Observatorio de la Ballona

The hearing for the plot plan change was last Monday and it was a non-event from my perspective. Our plot plan change and about 12 others were all approved in one motion in the first five minutes of the meeting. I’m certainly not complaining. We are in the 10-day comment period. I am hopeful there will be no comments.

Since I was at the building department, I filed the construction plans, complete with engineering. They are in plan check now. So we are moving forward.

Almost a month after it arrived, the AP-900 has seen first light. That is, perhaps, an overstatement, since I am not sure a mount can see first light. But I had it up and running last night in Lake Riverside, with the NP-101 (itself seeing light for the first time in almost 18 months).

Rather than build a model of pointing, as the CGE does, the AP-900 GTO relies on accurate polar alignment and the correct time. Using the NP-101 (about 500mm focal length) two cycles of polar and other star alignment led to adequate goto capabilities. Everything I pointed at was in the field of view of a 9mm Nagler or 13mm Ethos.

Unlike the CGE, when it slews to an object, it just arrives. The CGE gets close, then moves up and right to the final point. The AP gets to the position and stops. Confidence in mechanical operation no doubt.

I took two sets of shots with the USB camera. I forgot the TCF to NP-101 adapter so that I wasn’t able to do any CCD imaging. I am not ready for multi-location imaging. I find it stressful enough to get all the equipment in one place. I hope that place will be in Lake Riverside, but that will take time.

Here is a shot I took of the Moon. It is a mosaic of three sets of AVIs, stacked in Registax, merged in Photoshop, and processed in PixInsight.

With a vacation last month, I missed getting this posted, but here’s the news.

The forces of zoning and regulation have slowed progress on the new observatory. When our architect went to file the building permit, he was informed that, because our garage is detached, a plot plan change would need to be submitted. This will require a review by the planning department and a public hearing.

Riverside County instituted a new rule in March of this year to require a more public review on new accessory buildings. Apparently, some people were building large or ugly or view-blocking buildings and neighbors did not have a way to comment or possibly prevent the construction of an inappropriate outbuilding. We got snagged by that rule.

Normally, a building under 400 square feet doesn’t require a plot plan review. However, any second building, regardless of size, does require a review. At 208 square feet, this seems a bit unfair, particularly because the project is subject to Lake Riverside Estates’ CC&Rs, and that includes a review by the Architecture Committee. We are all OK on that front.

So we are now waiting for the next step. The planning department has apparently approved the project from their perspective, and I am waiting to hear what the next step is.

UPDATE August 4, 2008

We’ve been notified that the hearing is next Monday, August 11. I hope that it goes OK.

I have always considered my site maintenance practices to be quite safe. I try to keep code compliant, I stay on current patches, and so on. But probably quite a while ago, at least over a year, the main page on Obsballona.net was hacked.

Someone, somehow, edited the index.php file to include an obscure call. It was to include a file that was specified with the PHP function “urldecode.” It turns out that translated to a text file from someone who is supported out of the Netherlands. The text file contained a bunch of porn words with links to the porn sites.

I never noticed it because the inserted text was formatted as “hidden” and was therefore not visible. Search engines did see it, so I suppose that it helped someone’s Google ranking. I also never noticed the code because it was right at the bottom of the page. I did find it when I did the updates mentioned in the previous post.

So check your file versions, and beware of any “urldecode” with a nonsense string after it.

I’ve been under the weather the last several days and have been trying to take it easy. So I have taken the opportunity to do a little web searching.

I have been looking for a good open source HTML / PHP editor that runs on Windows for a while. I like Bluefish, but it does not run on Windows without Cygwin. I know that I should just set up a Linux partition and work from there, but I have found it too hard to go back and forth. And almost all the key software tools I use (The Sky, NexRemote, MaximDL, FocusMax, etc.) run only on the Windows platform. So I want a Windows or, ideally, a multi-platform tool. I believe I have found it in Eclipse.

I heard about Eclipse at work, where our Java developers would like to move to it as the preferred IDE platform. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs (integrated development environments) and has been primarily focused on Java®. They do have an IDE for PHP and the tool also understands HTML. I downloaded and installed it and it has been very easy to use. The HTTP context help isn’t great, but it is good enough so far. Finding the tool got me inspired to clean up the site.

All of the main pages (not the blog, gallery, or wiki) of the site have been updated to load the sidebar from an external file. The top bar is still static, as I would have to write some PHP to get that to load more flexibly, but that is on the table. Each page now also shows when it was last updated. I also have, with the help of the validator in Eclipse, made sure all the pages are XHTML compliant. I made major updates to the Equipment page, adding links to the products and putting software into categories.

I also updated the banner in the Astrophoto Gallery. The default color for the title text was too dark, so that is lighter. I also replaced the delivered background image from the theme with a bit of Mare Nectaris. It’s a bit more personalized now.

