Monthly Archives: November 2008

AIC 2008 Recap and Photos

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AIC 2008 wrapped up just over a week ago. It was a good conference, fairly different in content and organization than prior years. The core of the conference did not focus all that much on astrophotography, but rather on general space science, publishing, and 3-D rendering. I suppose it was good to get general theory rather than cookbook demonstrations as it has been in the past. From an astrophotography standpoint, the sessions on Friday were quite good. This balanced the more general content of Saturday and Sunday with smaller group sessions on tools and techniques.

As always, it was good to see friends from prior conferences and talk about imaging, observatories, and equipment. The vendor section was quite good, with more vendors than last year. I am now again interested in pursuing Hyperstar imaging given a very convincing discussion with the folks at Starizona. My current dream scope is a Planewake CDK 12.5. But the observatory comes first.

Here are some photos of the conference. This first is a shot of the main conference area.

AIC 2008 Meeting Room

AIC 2008 Meeting Room

Bud Guinn and Venkata model the 3-D glasses we were given for the 3-D rendering presentation.

Astro-Physics, Planewave Instruments, and ASA telescopes provided an impressive display.

The Chronos Mount is an intriguing product. It uses harmonic drives and is an equatorial mount that does not require a meridian flip.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s meeting. I would like to see some presentations on the math behind image processing.

AIC 2008 Live Blog Sunday

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08:00 PST — Start of the final day at AIC. Last night included a demo of Light Buckets, an on-line telescope service. Charges add up quickly as it is from $80 to $175 per hour. Next year’s conference is set at the end of October. It will be larger, they have reserved the upstairs room. Bigger and better.

Ray Gralak Advanced Image Combine Techniques CCD usage, starting in 90s. CCD stacking led to great dynamic range, DDP made it visible, but artifacts in the image came out. These are cosmic ray hits, hot/cold pixels, bad columns, satellite trails, plane trails, and asteroids. Four raw image types: Bias, Dark, Flat, and Light frames. Dark and Bias frames may change over time. Data collection tips: Take all frames at the same temperature, take the same number of darks as lights, use light frame duration for darks, dither your lights and flats, flat frames should be at or near focus and at the same orientation of the light frames, a flat for each filter. Workflow: Create master Bias, master dark, subtract bias from each flat, normalize and combine flat frames, subtract master dark from light, apply flat, align and combine.

Combine methods: Average, median, min / max clip, sigma, SDM. Average, good SNR, but artifacts remain. Median, best noise rejection, but lower SNR. Min/Max, rejects most artifacts, but leaves some, must have >6 images. Sigma Clip, strong noise rejection, requires >10 images to work best, does make errors to reject good or not reject bad. SDM, calculates mean and median, then looks at standard deviation of all pixels, if STD is above a certain number, it uses median, otherwise uses mean. Multiply a sigma factor to select “certain number,” if sigma factor is zero, all pixels are rejected and the mean is used. Lost of detail on settings (I took a picture).

09:00 PST — Wolfgang Promper Making the Most of Your Site This is a topic for me, about imaging from an urban location. I get it! We should image where we can do it more often. Normalize background: Equal pixel counts on background in each channel. Interesting, he cuts out of Maxim and pastes into Photoshop. Gradient Xterminator as primary gradient removal, then manual tweaking of the image. High pass and threshold to find the stars (SSRO has instructions). Add stars as new color channel with cut and paste to use the channel as a selection, expand and feather selection by 2 pixels, 2 pixel minimum filter to reduce size of stars. Use extensive selective color to balance nebular color. DDP 100 lower than auto. “After a lot of processing and versions you often find that the first version was the best.”

09:32 PST — Break

10:00 PST — Door Prizes! Art won a telecompressor!

10:30 PST — Conference Over

AIC 2008 Live Blog Saturday

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Today (November 15th) is the second day of the Advanced Imaging Conference (AIC) in San Jose, California. We’ll see how well I can keep up the live blog.

Friday was a very good day. I attended workshops on image processing programs PixInsight and CCDStack and observatory automation programs CCDAutoPilot and ACP. All very interesting. The CCDStack presentation from Stan Moore was particularly good. He covered data rejection techniques in detail. I have still not decided between CCDAutoPilot and ACP. ACP seems more robust, but there are some very cool features (auto G2V calculation, strong dithering algorithm) in CCDAutoPilot.

08:30 PST — We are under way. Tim Ferris awarded the 2008 AIC Hubble Award for creating the film, Seeing in the Dark. Commenting on the creation of films, how many are resistant to technology. The old 24 fps story. HD is shot at 30 fps. Now on to shallow focus. Another technical artifact of slow color film. People become stuck in the past. They used special effect techniques in the film to, among other things, make stars twinkle. This looks like an excellent film.

09:30 PST — John Gleason, A Celebration of Ha Imaging. Absolutely astounding narrowband images. Well, the ST-10 is good for Ha. Standard advice, expose, expose, expose. Live processing demo! A real risk taker. Extensive non-linear stretching of the image with curves, some clipping using histogram. 3-picel minimum filter “Continuum subtraction.” Use noise reduction to clean up noise from filter. Days of processing, lasso, feather of 100, curves and levels on selected areas. Analogous to burning and dodging. Relies on very deep exposure, lots of dynamic range. This allows extensive processing. It is interesting that there is no use of special tools, just lasso, curves, and levels. A great result.

On to Australia. Out in the outback with the Milky Way illuminating the ground. Sounds beautiful. Down there you have the galaxy right overhead. Many Ha targets.

