphere were magnified even further.
The DMK is great for this kind of work and I am starting to catch the "planetary imaging bug." The IC Capture software is really easy to use and the controls are intuitive, making good results repeatable. One of these days I will get a color filter wheel so I can do RBG imaging. That'll be a future upgrade once I save up the cash. For now there's plenty of fun to have in monochrome, and plenty more to learn.

Getting set up for remote operation

2007-05-15T17:41:00.001-05:00

The weather hasn't cooperated here on the weekends for a while so I have been busy with yardwork and some indoor projects. A few weeks ago my wife's 2-year old laptop started making some noise whenever the fan was running. This was a sign that the fan was about to go. On top of that, the LCD was beginning to fade out. This seemed like a good time for my wife to upgrade. I got the idea to try repairing the fan and get a little more use out of the little laptop. Something I have wanted to do is control my telescope and cameras via remote control. Currently I have been leaving my Dell XPS M1210 outside while it snaps aways a series of images. That always makes me a little nervous to leave my main computer sitting outside unattended. As soon as my wife's new laptop came in, a HUGE Dell Inspiron E1705, I proceeded to tear apart the old laptop and fix the fan. That is, of course, after copying gigs and gigs of files to the new laptop in case the old one didn't survive the surgery. I managed to locate a brand new fan on Ebay and it will be here in a few days. Meanwhile, this is what the laptop looks like now:

All that work just to get to the cooling fan! Pretty much everything in the laptop had to be removed. Fortunately the service manual was easily available on the Dell support site.
When I started looking into remote PC operation, I first tried Remote Desktop Connection, which is built-in to Windows XP. I quickly ran into one stupid limitation with Windows XP Home edition - XP Home cannot be controlled remotely by another PC. BUT, XP Home can control another PC remotely without a problem. This was a problem because the old laptop is running XP Home and my newer XPS is running XP Pro. After looking around I came across TightVNC. This free program works on Windows and Unix and is so easy to set up and use. In a couple of minutes I had my XPS controlling the old laptop (of course this was all before I tore it apart!). A nice thing I like about TightVNC is that the PC being controlled does not black out it's screen like Remote Desktop Connection does. This means that if I go outside to check on my telescope, I can quickly make changes on the local laptop without having to run back inside and disable control with RDC. I will still have to go out and get everything focused manually, but after that I should be able to do most everything from the comfort of my sofa. Eventually I will finish my electronic focuser project and make that PC-controlled. One other important piece that makes this all possible is the EQDIR interface and EQMOD software for my EQ6 mount. This eliminates the need for the hand controller and puts the functionality into PC-based software.
But, all that will have to wait because this weekend looks clear and the moon is nearly new. Time to finally get back out and do some imaging!

When the moon is bright....

2007-04-29T09:30:00.001-05:00

....take images of the moon! Last night, with the moon blazing bright in the night sky, I gave up on doing any DSO imaging after my test shots came out totally washed out in purple. I decided to take a few more periodic error measurements and call it a night early. But before that I figured I would try my hand at some moon images. Upon getting the moon in view of my DMK firewire camera I could tell this would be difficult because the moon was shimmering and shaking all over the place due to below-average seeing. The DMK camera is capable of higher frame rates to help get around the problem with poor seeing conditions. I bought the camera initially for dual-use as an autoguiding camera and a planetary camera. The folks at ImagingSource added long-exposure capability so now my DMK is a triple threat! So far I have only used the little blue camera for autoguiding. I am taking things slow and plan to tackle lunar and planetary imaging someday. For now I just recorded a few AVI files and ran them through RegiStax software, all the while not really knowing what I was doing. The results are not too bad considering the poor seeing conditions.

The first image shows the bright crater Tycho at the bottom, with south being up in this image. Crater Clavius is the large crater to the upper left of Tycho:

The next images moves a bit to the west, and shows one of my favorite lunar features, crater Schiller above and right of center. I have always found the elongated crater very interesting:

My final lunar imaging of the night moves a little north to another one of my favorite sites. This is the Mare Humorum area, with crater Gassendi to the lower right of center.

That's it for now. I still have a lot to learn about lunar imaging and working with the RegiStax software. But like I said before, I am taking things slowly, and one step at a time.

My EQ6 mount improvement - Part 4

2007-04-19T19:37:00.001-05:00

I got a brief period of clear sky a couple of nights ago. Less than an hour, but long enough to make a measurement of periodic error. To keep things fair with my pre-mod measurement, I used the same camera, scope, and software combination with all the same settings. I was using my DMK21AF04.AS CCD camera in the Celestron C8, with drift logging through K3CCDTools. Clouds started rolling in but I got enough data to plot in PEAS. Below is a screen shot from PEAS, and you can see that the "Max PE" values indicate a PE of a little less than 10 arc-seconds peak to peak. This is half of the pre-mod PE value. I'm pretty happy about the improvement - this is about the performance level of mounts costing twice as much or more. I'll keep on testing as weather permits.

A little tune up for the EQ6...

2007-04-16T15:32:00.001-05:00

...also known as "My EQ6 mount improvement - Part 3." When I received my mount back from Astro Motion Technologies it was immediately apparent that something was amiss in the operation of the mount's internal motors. The DEC axis would not move at all with a strange noise coming from the motor, and the RA axis would move less than halfway before stopping with the same noise. Here's a little video of the DEC axis trying to move:

As you can see and hear there's no movement and the sound is very much NOT the typical whine of the motors that I am used to. Being an electrical engineer I was dreading the thought of troubleshooting something mechanical. I searched around the Internet and read everything I could about taking apart the EQ6. Then, with a little nervousness I began removing the DEC axis. It was really quite easy and well documented on other websites. Inside the DEC housing you can see all the major parts: the big brass-colored ring gear, the steel worm gear, the small brass-colored spur gear, and the tiny little set screws that become very important later.

Those little set screws adjust the position of the worm gear relative to the larger ring gear. They actually move the entire housing, and since the worm gear is fixed to the housing you are moving the worm gear too. Below you can see what the housing sits on. There's a little metal block for one of the set screws to push against and the other set screw pushes against the metal lip around the large DEC axis shaft hole. You can also see the top of the gearbox which is driven by a stepper motor.

