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.

Real Imaging from Lake Riverside

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The equipment has been moved and the time came to take real data to make a good image. On September 20, 2008, my brother-in-law Art Fernandez and I got the AP-900, NP-101, and ST-10 combo all set up and took some nice data of M33.

Setting up the AP900 requires good polar alignment. On a one-night set-up, the first align alignment needed to be visual. On the first iteration, I aligned on the wrong star — I picked a bright star but not the named star to which we were aligning. The lesson is to start with the 44mm Panoptic, whose field of view is large enough to prevent mistakes. On the last alignment, the alignment star crossed the meridian during the alignment. The mount tried to slew backwards to get back home.

We then put on all the CCD equipment and balanced the mount. I tried aligning (using sync) on Jupiter, but results were poor. I finally got good alignment on a bright star and then using a search pattern from the believed location. Kind of like a sea search for a wreck.

My first idea for a “don’t stay up too late” target was the Cocoon Nebula. But by the time we got going, it was too high in the sky, so we moved to M33. So now come the follies.

FocusMax wasn’t talking to Maxim DL 5, so I had to find the newest version. If you need it go to the Yahoo! Focus Max group. Then I tried to use the Pyxis, but I could not talk to it. I learned later that the delivered software won’t work with a Keyspan USB to serial adapter. So no Pyxis. In rotating the camera, the mount moved against the clutches. Alignment lost.

Found a star, re-aligned. On our way. Except that Maxim DL 5 was obstreperous on the autoguiding calibration. It kept jumping from star to star between alignment frames. There definitely could be some algorithm enhancement there.

On focusing, acquire star in FocusMax didn’t work. It turns out that the error was that I did not allow syncs in TheSky. I control the scope from TheSky as the hub, but internal settings prevented it from working. On October 26, with help from CloudyNights, I fixed the problem.

The mount guided beautifully on 10 second exposures. I know I can push it further than that.

It got very cold, down to 43 degrees F. And in September. I blame Global Warming.

Take down was a lot of work.

And I have to mention the skunk. At about midnight, the definite smell of a skunk came down across us. Enough that it lingered in protected areas until morning. But thankfully, it was at least a quarter mile away.

Here is the resulting image.

M33 -- The Triangulum Galaxy

A Wonderful Night of Observing

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Last weekend my brother-in-law Art and I got the scope out (the NP-101) and had a fine night of observing in Lake Riverside. Scope setup went easily. We did two cycles of alignment with Polaris and Deneb.

The first target we went to was the Ring Nebula (M57). At first, I thought the scope was totally off, as I didn’t see the nebula at all (using the 22mm Nagler). The I realized the difference between the C-11 and the NP-101 makes the nebula very small. It was almost at the center of the field of view.

The next target was M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. The dumbbell shape was clearly visible. We tried the NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula, but it was not visible. Albireo, what I call the “Bruin Star” due to its blue and yellow color was very nice. We could see the full whirlpool shape of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy.

Then we headed south. The Lagoon was quite pretty, lots of detail in the nebula. We had shifted all of our observing to the 13mm Ethos eyepiece. It is an amazing piece of glass. We viewed globular clusters M4 and the tiny M80. Jupiter was a decent site, but M22 was a stunning globular cluster. The benefits of the Ethos really shined on this one.

We moved to M17, the Horseshoe Nebula and then looked at the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae in one view with the 44mm Panoptic. The next stop was a globular cluster tour.

We started in Ophiuchus:

  • M9 — A nice tight ball of stars
  • M10 — Best with the 9mm Nagler, as Art said, “The more you look, the more stars you see.”
  • M12
  • M14
  • M19 — Down in the soup to the southwest, but we saw it.
  • M62 — In the soup and very small.
  • M107 — Barely there, but it was there.
  • M15 — A very tight and small ball of stars.

We felt it was time for more planets. We saw Neptune as a tiny blue ball, clearly showing a disk where nearby stars did not. Uranus was similarly good to see. Then another globular, M72 in Aquarius.

On to more nebula. We looked at NGC 7009, the Saturn nebula. We could barely see the round shape. Definitely a target for the C-11. We could almost see the structure of the Helix Nebula, NGC 7293. And then came the best of the night, and it was a cluster.

The Double Cluster in Perseus has risen, and it was a great view. With the Ethos, the stars just stood out in the middle of the cluster. The view was amazing, almost 3-D. While the whole thing is visible with the 44mm Panoptic, the Ethos view was over the top beautiful. This was the most remarkable object we saw that night.

We took a quick view of M76, the Little Dumbell. Then the Moon was rising. We were able to see it moving behind the trees of Thomas Mountain to the northeast. Stunning. It would be great to get a movie of that one day.

This kind of night reminds me why I must keep observing visually. Pretty pictures are nice, but seeing objects in the sky is an experience I won’t forget.

Regulatory Update

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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.

First Light for the AP-900

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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.

First Quarter Moon

Regulated!

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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.