Hacked!

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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.

Site Updates

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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

High Concepts with Modern Classical Music

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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.

Step One: The Drive

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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.)


New Driveway

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.

First CCD Image from Lake Riverside

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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.


NGC 3628 - Spiral Galaxy in Leo

DMK IC Capture Video Settings Follies

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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.

Saturn with DV Encoding

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.

Saturn with correct aspect ratio

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).

IC Capture Table

* 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.

Getting Deep on Processing Math

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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.)

Copernicus Crater, February 17, 2008

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Last Sunday night was a mostly clear night out in the Cahuilla valley. That provided the opportunity for some astronomy and astrophotography. The night before might have been a bit better, but it was cold with the temperature already below freezing at 9pm. Yes, that’s really that cold, but it’s awfully cold to be outside with a telescope.

Earlier in the day, I had installed the new drive motor and tested the new controller for the CG-5 mount. Everything seemed to be working fine. The first order of business was to collimate the scope. The last time I had critically looked at the collimation of the C-8 the out-of-focus view of a star was quite asymmetric. It took a good 45 minutes to get it done, but I am now confident that the C-8 is in good collimation.

The Moon was getting close to full, only two days away, so I was planning on Lunar imaging. Dew became the first problem. I believe that my prior CG-5 motor controller box was destroyed because I used a hair dryer to dry the corrector plate while the drive controller was plugged into a Radio Shack 6v transformer (not a regulated unit but a little brick). Given this, using batteries for the CG-5 drive was required.

The next problem was that my new ImagingSource firewire camera did not respond. The computer did not see it. I tested the firewire port and it was fine. Gloom. The I remembered that I did bring my trusty Phillips ToUCam Pro. I got that set up and focused on the Moon.

I have always wanted to try creating a mosaic. I shot four shots around Copernicus crater to create my first mosaic. I processed each AVI as consistently as possible, in the end, doing no wavelet or exposure correction in Registax. I combined the four images in Photoshop, using the built-in panorama capability. Registax had been shifting the histograms of the stacked images which made the composite uneven; I turned off that option in Registax.

After combining the images in Photoshop. I did all the processing in PixInsight (now a commercially available product!). I had to crop the image before deconvoluting the image as the white space caused errors in processing. here is the processing story.

  1. I changed the image format to 32 bit depth, and then doubled the pixel depth by increasing the resolution. Even though this added no data (and probably introduced noise), I could not get decent deconvolution results at the lower resolution.
  2. The combined image had some strange color tints to it, probably the result of creating the mosaic. I extracted the luminance and worked with that.
  3. I then used the Regularized Van Cittert deconvolution algorithm in PixInsight to sharpen the image. The tutorial they have is excellent. I used a standard deviation of 2.75 and a shape of 1.5, with standard noise reduction and a 0.15 increase on the highlight in dynamic range extension. That final bit was important so I did not clip the bright areas during deconvolution. This step was the key step in creating the image.
  4. The next step is where I created two versions with different contrast profiles. On the first, I applied a default HDRWavelet transform to the image to bring up the dark areas without clipping the whites. In the end, this led to a more even image overall, but one with more contrast in the details. On the second, I skipped the HDRWavelet transform.
  5. On both versions, I applied a moderate noise reduction with GREYCstoration and a final tweak to the contrast with curves.
  6. Final steps were to shift to 16 bit integer, then move to Photoshop to save as web size.

This is version 1, with a sharper contrast in the details, but flatter overall.

Copernicus with HDRWavelet Transform

The second version is here. It is a bit softer in contrast.

Copernicus with softer overall contrast

I’d be curious to see which version people like better.

Cold Morning in the Cahuilla Valley

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It dawned quite cold this morning (at least cold for us Southern Californians): 23° F. Frost was everywhere. It was quite pretty.

The grass was all covered in frost.

Frosty Grass

The grill got chilled

Cold grill

The house was dusted with frost

Frosty roof

But the view down to the lake was very pretty

Lake Riverside at dawn

One benefit of having an eight-month old child is that you tend to always get up early in the morning, even on the weekends.

Coolest In-flight Video

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I just returned from a trip to Singapore and India. Overall it was a very productive trip and I got to see some cool things.

One was the Singapore zoo, which has a part of the zoo open at night with what they call the Night Safari. It is a great way to see the animals as they are awake and active at night. But that’s not the topic of this post.

Flying between Bangalore and Pune, we flew on Kingfisher Airlines. It is owned by the same company that makes Kingsfisher beer — kind of like flying on Budweiser Airlines. Domestic airline service in India is very good. Most flights are between one to two hours and there is full hot meal service in coach. Easy to get spoiled. The airlines compete on service. On the flight from Hyderabad to Bangalore on Jet Airways, the flight attendant took my jacket when I was sitting in coach. Very nice.

Kingfisher offers good service and good in-flight amenities. One of those amenities is a video screen in each seat. They have a variety of channels with entertainment and an in-flight map. But what was very cool was channel 2. It had a live feed from a camera on the front of the plane. You could watch as the plane taxied and took off. After take-off, the camera was pointed down and you could see the countryside move by. That is the coolest in-flight video I’ve ever seen.