At this point it's a good time to scrape away all that black paint on the mating surfaces of the housing and mount. A flat razor blade and some sort of mild solvent will quickly remove this paint. I used decal remover. Removing the paint ensures that you have a tight fit and accurate tolerances. Now that I had the DEC axis apart I checked all parts and could find no problem. A bit puzzled, I put it back together. Another check of the motors revealed nothing new - still no movement. I then checked to make sure the stepper motor gearbox was making good contact with the spur gear. This can be done be removing a small screw under the end cap of the worm gear and looking in where the gears meet, as seen below:

Everything looked good there, so it was back to the worm gear housing. By this time I had done a little more research, gotten some help from Tom at Astro Motion Technologies, and discovered the secret to the little set screws shown in the above pictures. To adjust, you first loosen the four 5mm bolts that secure the housing to the mount, but only very slightly:

The set screw shown above loosens gear mesh when tightened. The set screw on the other side tightens gear mesh when tightened, and is shown below:

The best way to know when you are pretty close to having the right gear mesh is to remove the stepper motor for the axis you are adjusting and spin the spur gear with your finger. To accomplish this the electronics board of the mount is removed and disconnected. The stepper motors are behind this board, and easily removed with two screws. Below you can see the motor compartment with the DEC motor removed. The edge of the spur gear is just visible near the top of the compartment:

The spur gear should feel a little firm but not tight, and not very loose. Adjust the set screws until the spur gear is very hard to spin, then back off a little. Now you can put the motor back and check the gear alignment by peering into the hole shown previously. Then tighten the four 5mm housing bolts in a criss-cross pattern just like putting a tire on your car. Once I got to this point the motor still did not turn the DEC axis, which meant a little more adjustment of the set screws was necessary. The object here is to find the sweet spot between backlash and motor stall (what you saw in the video above). Backlash is "play" in the gears which you can feel by trying to rotate the axis with your hands while it is locked. If it wiggles back and forth - that's backlash. There's only a tiny spot between no backlash and motor stall, and it takes time to find. The gears must be checked across the full range of motion. They may seem fine at one point, then the motor might stall as you slew the axis around. Each time the set screws are tweaked, the adjustments are very tiny - just 1/8 of a turn or less. It turned out that I never needed to take apart the mount to make these adjustments, but I am glad I did. I really learned a lot in the process and am no longer afraid to dig into my EQ6. The RA axis is nearly identical as far as adjustments are concerned. Here you can see the first pair of 5mm bolts to be loosened just behind the RA setting circle, as well as the housing adjust set screw:

The other 5mm bolts and the other set screw are located down below the RA setting circle as shown below:

One other thing to check is the spanner nut at the end of each worm gear. These are behind caps located on the same side of the mount as the electronics board. The nut should be snug, but not too tight and not too loose. This is another source of play in the mount. The DEC axis spanner nut is shown below:

It took a couple of hours to get my EQ6 tweaked properly. Now I have no play in either axis and no motor stall either. With the WS2 coating I am even able to adjust beyond zero backlash. This means getting the backlash adjusted out, then tightening the gear mesh just a little more. This preloads the bearings and increases the contact area between the gears. I should get more payload capacity and better periodic error as a result.
Thanks to Tom at Astro Motion Technologies for guiding me through all the adjustments and patiently explaining the reasons behind them. His help has given me a much better understanding of the mechanics inside my mount. We both now realize that all the electronics and hand control are needed for the WS2 modification. I didn't send my hand controller or electronics board with my mount, thus Tom could not operate the motors. He got the gears pretty darn close though! Now my mount is running smooth as silk. If these fierce winds ever die down I might actually be able to get out and test out the improvement.
In case you want to hear what the mount should sound like, check out this video:

More on the focus control project

2007-04-04T17:11:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I put together a couple of different stepper motor control kits to see how they each perform. The first was the CK1405 kit from Carl's Electronics. My assembled kit in it's testing configuration is shown below:

I really wanted the CK1404 kit but they do not carry it any more due to the UCN5804B chip being discontinued. But, I also ordered another kit from Alltronics. Their kit did not have much of a description but I took a chance on it anyway. As luck would have it, their kit included the UCN5804B stepper motor IC and much more versatility in features. Back to the original kit - I tested it out and just could not get satisfactory operation of the motor. It was very "choppy" and did not have much speed adjustment range. I put that one aside and moved on to the Alltronics kit, as shown below:

This kit worked very well. Motor operation was very smooth and there was a wide range of speed adjustment. Plus, this kit offers a low-speed mode, single-step function, half step mode, and a selectable full wave/2-phase drive. I decided to use the Alltronics kit for my design, which required some changes. Originally I intended to put everything in the hand-held case shown in my previous project post. But the Alltronics kit is too large to fit in that case. So the motor control kit will be mounted in a separate box at the mount. The hand-held case will just house the control switches and display.
This design got me thinking - can I control three different motors with one control board? Why not? I have three focusers, so it sure would be nice to control them all. What I am planning is a relay switching circuit that only switches on one motor at a time. There's no reason to ever control two focusers at the same time, so this should work. My hand control just needs three more switches, each one to enable one motor. Below is my basic schematic of the motor control circuit, without all the hand controls and display:

Also, over the weekend I built the display board, but have not yet tested it out:

It's getting closer! My mount comes back tomorrow, so the focus control project will probably be sidelined for a while until we have some cloudy weather.

My EQ6 mount improvement - Part 2

2007-03-30T16:12:00.001-05:00

Last time we were at the stage where the gears came out of the ultrasonic cleaner all nice an shiny. The next step is to take very precise measurements of the gears. One type of measurement performed is to measure the "run out" of the gear. This is done on a machine scale as shown below:

My gears averaged out less than 0.001" overall deviation. Pretty darn good! Next, the gears are checked on an optical comparator:

This device allows a very exact measurement so that the right amount of WS2 can be applied. Here's a view of the worm gear before treatment showing the roughness and machining marks:

After treatment you can see that everything looks much nicer:

After coating, a close-up inspection of the gear shows the WS2 coating as a light-colored edge on the teeth of the gears:

And here's a picture of the gears after coating. The WS2 is the darker area on the surfaces of the gears:

That's it for now. My mount is almost ready and should be back next week. Just in time for more cloudy weather!

My EQ6 mount improvement - Part 1

2007-03-25T07:49:00.001-05:00

This is the first part of I don't how many to describe the improvements being done to my EQ6 mount right now. The mount is currently getting worked on and I hope to have it back in the next week or so. In the meantime I have some pictures of the process that were sent to me by Tom at Astro Motion Technologies. This process is currently in beta test mode and I am one of the lucky beta testers.
The point of this process is to even out all the inaccuracies in the mounts internal gears and make them all mesh together much better. This will reduce periodic error and increase the load bearing ability of the gears. The secret of the process is the application of WS2, also known as Tungsten Disulphide. This is a compound developed by NASA as a lubricant for spacecraft. WS2 forms a molecular bond with whatever it is coating, but does not stick to itself so it won't build up where you don't want it. It has a very low coefficient of friction and can withstand pressures of over 300,000 psi. The coating is applied with high-velocity and is very thin - about 0.5 microns thick.

