Blog
Articles on workflow and processing, experiences with equipment, or just general stories related to astronomy or astrophotography.
Moving to a Remote Hosting site - Part 1
After six years of imaging from my backyard, I have decided to move one of the rigs to a remote hosting site. In a number of blog-posts you can follow along on this journey. Part 1 describes the reasons behind the decision, the selection of a hosting site, goals and some higher level consequences for software and equipment.
Creating Horizon files made easy. Astroplanner example
Making a horizon file can be labour intensive. With this app, the task is made a lot easier. In this example the information is used to create a horizon file for Astroplanner, the very versatile application to plan and record observations and imaging sessions
Powering your rig with USB-Power Delivery
Traditionally telescope rigs are powered using 12VDC from bricks, wall adapters and power banks. But now that USB Power Delivery has become a mainstream solution to power laptops, screens etc, would it be any good to power an astrophotography rig? In this blog we will try to find out.
Euro-EMC S130 rolling pier review
Recently the observatory was upgraded with a rolling pier. This allows a fully assembled system to be rolled-in and rolled-out the house in a fraction of the time than before. Read here my experiences with the S130 rolling pier and how it greatly improved the efficiency and productivity.
Mastering Flat Frames (3/3): Bias, Flat-Darks and Conclusions
In this third and last post in a series of articales around mastering Flat Frames, we will do a comparison between Bias and Flat-Darks. Also we will look into some topics that came up following responses to the earlier two articles. Finally a cautious attempt is made to draw some conclusions.
Mastering Flat Frames (2/3): Flat Panels compared
A deep dive into the topic of taking Flat frames. A series of three articles describing experiments to fully master the many aspects of taking good Flats. In this second article four Flat panels are compared and tested in a range of experiments.
Mastering Flat Frames (1/3): Gain matching
A deep dive into the topic of taking Flat frames. A series of three articles describing experiments to fully master the many aspects of taking good Flats. This first article is about the need (or not?) of gain-matching Light and Flat frames