AIC 2012 has begun! Day one has been filled with some excellent sessions. The exhibitor hall is open and there will be a two-hour opening later this evening.

My first session today was Ron Wodaski’s introduction to PixInsight. He covered many of the basics (that’s a lot) and gave some glimpses of the advanced features in the platform. Even an experience PixInsight user like me found it a useful and informative presentation. I am looking forward to seeing the full deck with all the details Ron promised.

I then attended Tim Puckett’s presentation on supernovae searching. He has built some amazing telescopes and quite a robust process and team for finding supernovae. When it is clear, his team will image 2,000 galaxies to find potential supernova. I learned that fit order 3 or 4 is required in PinPoint for astrometric reporting, and how to access the reference magnitude function in Maxim DL.

After lunch, there was a great presentation by Steve Brady, co-developer of the great focusing program, FocusMax. FocusMax uses the idea that there is linear relationship of the half flux diameter or HFD to focus that can be used to quickly and accurately focus a telescope using a CCD. HFD is the circle that evenly splits the flux or total ADU of a star regardless of focus. It is expressed in pixels. Max flux for a system is best calculated by plotting max pixel and max flux vs. time and picking a max flux value below where the curve flattens out. Focus convergence was clearly shown to be the best way to get to focus, even though it takes longer than the default of 5 exposures.

There was a very interesting discussion on precision vs. accuracy in FocusMax, and the key point is the size of the critical focus zone. More reading will be needed on that later. Focus is driven by the Vcurve, which is a hyperbola. Fit of measurements in creating a Vcurve are fit to the hyperbola, not to a linear fit of each side of the v. One should pick the point just above where the Vcurve moves away from the line as the near focus HFD, with the start HFD being about five units higher. Get at least 12 Vcurves for best results.

A major new release is coming sometime in the relatively near future. For now, the beta version is quite stable and is the one to use.

Finally, there was a great presentation from Ken Crawford on using masks in Photoshop CS5. I think I understand alpha channels now — they are containers for masks. He will have a video tutorial for all AIC attendees.

I took this image of NGC 7814, a spiral galaxy in Pegasus, last November but only am getting around to posting it now. I am afraid that the color is a little weak in the blue, but I’m not up to going back to the drawing board on this one. Click on the image for a full sized version and more information in the gallery.

Back on June 5th (in the Pacific time zone) was a singular event:  The Transit of Venus.  Venus passed directly between the Earth and the Sun, passing across the face of the Sun as seen from the Earth.  This happens rarely.  While the last transit was eight years ago, the next is 105 years from now.  Clearly unique in my lifetime.

The last Transit was not visible from Southern California.  This one was, starting at about 3pm and continuing until sunset.  I had prepped my C-8 on my old CGE mount (both worked flawlessly) with a Mylar solar filter.  I made a filter for my wife’s 200mm Nikon zoom.  We had Sun goggles.  I’d arranged my schedule to take the afternoon off, arriving just in time to open the observatory and point the scope.

The Transit started right on time.  There were a few sunspots on the face of the Sun, adding some visual interest.  One friend came by to see it.  It was a nice, low-key event, somewhat visually interesting.  What really made it fun was knowing that we won’t be seeing it again.

I took two images through the C-8.  The first was taken early in the transit, pointing my digital camera through the eyepiece. Some visual interest with the sunspots.

Venus transiting the Sun, taken with eyepiece projection through a C-8 at about 3:30pm PDT 5-Jun-12.

The second was taken with my trusty ToUCamPro directly through the scope with a f6.3 focal reducer. Not all that pretty, but an accurate image.

Venus transiting the Sun, taken at about 5pm PDT 5-Jun-12 with a ToUCamPro on a C-8 @ f6.3

Jerry Kamienski took a beautiful video of the Transit out at Lake Riverside.

Transit of Venus by Jerry K

Finally posting here, two versions of the first real image taken with the new CDK 12.5 telescope. The full set-up: CDK 12.5 on an AP-1200 mount, ST-10XME camera, Pyxis 3″ rotator. Data captured with Maxim DL and CCDCommander, reduced and aligned in CCDStack, extensive processing in PixInsight with a final touch up in Photoshop. It is 3 hours, 25 Minutes LRGB with 100 minutes luminance and 35 minutes each of red, green and blue. All subexposures were 5 minutes and the color was binned 2×2.

This is the first version.

Here is the second version. A bit more aggressive on the processing on this one.

Click on the images to go to the gallery and vote on your favorite!