My EQ6, like other mounts of this type, move and track objects in two axis - right ascension (RA) and declination (DEC). Each axis has a worm gear, as shown in the worm block above. Each worm gear drives a larger gear along the axis of motion. The worm gears are driven by stepper motors controlled by the mounts internal electronics. The larger shaft gear, shown to the right of the mount, and the worm gear are the surfaces to be coated with WS2. The shaft gear has bearings inside that are friction-fit. They are pressed out using a hand press with even pressure, as shown below.

Once the gears and bearings have been completely removed, they are given a good cleaning in an ultrasonic cleaner. Thankfully Synta has stopped using the super-thick black grease that has always caused sticky operation in cold weather. They put that thick grease in there to make up for less-than-accurate gear tolerances. Back to the process - the gears come out of the ultrasonic cleaner all nice and shiny:

The worm gear is then measured on a machine gauge to check run out, radial run out, and gear tooth spacing. My gears checked out pretty good, with accuracies down to around a thousandth of an inch variance. Looks like Synta is doing pretty good with their gears. After the gears are measured, they are closely inspected on an optical comparator. But, more on that next time.

A new project...

2007-03-22T17:26:00.001-05:00

Things are kind of slow around here while my mount is still away (I promise to post lots about this soon!). So, it's time for a little indoor project that I have been thinking about for a while now. I wanted a "hands-off" focus control for my telescope, something I wouldn't have to touch which causes vibrations. I also wanted a way to return to a known point of focus, which is important whenever you change cameras or add a reducer or barlow. Every time you change something the focuser must be moved to reach focus again. This becomes more of an issue with a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope because the focus knob, which moves the primary mirror, can be turned about a million times without any indication of where you are (or more correctly - where the mirror is at). My other focusers don't move so much, and have a scale engraved on them which helps me find the right focus. (NOTE: my Celestron C8 has a built-in focuser - the one I am talking about now - but I also have an additional Crayford focuser on the C8 for fine focusing, as well as a similar Crayford focuser on my ZS80FD) Touching any of the focusers causes vibrations in the entire rig, not to mention the fact I have to get up out of my chair. After researching around the Internet, I decided that a stepper motor with electronic control was easy enough for me to build, and affordable. I got most of my inspiration from this site. The stepper motor kit shown on that site is no longer available, so I found another kit here. It's not quite the same, so we will see how it works out.

Above are the parts I have purchased so far, mostly from Mouser Electronics. The display/counter kit was purchased from Ozitronics down in Australia. If you contact Frank there, he will program the circuit for no debounce, which is important for the operation of the focus control system.

Here's the schematics of the stepper driver kit, and counter/display kit. I chose kits instead of building from scratch because it saves loads of time. I am still trying to figure out the best way to interface these two circuits, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Here's a couple view of the stepper motor. It's a 12VDC motor with 100 steps per revolution. I actually bought two just in case (they are cheap!). To attach the motor to the focuser, I'll use a mechanical coupler like this:

Beyond that, a bracket will need to be fabricated to secure the motor assembly to the focuser. I still haven't figured that out yet. I hope to get started on this project soon. If this works well I will put stepper motors on everything for the ultimate lazy-man's setup. Later I will take it another step by making everything computer-controlled. My ultimate goal is to eventually control everything remotely from inside. Or am I getting too lazy? Hmmm...

Chasing Iridium Flares

2007-03-04T20:17:00.001-05:00

While my mount is away getting worked on (more on that later) I am looking for other things to image. Iridium flares are something I try to catch visually when I can, but I haven't tried to catch one with the DSLR. What are Iridium flares? They are reflections of sunlight off one of the 66 or so Iridium communications satellites orbiting all over the earth. They have large antenna arrays made of aluminum treated with silver-coated Teflon. Thus, they are highly reflective. The satellites are maintained at a fixed vertical position relative to the earth as they orbit, so if we know the position in orbit, we can use software to predict when and where we'll see the glint of sunlight off the antenna panels. You can check the next times for flares at the Heavens Above website. They require some careful planning to catch with a camera, so use a planetarium program to see where the satellite will be at the time of the flare. Even then you don't always get it right, as you can see by my image. I was a little low with the camera. Fortunately there's always another Iridium flare in the near future.

The Lunar Eclipse

2007-03-04T08:37:00.001-05:00

Saturday night was the first total lunar eclipse in 2-1/2 years. Unfortunately for us the moon was rising well past the beginning of totality. That's the phase where the earth's shadow completely covers the moon and the moon turns a blood-red color. In this case the totality phase began at 5:44PM, but the moon wasn't going to rise until 6:21PM at my location. With the hills and trees on my eastern horizon, I would have to wait much later to even see anything. Totality ended at 6:58PM, at which time the moon was still hidden behind the trees. That's when I could see the bright crescent as the earth's shadow began moving off the moon. I sat with my telescope ready, positioned just above the tree line. The high clouds that were around all day were breaking up, but still making the view of the moon pretty fuzzy. Once the moon cleared the trees, I snapped a few shots but they were all fuzzy. The above image is my favorite of the bunch. Too bad we didn't have a good view of the entire eclipse. I haven't had good weather to see that since May of 2003, when I took the sequence of images below. At that time I didn't have a telescope, but the awesome lens on my old Sony DSC-F505V provided some great images. I'll be looking forward to nearly a year from now when we have our next total lunar eclipse on February 21, 2008.

The Moon & Venus

2007-02-20T18:03:00.001-05:00

This was a very pretty sight in the western sky shortly after sunset on February 19th, 2007. A few little clouds were zipping by, powered by the high winds that were persistent over the past few days. The moon is just a tiny sliver of reflected sunlight, probably only about 10% into the waxing phase past last weekend's new moon (and beginning of Chinese New Year). There was quite a bit of earthshine (the illumination of the dark region of the moon) visible.

NGC 2174 in Orion

2007-02-16T16:46:00.001-05:00

This is a fairly bright nebula up around the head of Orion. This object is about 6,400 light years away. It's actually a combination of emission and reflection nebulae. However my image does not really bring out the reflection nebula, which typically show up as blue. The red emission nebula is much brighter and easier to capture. I hope to get some images with my H-alpha filter to bring out more detail. This image was the result of 28 exposures of 180-seconds each, at ISO 1600.