Perhaps now I’ll personalize the wiki. Or perhaps clean up Schlei.com

We went to the final regular season concert for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Disney Hall today. There were three more modern (1900+) pieces that were nice, if a little more avant garde then our preference, but still enjoyable.

One of the pieces was Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto. This is a new piece, composed in 2007, at its first performance by the Philharmonic. It being the last performance of the season, they introduced three retiring performers, each of whom had been with the orchestra since the early 1960s. The retiring french horn player commented that we needed to be tolerant of new music, such as the Piano Concerto to be performed that day. He said “Remember your favorite keys: C, F sharp, G. You’ll be hearing all of them. At the same time.” Very amusing.

Even more funny is the paragraph from Esa-Pekka’s own description of his piece:

Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds I (my working title)

I imagined a post-biological culture, where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore. Composing intelligence creates music that somehow relates to an area that long time ago [sic] was called the Balkans. All this is accompanied by bird-robots.

I take it he was being funny and it was a light hearted piece, but that description made my jaw drop.

We have completed the first step of the new observatory project. The driveway at Osage Court has been re-routed and re-graveled, and a parking area has been added near the observatory site. Here is a view looking down the drive to the south. (Click-through requires a login.)

We hope that this re-routing will prevent the problems we have had with erosion. The pipes are the temporary irrigation until the observatory building is completed. The new building will have an equipment room so we can move the pump equipment inside. At that time we’ll also re-do the irrigation so that it is more effective, more reliable, and, most importantly, requires less maintenance.

There was a small problem with the temporary irrigation. An open pipe created a flood, washing down dirt over the lower drive. This was caused because the order of the valves did not match the circuit number on controller. The 2nd, 7th, and 9th valves were used, but the circuits are the 2nd, 6th, and 8th. Yet another slap-dash job by the prior residents here. This caused a bit of anguish, but it is all fixed now.

It has finally been achieved. After almost two years, on April 11, 2008, I took a CCD image from Lake Riverside. This took quite a while because I have a full observatory set-up in Los Angeles. So going to a temporary set-up again was a big leap, even to get to darker skies. After all, I do admit to being lazy.

I got up to LRE on Friday afternoon. There was a good wind blowing from the east, but the weather was otherwise pleasant with the temperature in the low 70s. I took care of the yard chores and as soon as the Sun got low I began taking out the equipment. I wanted to wait for the Sun to be fully down before I took out the OTA (optical tube assembly) since I wanted it to be as cool as possible. I had selected the driveway in front of the garage as my location because it was shielded from the east wind.

There is a fair amount of equipment involved:

• Tripod, with spanner
• Mount, with computer assembly, mount proper, and counterweights
• Telescope (or OTA) with dew shield
• Focuser (TCF-S), controller box and power supply
• Dew heater and controller
• 12 volt power supply for mount and dew heater
• Camera (ST-10 w/CFW-8 and AO-7) and power supply
• Table
• Computer, with power supply and wireless rumblepad to control the mount
• USB hub with power supply
• USB to serial adapter (Keyspan)

Once that is all set-up, then I have to connect the mount to the PC. Then software configuration: The Sky to NexRemote, Maxim DL to The Sky, the camera, and the focuser, and Focus Max to the focuser and the Sky. The mount needs to be aligned, polar aligned, and aligned again. This took over an hour.

I had settled on NGC 3628 because it is an interesting object in the southeast sky with an excellent magnitude 7.1 guide star. It took about 45 minutes to get the object framed with the guide star on the guide chip, the scope focused, and the shot set-up. By that time is was 10:25pm and NGC 3628 was going to transit (cross the meridian) at 10:45. I decided to take a couple of 5 minute luminance shots anyway.

I went in the house for a few minutes and when I came back (on the phone with my wife) the wind had come up. Only now it was coming from the northeast, not the east and it was buffeting the mount. Two ruined shots, one I ultimately used. And some despair that the wind would ruin the entire night.

After the meridian flip, I tried to get the “acquire star” functionality in Focus Max to work but it wouldn’t. It did not report an error, it just said that it failed. I got it to plate solve and synch the scope, but not acquire a star. This is really a great focus feature when it works. It will find a near-by star, center the star on the CCD, focus, and return to the object. Excellent automation. This work on Focus Max pushed the time to 11:30, but the wind had subsided.

I set up an imaging run of 12 five minute luminance shots and 4 five minute red, green, and blue images. I then went inside out of the cold, as it had fallen to the low 50s by this point. The wind was mostly calm. I checked the process several times, and everything seemed OK. The bright guide star allowed me to use 0.07 second guide shots, running the AO-7 at about 12 Hz. Then, at about 12:15, the back door banged from a gust of wind. When I went outside, a northeast wind was really coming up. The current image was worthless, the last two prior were lost as well. I decided to end the imaging session.

First, I had to shoot flats. I put a pillow case over the front of the OTA and got my flats with light reflected off of the garage. The wind kept rising, so I began to get a little frantic getting everything taken down. Scope shot down and disconnected, camera disconnected and into the house, cables off, OTA off and into the house, PC inside, counterweights off and into the shop, miscellaneous stuff into the shop, finally, the tripod, mount, and table into the garage. Whew.