10:30 PST — Break Time

11:00 PST — Michael Backich, Senior Editor and Astronomy Magazine. What a Photo Editor Wants Picture selection depends on the story, not pro or amateur. And the editor is god when selecting photos. Best submissions are e-mailed, TIFF, and highest resolution you have. Make the subject of the e-mail with only the object identifier. At www.Astronomy.com/astroimages provides information on what has been published for the last several years. Try something that hasn’t been done or that hasn’t been done recently. Also add descriptions, emphasis on “only,” “last,” “first,” and the like. Also, interesting things: Good double stars, variable starts, showers, comets, etc. Same object, different wavelengths. Simple camera, star trails shots. Astronomy will be starting an on-line reader gallery. Starting an e-mail list, will put out announcements, requests for images. E-mail Michael.

11:45 PST — Lunch

13:00 PST — Vendor Presentations

SBIG: new STX Cameras, standalone autoguider, new all-sky camera — color and daylight.
Software Bisque: The Sky X — multi-platform, 50x performance improvement, reduce separate applications, simplify installation. Professional version mid-2009. AP support!
RCOS (Adam Block presenting): Big 24″ scope. Clearly an amazing scope.

13:35 PST — Alex Filippenko, UCB — Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe Do you believe that people mistake Cosmology and Cosmetology? A good and entertaining presenter, probably a good professor too. Zwicky: “Spherical bastards: bastards anyway you look at them.”

14:30 PST — Break

15:00 PST — Ron Wodaski Tzec Maun Foundation 50′ steel dome in New Mexico. A foundation to provide free internet access to telescopes for students and researchers. The foundation will be providing a scholarship to AIC 2009.

15:25 PST — Sean Walker, Imaging Editor, Sky & Telescope, Collaborative Imaging One partner from Sky and Telescope, the other a great amateur telescope maker. WinJUPOS, plot positions of the major planet features. Can import and flatten your images. Sean created an amazing picture map of Mars, and another of Venus. The Venus image is really unprecedented.

16:00 PST — Chris Ford, Pixar, Astronomy in 3d Constrained: Fixed to real images, Unconstrained, able to visualize. The latter open to all artistic license. The talk is on the former. Amazing 3d visualization of astro images. Very interesting, but not for me for quite a while. It’s enough to do regular processing.

17:05 PST — Close up the live blog for the day.

Observatory — Planned and Approved

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After a bit of an adventure with the planning department, I have a building permit to build an observatory out in Lake Riverside. I wrote earlier (Regulated! and Regulatory Update) about how Riverside County made us go through a formal process so that we could even apply for the building permit.

The building permit process went much as we expected it. After about a month, the on-line status showed that Building and Safety had looked at it, rejected it and passed it on to Engineering. They had some updates, and our architect took care of those and resubmitted the plans. Then the fun began.

I received a call in early October from Building and Safety. I was told that they “just realized that our property is in a high-fire zone.” Let’s see. The county had the plan through two planning processes since the first week of July. And they “just realized” the fire classification? The net was that I was called the next week and told that the plans were ready but I would need clearance from the Fire Safety Department.

I spoke with the representative in the office. She said she didn’t want me to panic, but the rules stated that there is a 100′ setback rule, mandated by state law, in any high-fire area. I told her that this couldn’t make sense because that would make about 2/3 of my property unusable. She said to come in, an appointment wasn’t necessary. So I worked my schedule to stop at the office in Riverside on the morning of October 17th.

I’ll just cut to the chase. The gentlemen I spoke with that morning basically said that the law is the law and that 100′ setbacks are required in a high-fire area. It didn’t matter that those setbacks would render a 350′ square lot mostly useless. I was a bit upset, but he said that I could set-up time with his boss and we could look at the plans and perhaps a mitigating plan could be put in place. I left in a state of shock. I had spent over three months and almost $4,000 in fees to Riverside County and they were saying there is no way the structure could be permitted.

I met with another contractor the next day. He had been recommended by Dennis McQueary, the plumber who has done a lot of very good work for us. The consensus was that I should go to the Murietta Fire Safety office and see what I could do there.

I arranged my schedule so I could go out there the morning of October 30th. That required driving to Lake Riverside the night before to get there at a reasonable time in the morning. I prepared pictures, printed out Google maps and aerial photos, I had a whole story set up. After all, the law defines “high-fire” as covered in brush and remote from roads. The area around the house is neither. I was ready.

I got to the office, and the person at the desk went to the back to get the fire safety officer. I told him my story. Permit denied, no point in leaving for review, must make an appointment. He asked who had told me I needed an appointment and I told him. He said “let’s look at the plans.” It was straightforward. 280 square feet, next to a gravel drive, about 100′ from 5,000 gallons of water. Het stepped to the next cubicle and I heard the tapping of a keyboard. He returned with a stamp and started stamping and signing each page. The stamp said “approved.” I left the office shortly a very happy man.

At this point, I decided to push it all the way. I went to Riverside and picked up the permit. There were a few other bumps, but they were all cleared within about 90 minutes from when I arrived at the Building and Safety office. I left with approved plans, a building permit, and a job card. Ready to go!

The project isn’t totally a go yet. We still need to have a contractor’s bid that can be built within our budget. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Here are some of the details of the planned (and permitted!) observatory. The first image is the floor plan. You can see the large observatory area with room for two telescopes, a good-sized warm room, and a place for the pump equipment.

This next image is the elevation from the east, looking at the entry door to the warm room.

Finally, here is the planned site for the building, next to the existing pump equipment. The rough position is outlined in green.