The Seagull Nebula

2007-02-14T19:10:00.001-05:00

Actually it's only half a seagull. I didn't realize how large this object was until I took my first test exposure. Even then I could barely see it, and tried to compare the stars against pictures from other websites to make sure I was in the right area. This image consists of 25 exposures at 180-seconds each. I took 30 exposures, but discarded 5 due to wind. Processing this object was very difficult as the nebula is faint, and I pushed the colors pretty hard to get anything to show up. The Seagull Nebula is located in the constellation Canis Major. The area of nebulosity is cataloged as IC 2177, while the bright "head" portion (at the left of my image) is NGC 2327.

The Leo Triplet

2007-02-13T19:38:00.001-05:00

Here's one from last Saturday night. That was one of those nights when it probably would have been better to stay inside. It was clear, although my Clear Sky Clock (see link at bottom of blog) was showing below average seeing conditions. This was probably due to the wind, which occasionally gusted up to 15 mph. I started this imaging sequence about midnight, when Leo was in a decent position in the sky. I went back inside for a snack and a quick nap, then came back out at 2AM to check the progress. Much to my disappointment, the sky had completely clouded over while I was napping, and my mount was guiding off to la-la land. I packed up at that point and went to bed. Several of my exposures had to be discarded due to the wind blowing everything around. I salvaged about 25 exposures of 3-minutes each, at ISO 1600. Not bad for my first galaxies - but man, are these things small! This image is a crop of about 1/4 of the full frame.

Fun with layer masks

2007-01-28T19:27:00.001-05:00

Once I started playing around with the layer masks for the H-alpha images below I just couldn't stop. I had a pretty decent H-alpha luminance image, so all I needed was a good RGB image to combine. After digging through all the images I have taken in the past few months, I found some 10-second M42 images taken in October with the unmodified Rebel XT. Using the layer mask in Photoshop I combined the short exposure image with a 180-second image taken in December with the modified camera (both resulting from many exposures stacked & aligned of course). The images taken at different times were not quite lined up so the "translate, scale & rotate" function in ImagesPlus was needed. The resulting image was then split into red, blue and green channels. Then it was combined with the luminance H-alpha image below. Again, the images didn't quite line up and needed some alignment. Slowly but surely I am starting to get a handle on all this processing stuff.

Venturing into narrowband territory

2007-01-28T09:39:00.001-05:00

What do you do when you have a modded DSLR camera, light-polluted skies, and a pretty bright moon? Stay inside taking infrared pictures of your pets? OK, sometimes I do that, but now I'm talking about narrowband imaging. This is a technique of using a filter with a very narrow bandpass. The idea here is to only image a certain wavelength of light, while rejecting all others (including all that pesky light pollution). On Friday night I was using a Baader 7nm H-alpha filter. The significance of the 7nm number is the width of the band of light that is allowed the pass. The smaller the number, the narrower the bandpass, and the more selective the filter. Smaller bandpass usually equals higher price, but the Baader is reasonably priced. You can see a plot of the light transmission here.
Some objects are rich in H-alpha light, others are not. Thus narrowband imaging is not suited for everything. But when it comes to really faint nebula, this works wonders in bringing out subtle details. I decided on imaging M42 because the entire Orion region is full of H-alpha emissions, and because Orion is well-placed in the sky after sunset this time of year. While logging my mount's tracking as described in the previous post, I took 30 exposures of 3-minutes each at ISO 1600. The result is pretty interesting, but I have much to learn about processing narrowband images. It's tricky because of everything being in the red channel. I still have more work to do on the above image, including layering in some shorter exposures to show some core detail of M42. But it's a good start and I am happy with it. I also have a Baader O-III filter that I will try sometime. One of these days I'll get a sulfur filter and have a full narrowband set for tri-color imaging. Should be fun!
UPDATE: Today I processed some 15-second exposures and did a layer mask in Photoshop to bring out more core detail. Below is the result with one using only the luminance channel and one using RGB.

Measuring periodic error

2007-01-27T22:17:00.001-05:00

Last night we had the first clear night on a weekend in about 6 weeks. The only bad thing about this time of year is that really clear nights usually mean really cold nights. This was no exception - quickly dropping to the 30's not long after sunset. Seeing was average, and transparency was above average. The waxing moon was a little over 50% illuminated. These are the times I like to use for experimentation. This night I decided that I needed to get some good data on the periodic error of my EQ6 mount. This brings up a couple of questions:
1. What the heck is periodic error?
2. Why do I want to spend time measuring it on a clear night?
For the first question, about all I can say is that periodic error has to do with the inaccuracy of the gears that move the mount in right ascension and declination. Gears made for mounts in my price range (i.e. cheap) just aren't made perfect. Actually, no gears are made perfect, but the more money you can spend on a mount, the more precision there is. The shape of the gear has a pattern to it which repeats on each revolution of the gear. Each revolution makes up one period. We measure the movement of the mount over several periods to get a picture of the error in the gear. Modern electronics can adapt to this error and help minimize it.
For the second question, I am measuring the periodic error because I will be sending my mount away in the near future to be treated with a new "dry-film" lubricant that is used by people like NASA to improve the mesh between load-bearing gears. Sounds like high-tech stuff, huh? It's a retired NASA engineer that has developed this service for amateur astronomers, and I have been selected as a beta tester. I'll never know if it improves anything unless I have data showing the performance before the treatment.
So, with a clear night at hand I lugged all my gear outside and tried to remember how everything hooks up. Funny how much you forget after 6 weeks of watching it rain every weekend. Once I got everything running, I pointed the mount at a star near the intersection of the celestial equator and my meridian, and fired up K3CCDTools. It was the first time for me using this software, and I had heard good things about it. After getting things lined up, I started a data log and walked away for a little bit. My mount's gear makes one revolution, or period, in 8 minutes. So, I wanted at least 3 periods to get good data. After that, I pointed the mount over to M42 and started some imaging. This time I used Metaguide since that is what I am comfortable with. K3CCDTools will also guide, but sitting outside in the cold is not the best time to learn something new, especially when you haven't even read the manual. With Metaguide ready to do some autoguiding, I started imaging M42 and went back inside to defrost my toes. Meanwhile, Metaguide was logging data while ImagesPlus was happily snapping away 3-minute exposures of M42.
By midnight I was ready for bed and carried my ice-cold equipment back in the house. This morning I imported the date into Excel and examined the results. Seems like my periodic error is 20 arcseconds from peak to peak. Pretty average for a mount in this price range, and about what I expected. The log file from Metaguide showed the error pattern over a longer time. It's interesting how every third wave in the error plot has a weird shape. It's not yet totally clear what all this means, but at least I have some baseline data upon which to make a comparison. Hopefully after my mount is modified, I can repeat this testing and see some improvement. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

A new toy!