By this time it was blowing at least 25 to 35 miles per hour. The rest of the night was very noise as the wind kept up, with gusts over 45 miles an hour. It stayed windy until I left at noon on Saturday.

I ended up with 50 minutes of exposure time. 25 minutes of luminance, 10 minutes of red and green, and 5 minutes (only one shot!) of blue. The RGB shots were binned 2×2. The final result doesn’t have a lot of detail, and it is fairly noisy, but the milestone of the first shot from Lake Riverside has been achieved.

NGC 3628 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Leo. It is one of the Leo Triplet group of galaxies. NGC 3628 is about 35 million light years away. You can click on the image for more information.

I have been using a new planetary imaging camera for the last several months. I have a DMK DFK21AU04 640×480 USB 2.0 camera. I originally bought a firewire camera but was able to swap it for a USB version, much more convenient since my laptop does not have power to the firewire port. I also purchased a color camera because I am not yet up to getting a full filter wheel set-up to do RGB planetary imaging. Yes, you could call that lazy.

One struggle I have had is choosing from the multiple choices of video format and codec. The Imaging Source’s software gives you many choices. I learned the hard way that some of the codecs cannot be read directly from Registax. That requires reading the files in VirtualDub and saving them as BMPs via the export function. This is an extra step I’d like to avoid.

Now there is an advantage to going to BMPs. Registax appears to have a limit that prevents it from reading more than a 2,000-frame AVI. There is no limit to the BMP processing, you just drag the list of however many thousand images you have right into the Registax window and it works fine. This has allowed me to do some nice Saturn imaging that would not have been as good if I had to use fewer images and allowed me to process some captures where I had shot over 2,000 frames before I was aware of this consistent limit.

IC Capture lets you set the video size and color format with three settings and supports a whole bunch of codecs for compression. Being lazy, I went with the default which is video size and color of YUY2 and a compression codec of DV Video Encoder. Of course this could not be read by Registax, but I used my workaround through VirtualDub and all was well, or so I thought.

Last Friday I took and processed this image of Saturn.

Not the greatest Saturn image, but OK. There’s another story on the processing of the image, but we’ll get to that in another post. One problem though. I posted the image in the Bad Astronomy / Universe Today forum and Mike Salway noted that it looked a bit squished. He was right. Here is a corrected version of the image.

Apparently the DV encoder makes the image widescreen, stretching the 640 dimension to 480. I finally did some research and found that the recommendation was never to use compression. So that sent me into experimentation mode.

The recommended format for imaging is Y800. Y800 appears black and white but debayering will reveal the colors. In Registax on the first screen, select additional options, use debayer and GB under the Debayer options. Full instructions are available from the Imaging Source blog. Rather than try to communicate this in text, here is a table with my results (FPS=Frames per second).

* Can’t use BMP output directly in Registax. See this post in CloudyNights Forums.

So the bottom line is this. If you need fewer than 2,000 frames with 60 fps, go with Y800/Unspecified and go straight to Registax. If you’re OK with 30 fps, but need lots of frames, go with YUYV/Unspecified and run it through VirtualDub to get BMPs. If you need 60 fps and lots of frames, use BY8 and RGB24. It uses a lot of disk space, but you get your frames and your frame rate.

Comments and corrections greatly desired.

Since we’ve been going back and forth to the LRE house and I haven’t had a chance to get things fully set-up in LA for CCD imaging, my main target has been the Moon. As in the previous post, I have tried additional mosaics. I have also kept experimenting with processing Lunar images.

My basic process in PixInsight is:

1. Convert the image to 32 bit
2. Upsample by 200%. Deconvolution simply won’t work on the original pixel depth.
3. Use regularized Van Cittert algorithm deconvolution to sharpen the image
4. Flatten the image with HDR Wavelet transform at the default settings
5. Adjust the contrast of the image with curves
6. In some cases, do some minor noise reduction with GreyCStoration.

Most of my time is taken tweaking the deconvolution parameters. (If you are starting on this, the PixInsight team has a great processing example on their site.) This time, I learned that other parameters matter too.

In iterating on the deconvolution, I noticed that this image had more noise that other recent ones. The deconvolution was bringing it out clearly. After several hours, I figured out what I had done differently. On my prior Lunar images, I had selected bicubic b-spline interpolation rather than default when I upsampled the image. No particular reason, but I picked that instead of the default. This time, I had used the default (”automatic”) which I believe chose bilinear interpolation.

No, I don’t understand the difference in the algorithms, but I know they are different. Time do do some reading on the subject.

So I experimented and learned that for my Lunar images, bicubic b-spline is sharp, cubic b-spline produces less noise, and the other offered choices aren’t worth using. And I learned that you can go past critical details in processing your image without even knowing it. Layers. (Onion layers, not parfait layers, if you follow the reference.)