I haven’t had much time or focus on astronomy for, really, the past year. Many reasons. So in this post I will set forth my astronomy goals for the year ahead.

• Install and image with the new camera
• Take many solar images with the Lunt scope
• Image Saturn
• Start setting up the original Observatorio de la Ballona for narrowband imaging with the ST-10

And so, there it is.

This is old news, but I feel compelled to mention it.

Back on October 1, 2014, Diffraction Limited, creators of Maxim DL, acquired Santa Barbara Instruments Group (SBIG).

Diffraction Limited, a company well-known for its Cyanogen brand astronomy products, including MaxIm DL imaging software, today announced the acquisition of the assets of Santa Barbara Instrument Group Camera Division of Aplegen, Inc. As part of this acquisition, Diffraction Limited is assuming all responsibility for manufacturing, product development, customer service, repair and warranty support.

Several years ago, SBIG was acquired by Aplegen, Inc,. a medical imaging company. I figured this was a way for the founders to get some of their money out of the company and a basis for continued growth. SBIG has continued to produce good products and new innovations.

I am hopeful that this new change in ownership is a good thing. Doug George, owner of Diffraction Limited, is a good guy. I’ve met him several times at the AIC in San Jose. Others I have communicated with believe this is a good thing for the company. And that is good for imaging, because SBIG consistently has set the standard for astronomical cameras.

A few weeks back I acquired a new, dedicated solar telescope. It is a Lunt LS80 THa with the double stack module. I admit that I was attracted to solar scopes by the Coronado line of telescopes, purchased sometime back by Meade. Upon doing my research, I learned that the Lunt line is made by the founder of Coronado and manufactured in the United States. I purchased from Anacortes Wild Bird and Telescope, a fine establishment with an excellent staff.

Of course I wanted to take images. My first attempt was not worth posting outside of Facebook. And when I tried again, I had more follies with video format. For all programs, RGB24 is a large file, but a good, uncompressed format. And it works.

For this effort I acquired a new camera off of Astromart. It is am Imaging Source DFK 31AU03. It has a 1024×768 CCD, and worked very well for what I wanted to do.

I processed the 2,000 frame videos in Registax, AstroStakkert, and AviStack. AviStack was the slowest, but it produced the best result, based on visual assessment. I am sure all of these programs are good, and I am a beginner on all but Registax. From there, I moved to PixInsight. I only aligned and stacked the images in these programs. All real enhancement was done in PixInsight.

In PixInsight, the real enhancer was deconvolution. I used modified Lucy-Richardson with a combination of 3.0 and 3.5 StDev PSF, with 200 iterations. More the better I always say. Before deconvolution, I doubled the pixel size of the image. I did use HDR transform to add some contrast, but I weighted the deconvolved image more using pixel math. I am happy with the results. Some minor finishing was done in Photoshop.

Here is the first image. I stretched out the image with a mask to show the prominences on the rim of the Sun. It did tweak part of the limb, but I think it looks good.

On the second image, I tweaked the color in Photoshop to brighten it up a bit. I think it reveals the details of the Sun better.

I had some used astro-imaging equipment I wanted to sell, so I went to the premier on-line marketplace for used astronomy equipment, Astromart. I have sold items through the site before. It is a really good marketplace for astronomy equipment.

I sold two items, an SBIG STL-11000M and the 8-position filter wheel for the STL-series cameras, the FW8-STL.

I sold the STL-11000 first. I had replies to the add almost immediately. I had a request for a dark frame from the camera that resulted in a funny comment. The person to whom I sent the dark frame commented that it looked “noisy.” Since a dark frame consists only of the record of thermal noise on the chip, what else is it going to look like? Particularly a single 5-minute frame. I was amused. The sale was completed with in a couple of days.

When I listed the FW8-STL, I received a responses within minutes. Clearly this is a widely sought item. If any of you have an FW8-STL for sale, I bet you can get almost the original full retail on it, which is $1,195 (I did not charge that much). That sale is completed with the FW8 off to Australia.

Anacortes Wild Bird and Telescope does a great job keeping Astromart going. My experience there has been consistently good. It is well worth the annual membership fee. They are great to do business with as well. I have purchased several items from them. They provide excellent, knowledgeable service.