2007-01-15T09:17:00.001-05:00

Over the weekend I headed over to Sam's Club and got myself one of these Philips SPC900NC webcams that I have heard so many great things about. For only $57 this is quite a good deal. You might ask "why does he need another camera?" Well, I didn't need it until I got the "AS" version DMK I talked about in the previous post. My DMK has been my autoguider when imaging with the Rebel XT. But, now that the DMK is capable of long-exposure imaging, I need something else to be my autoguiding camera. Hopefully the SPC900NC will be up to the task. To use the webcam with a telescope, an adapter is needed, which you can see in the picture. These are easy to find on Ebay, and the same seller made the adapter for my DMK camera.
I can't wait to see how the SPC900NC performs, but I won't know until I get a clear night. The latest extended weather forecast is more depressing than the last time I checked. To top it all off, my wife and I are both suffering from bad colds right now. That's why I am sitting at home on a Monday instead of being at work. Now it's starting to rain a little - time to go read a book, or sleep!

Time for some indoor projects...

2007-01-13T19:28:00.001-05:00

The weather continues to be uncooperative for imaging and doesn't appear to show any sign of giving me a break for the duration of the extended forecast. When the skies cloud over, astronomers usually focus on DIY projects, learning & research, catching up on sleep, drinking, or any combination thereof. I decided on a little DIY project to kick off the new year, along with some drinking thrown in there of course. I prefer single-malt Scotch, or anything with vodka in it. And an aged tawny port makes a nice nightcap too. What were we talking about? Oh yeah - my DIY project. This project requires some background information to explain why the heck I would build such a thing. It all started not long after I got my DMK21AF04 firewire camera from The Imaging Source. They make high frame-rate cameras for scientific, medical, and industrial applications. Fortunately for amateur astronomers like us, the cameras are also sensitive in low-light conditions. The high frame rate lets us capture better images of the planets too. The DMK has two uses for me: autoguiding and planetary imaging. I started off with autoguiding and discovered a problem - a bright stuck pixel, or possibly group of pixels, was really messing up my guiding sometimes since the software would try tracking the "false star" caused by the stuck pixel. The great folks at The Imaging Source were kind enough to arrange an exchange. About the same time, I had heard about a new version of the camera (with an "AS" suffix) was being developed for astronomy use. The new version would allow exposures up to 60 minutes. The original version I had would only go up to 30 seconds. Luckily enough, they replaced my DMK with the new "AS" version. This meant that I now had not only a great planetary imager and autoguiding camera, but also a long-exposure CCD camera for deep-space stuff too. All in one package!

Most of the higher-end CCD cameras are cooled, so I thought: why not give it a try on this one? I had most everything I needed already: some thermoelectric cooling modules (also called Peltier devices) and a CPU cooling fan. Now I just needed a "cold plate" - something to transfer heat away from what we want to be cold. I bought some aluminum square tube that had inside dimensions the same as the camera. It wasn't quite that easy and I ended up cutting off one side of the square to make things easier to file down to size. The thermoelectric cooler (from Melcor) was bonded to the CPU cooler heat sink, and then to the cold plate, using thermal epoxy. Some rubber sheet material from Hobby Lobby was placed between the heat sink and cold plate for insulation. The only remaining issue was the DC power for everything. The fan on the CPU cooler needed 12V and the thermoelectric cooler needed 5V. That turned out to be an easy one - I picked up a high-capacity computer power supply that was less than $20 after a big rebate. The final touch was some Molex connectors and I was ready for testing. I decided to use 5-minute exposures as a test. First, I let the DMK take about an hour's worth of 5-minute dark frames without the cooling module turned on. Then, I turned on the cooling module and let it take another hour of exposures. The results seem pretty good and I am anxious to get out and try this under some real imaging, if the weather ever clears out. Below is a comparison between the last uncooled exposure taken and the last cooled exposure taken. Noise is reduced and we are left with hot pixels and some sort of glow in the corner that I haven't figured out yet.

Gotta love this weather!

2007-01-07T19:50:00.000-05:00

So far 2007 has not been good for my imaging. OK, I know it's only the first official weekend of the year but I am already complaining. Last weekend was cloudy and rainy - it poured rain like crazy on New Year's Eve. Then it cleared up just in time for the full moon, and of course in the middle of the week. I get up at 5AM for work, so week-night imaging is not an option for me. This weekend was another repeat, for the most part. After a rainy Friday, Saturday actually was very nice - partly sunny and 75. But as soon as the sun set, the temperature dropped like a rock and all that moisture starting rising. The image above pretty much sums up the way it looked every night this weekend. We just had a strong line of storms pass through which caused several tornado warnings in the area. That's twice this week! And again, the forecast for the week looks clear and sunny, with rain returning just in time for the weekend. Good thing I have lots of indoor projects to work on!

Going deeper...

2006-12-31T17:58:00.001-05:00

After seeing many great images taken with modified Canon cameras, I finally got up enough courage to attempt one of these modifications myself. Of course I didn't want to try it on my new Rebel XT, which was still under warranty. I decided to pick up a refurbished model on Ebay, do the surgery on it, and sell my original camera which was only 3 months old.
You may be wondering what I am talking about, and why I would want to rip apart a perfectly good camera. The stock Canon cameras have a small piece of filtered glass installed in front of the CMOS sensor (that's the part that converts red, green, and blue light into electrical signals). This filter cuts off a large portion of light in the H-alpha wavelength of 656nm. Above that wavelength the filter pretty much cuts off everything. Why do we care about H-alpha? Because hydrogen is very common in nebulae, and when hydrogen gets ionized due to the energy of a nearby power source such as a star, it then recombines with all the loose electrons flying around. About 1/2 of the time the hydrogen recombines at just the right energy level to release photons at the H-alpha wavelength. So, wherever a nebula is present we will usually see light (photons) emitted in H-alpha. Sure some nebulae are reflection types, but we can capture that light in the normal wavelengths too. Same goes for galaxies.
OK, enough physics, let's get back to the camera. So, we have this filtered glass deep inside the camera and we don't want it there. We have 3 options available right now to deal with this issue:
1. Remove the internal filter and leave the sensor uncovered.
2. Remove the internal filter and replace with clear glass.
3. Remove the internal filter and replace with UV/IR filtering glass.
The problem with option 1 is that the camera can no longer autofocus, but that's OK for use with a telescope, since the scope controls the focus. The only issue with #2 would be with refractor type telescopes where infrared light is not focused at the same point as visible light. This would cause stars to become bloated on images due to the excess IR energy that is out of focus. Option #3 is good for most average use, but does not allow the option of IR or UV photography. I chose option #2 because I wanted to try IR photography. While I do all my imaging through a refractor right now, I am not worried about star bloat because my light-pollution filter cuts off light in the infrared region.
For the clear glass replacement, I chose a pre-cut filter from Life Pixel. Edmund's Optics also sells a larger piece of anti-reflective glass that must be cut to the right size. The glass from Edmund's is thicker than the stock Canon filter, so I was worried about the effect on the camera's auto focus. Life Pixel did not specify a thickness, so I was hoping they matched the stock glass. When I got the glass I noticed it was thicker, so I could have saved some money by buying Edmund's glass. Oh well, now I know better.
The actual surgery is quite tedious and involves many steps. Some good instructions can be found at Life Pixel's DIY page. I followed every step and nervously disassembled and then reassembled the camera. Well, I didn't completely put the case back together just in case anything was wrong. I put in the battery, nervously turned the power switch, and then....nothing. No power, nothing on the LCD screen, just...nothing. I was very frustrated at this point and decided to carefully disassemble the camera again and thoroughly check every connection as I put the camera back together. Again, I attempted to power up the camera and....again....nothing. Well, this time I was really frustrated. I decided to take a break and look over the online instructions on the Life Pixel site as well as this fine tutorial. While looking at one of the pictures it hit me - the door over the memory card slot! The camera won't power up without this door closed. Since I hadn't totally reassembled the camera, I did not close the card door. I ran back upstairs to try again, and lo and behold the camera powered up. Man, did I feel stupid at this point, but very relieved. The only thing left to do was secure all the tiny screws holding the case together, and then wait for a clear night.
In the meantime I decided to try a few test shots indoors. At the top of this post you'll see a comparison image of some colored spools of thread. The top image has no external filter installed. You are seeing UV, visible, and IR wavelengths all at the same time. All color is washed out and you can see how sensitive the camera is to red. The second image shows how the CC1 filter from X-Nite brings back normal colors for whenever you want to take family or vacation photos, or whatever. This filter essentially mimics the stock Canon internal filter. You'll notice in that picture how much my auto focus is off. The thicker glass threw off the auto focus, but I can tweak that sometime. The lower picture shows the view through a Hoya R72 infrared filter. This gets tricky because you cannot see anything through the viewfinder with this filter installed. Your eye is not sensitive to IR, so it essentially looks black. To get the image framed and focused properly, you have to take a trial-and-error approach and take many images on a tripod. By the way, I am using 58mm filters along with a step-down ring to fit the 52mm threads on my lens.
The weather cooperated the following weekend, with some unusually warm weather for mid-December. This also brought lots of fog. I decided to go out anyway and try out my newly modded camera. I started off taking about an hour's worth of "junk" images to get the camera up to operating temperature. Then I turned my telescope to Monoceros, a visually bleak constellation with some wonderful objects. My deepest image with the stock Rebel XT had been the Rosette Nebula, which you saw in the previous post. That was 80 exposure of 3 minutes each, stacked in ImagesPlus. This time I only tried 20 exposure of the same length for testing purposes. I was shocked at the stacked result. I got slightly better results in 1/4 of the exposure time. Other objects with less H-alpha emissions, or none at all, will not show this kind of improvement. But this short test proves the modification is well worth the effort for objects like the Rosette. A comparison image of the Rosette Nebula is at the bottom of this post. Next, I moved over to M42 and snapped only 20 images to check the results. The stacked image above shows a nice improvement in red sensitivity in this region. I then went over to the Horsehead Nebula area and planned to taking a lot of exposures here. After about 30 exposures were taken, I came back outside and noticed a thin layer of fog hanging over. I decided to stop the exposures and pack up for the night since it was getting late. I kept 26 of the exposures, although I should have threw out a few more due to the fog. The stacked result above blew me away. In just a short amount of time I had captured a huge amount of deep red H-alpha emissions. Just compare it to my first attempt in my previous post about Orion. The new image also indicates a problem that occurs when the mount is tracking too well. There are vertical lines appearing due to the noise from the camera's internal CMOS sensor, which is generated every time an image is read into memory. Normally a small amount of tracking error in the mount can compensate for this by shifting the image slightly between frames. Some people actually move the camera slightly between exposures. I never worried about this because my tracking was never perfect. That night I must have been lucky with my polar alignment!
Since that night I have been busy with the holidays and haven't gotten a chance to get back out. I plan to spend a lot of time in Orion and Monoceros while they are in prime position for the next couple of months. Then it's galaxy season, which doesn't always required a modded camera, but it should be fun anyway. This post should get me caught up to present day, just in time for New Year's Day. Time to go celebrate the end of 2006, and the beginning of what hopefully is a great year for everyone.

Going deep...

2006-12-28T19:14:00.001-05:00

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I got very lucky with the weather - four days off work and four clear nights forecast. This kind of thing is typically unheard of for someone with lots of new astro equipment, so I was praying that the forecasters would not let me down. The night before Thanksgiving I setup my equipment before it was totally dark and got prepared for some imaging. I haven't mentioned it before, but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be connected to make this whole system work:

USB cable from laptop to Canon Rebel XT USB port
USB to serial convertor to Canon Rebel XT shutter port
DC adapter from power strip to Canon Rebel XT
USB laptop port to Shoestring Astronomy GPUSB unit
GPUSB interface cable to EQ6 autoguider port
Firewire cable from laptop to firewire hub
Firewire cable from firewire hub to DMK camera
Power cable to firewire hub
Power cable to mount
Power cables to dew heaters on each scope

So you can see that there's lots of stuff to trip on, and I have on more than one occasion. All these cables are necessary to automate the process as much as possible. The ImagesPlus software uses the USB and serial cables connected to my Canon Rebel XT camera to control camera settings, download images, and control the camera's shutter. ImagesPlus makes the process so easy. The software has a routine that measures focus, so you can quickly dial in the focus before getting started. Once you have achieved the best focus, you simply enter the number of exposures, the delay between exposures, the ISO setting, and any prefix to the file name. Then you click "Release" and the software begins taking exposures.
But there's a little more to be done for longer exposures. My mount can typically allow exposures up to 90 seconds without any guiding. That's without any precise polar alignment or drift alignment. To go longer we need something to keep the mount pointed precisely. That is where autoguiding comes into play. There are three basic elements to the autoguiding system:
1. A camera such as a dedicated CCD guide cam or webcam
2. Software to read the camera images and issue correction signals
3. A hardware interface to the mount's guide port
In my case I use the DMK21AF04 firewire camera as my guiding camera. I purchased this camera because it excels as a planetary imager with it's high frame rate and low noise. I tried to pick equipment that can have more than one use, and the DMK fits that role perfectly. The DMK is mounted in the C8, which has the f/6.3 reducer installed. Without the reducer my field of view would be very small, and the f/10 ratio would require much brighter guide stars. Going down to f/6.3 gives me a bit larger field of view and requires less exposure time for dimmer guide stars. On my laptop I am running MetaGuide software which works with lots of different webcams. Metaguide captures the frames coming in from the camera and stacks several to overcome small movements due to poor seeing. The software then determines which way to correct the mount, and issues guide corrections to the GPUSB interface from Shoestring Astronomy. This little device converts the guide commands to signals that the mount can recognize. What all of this boils down to is that I can run my exposures much longer. What makes it so convenient is that I can get everything setup in about 30 minutes, then start a long image sequence and walk away. While I am inside sipping cocoa or having a snack, the rig is snapping away pictures and keeping itself guided along the way. I just go out from time to time to check the progress and make sure nobody has ran off with any of my equipment. Sometimes I even catch a quick nap, which is hard not to do when you are imaging through the night.
Over the holiday weekend I managed to spend two nights out and capture three objects very nicely. The first was M45, which was in the previous post. The second was the Rosette Nebula, which consisted of 80 exposures of 3 minutes each at ISO 800 (top picture). The third was the California Nebula, which consisted of 50 exposures of 2 minutes each at ISO 1600 (bottom picture). Beyond just capturing a bunch of images, I learned a lot in the process. Every night I go out I learn more, and that's a big part of the reward of this hobby.

M45 - The Pleiades

2006-12-28T16:08:00.001-05:00

The Pleiades cluster is a bright nearby grouping of stars visible to the naked eye even from moderately light-polluted skies. It is estimated to be 440 light years away, which is why I say "nearby." In astronomical terms that's not too far away! It is also know as the Seven Sisters, named after the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione in Greek mythology. The main stars of this cluster are hot and blue, which is due to their relatively young age of about 100 million years old (1/50th the age of our Sun). The intense blue light given off by these stars illuminates a dust cloud that the stars are currently passing through.
This has been a challenging object for me, both in imaging and processing. My image above is the result of 70 exposures of 3 minutes each taken at ISO 800. It seems like even more time might be required to improve the results. I also need to work on my processing skills as it was difficult to really bring out the fainter details without raising the overall noise level too much.
Below is a NASA image map that identifies the major stars of the Pleiades.

Comet Swan

2006-12-28T11:36:00.001-05:00

It was nice to have a brief visit of a passing comet shortly after getting my astrophotography rig. This was Comet Swan, named for the SWAN instrument aboard the sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft. The instrument makes images available to the public, and the skilled eyes of astronomers all over the world, both amateur and professional, can use these images to discover their own comet. This comet, also classified as C/2006 M4, is a non-periodic comet, which means it will not come back for at least 200 years, if at all. Comet Swan suddenly increased brightness from magnitude 7 to magnitude 4 shortly before my image was taken. I didn't have ideal imaging conditions as the comet was low on the horizon at dusk and would disappear behind trees not long after it was dark enough to image. The images were aligned on the comet nucleus and stacked in ImagesPlus.

Orion - The Hunter

2006-12-28T10:41:00.001-05:00

Since I first started taking an interest in the night sky during childhood my favorite constellation has always been Orion - The Hunter. This winter constellation stands out prominently among the rest, dominating the southern sky. Riding along the celestial equator, the three bright stars that make up Orion's belt are hard to miss. The Giza pyramid complex in Egypt is said to be a map of these three stars. To the ancient Egyptians, this constellation represented the god of death and the underworld. Greek mythology has a couple of different versions, one being that Orion was accidentally killed by Artemis after a dare by her brother Apollo. The other version had Apollo summoning a giant scorpion to kill Orion. The latter might explain why Orion and Scorpius occupy similar parts of the sky in opposite seasons.
It is easy to see why so many civilizations regarded this constellation with so much attention. You can't help but stare at it when stepping out on a cold winter night. The great yellow star Belelgeuse dominates Orion's shoudler, while the bright multiple star Rigel stands at one of Orion's feet. And of course you can't miss the three stars of Orion's belt - Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Straight below the belt you will find Orion's sword, and a large nebula complex appropriately called the Orion Nebula. This was also classified by Charles Messier as M42 and is a large cloud of illuminated dust visible to the naked eye (assuming your sky is dark enough). There are actually two Messier objects here, M42 and M43. Nearby is what is referred to as the Running Man Nebula, because it really looks like a man running. This is classified as NGC 1977, but is also part of a complex of other nebulae NGC 1973 and NGC 1975. This is all part of an extremely large area called the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. This area covers nearly the entire constellation, hundreds of light years across and 1,500 to 1,600 light years away from us. A very active star forming region, the complex also contains Barnard's Loop as well as the famous Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33. Near to the bright star Alnitak and the Flame Nebula, this region is high in H-alpha emissions which give it a reddish glow behind the dark dust. The Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) is also a pretty sight, getting it's bright illumination from Alnitak. The bright energy of Alnitak knocks electrons loose from the hydrogen gas there, and when these electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine, they give off a bright glow.
This area represents a challenging object for imagers due to the very bright star Alnitak next to the very dim details we want to capture. Also, the deep red H-alpha regions around the Horshead Nebula are difficult to capture with a stock camera due to the internal filtering (more about that later). But with time and persistence, decent results can be obtained. Below are my first attempts at two regions of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.

Observing in suburbia

2006-12-28T09:40:00.001-05:00

Many people will travel to darker sites, or even build their own observatory to enjoy viewing & imaging celestial objects. The idea of packing everything up and driving to some location in the middle of nowhere does not appeal to me, at least not on a regular basis. This is not something I would do alone and I definitely do not want to leave my wife home alone all night. An observatory is just not an option as the neighborhood association would have a fit with such a structure. Someday I might have an observatory in a remote area of the southwest, but that will probably have to wait until retirement (and even then only if I'm lucky!). For now I am stuck with my suburban Atlanta location and it's light polluted skies. On top of that, my neighbor installed motion-detecting lights on the front and back of his house. What is really annoying is the front light, which has one light pointing out on the driveway, and another pointing diagonally back towards my yard - right at my observing location. He has conveniently aimed the motion sensor high enough to activate upon any car passing by, which in my neighborhood is about every two minutes. I could move over to the other side of the yard, but then I would have no view of Polaris, which is necessary for my mount's polar alignment. For the moment, I have resorted to clamping some aluminum corner pieces from a canopy we had on the deck to the fence, and hanging moving blankets between the pieces to block the neighbor's lights. Eventually I will build a small patio area so I have a flat, stable surface for my rig. Then I'll put up those aluminum canopy pieces around the patio to hold "light-blocking panels" which haven't been built yet. They will consist of a square PVC pipe frame with black duck cloth covering the entire area. These will make very lightweight panels that can be stored easily in the garage. It's the closest thing I can have to an observatory, and it's the best I can do in suburbia.

Stack 'em up!!

2006-12-27T23:46:00.001-05:00

One thing I learned & loved very quickly was the technique of stacking many exposures to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Things like light pollution and a mount with less-than-perfect tracking all work against us to limit how long we can take an exposure. If you can't take 10-minute exposures, no problem. You can take 2 or 3 minute exposures and take lots of them to get almost the same results. Software like ImagesPlus makes this task easy and offers many different options to stack images. I still don't understand them all, but the results clearly speak for themselves. Take a look at what happens when I add 20 more 90-second exposures to the 10 I took the night before (top picture). Nice improvement! And then look what happens when I add another 30 exposures.The results get even better - now I have dust lanes appearing in my Andromeda Galaxy. This is where I realize that I didn't line up my camera very well on different nights. You can see the mis-alignment on the corners. Oh well, all part of the learning experience. I'll keep going back to this object and adding more exposures.

Now I'm hooked!

2006-12-27T23:17:00.001-05:00

After my first weekend out with the new rig it was two weeks later before the weather cooperated and allowed some imaging. It was mid-October now and the weather had briefly turned cold, but at the same time brought much clearer skies. I actually didn't intend to start any DSO imaging yet, I wanted to keep getting familiar with all the equipment and polar alignment techniques. However, the first time I looked at M31 through the William Optics Zenithstar 80 FD, I couldn't help but run back inside and grab the camera. It was too beautiful NOT to photograph. I only snapped about 10 exposures at 90 seconds each, with the camera set at ISO 1600.
I could tell from the exposures being downloaded to my laptop that this would turn out pretty good. I also took some 120 second exposures, but my lack of good polar alignment created too much star trailing to use these images. Next, I moved over to M45 and again took only 10 exposures at 90 seconds each. I then moved over to the Double Cluster (NGC 884 & NGC 869) to try my hand at the monthly imaging contest on the Cloudy Nights website, where I spend much of my time on the forums. I finished the night by taking a few exposures of M42 in Orion, although it was still low in the sky and a streetlight was shining almost directly in my scope. Later I took some dark & bias frames before tearing down for the night. The next day I took some flat frames using a simple technique of holding two layers of a t-shirt over my telescope with a rubber band and taking some exposures in Av mode. I then used ImagesPlus software to calibrate, align, and stack all my images. I love this software and consider it one of the best investments I made for the entire setup. Without it I truly would be lost, or at least not enjoying things as much! These images posted here represent almost no processing, but I was excited about my initial results. At this point, I knew I was completely hooked!

My first "Astrophoto"

2006-12-27T19:31:00.001-05:00

Let's now go back in time a few months to the first night out for the new rig. It was September 30, 2006 and the full moon was out. Since my wife is Taiwanese, and this was their "Mid-Autumn Festival" we were out carrying on the tradition of cooking BBQ under the bright moonlight. After a lot of meat, seafood, and veggies were put on the grill I rushed out to the yard to power up the mount as the moon began to rise through the trees. The sky was still not quite dark enough to do a star alignment, and I was in a hurry to snap a pic of the moon still rising though some distant trees. What was interesting was that the mount slewed right to the moon without any star alignment. OK, the moon is a big target, but that impressed me. I probably didn't get the camera at the right exposure setting, but I was happy with the result. Later when the moon was a bit higher I snapped a few pics of the big bright full moon. The night of a full moon is not great for imaging, but I was bound and determined to do something with this new rig. Well, that's about where the fun ended. Now I can look back and laugh, but I spent several frustrated hours that night trying to figure out why my mount's GOTO function was not even close. After using a dob, I was moving the mount manually sometimes (i.e. unlocking each axis and moving it). This was after the mount was powered up and aligned, so I was obviously throwing off the mount's alignment without realizing it. Now I know better, but that first night had me nearly pulling my hair out. Oh well, newbie mistakes, and not the first.

Better late than never....

2006-12-23T12:47:00.001-05:00

When I got started with my new telescope earlier this year, my intent was to document my progress through a blog or my own dedicated website. A decent website costs money so I started looking around at all the different blog sites out there. I signed up for one and later didn't like it, signed up for another, then started getting overwhelmed in CSS and HTML stuff. About the same time we started remodeling our kitchen, which caused my blog, and my astronomy hobby, to be put on the back burner for a while. Well, the kitchen turned out great even though it's still not 100% complete today. Still have some backsplash to install but we are almost there. Another side effect of the kitchen remodel was my aggravation of an old shoulder injury. Even after all the hardest work was behind us, my shoulder continued to hurt for a couple of months. This made hauling my telescope, an Orion XT10i Dobsonian, a difficult chore. The XT10i collected dust during the summer while the weather was too hot and humid for viewing. As fall approached, my thoughts turned to astrophotography, which meant lots of new equipment to buy, and lots to learn. The dob was a nice telescope, but my light-polluted suburban Atlanta skies made viewing frustrating and disappointing. I had a good collection of accessories including some Siebert and Hyperion eyepieces, a NexImage webcam, and a Moonlite CR2 focuser. This would probably be a killer setup in dark skies. In my skies it was still a pretty good performer, but I always was left wanting more. I kept thinking about astrophotography, which my original budget did not allow. In September I was finally in a financial position to afford a decent starter rig. That's when I got started in what has turned into a full-blown obsession for me. The dob is gone now, but new set of toys takes it's place. This is where I will start documenting my journey into the world of astrophotography, and finally get around to getting this darn blog started.