Astrophotography Workshop - thoughts?

Only catching this post now..
An imaging workshop sounds like a class idea.
Sorry I can't give more time to my reply...Swamped at the moment..

I think to be fair to everyone a central location would be better. On the other hand we can see what numbers are involved where people are coming from and go from there.

a bit on autoguiding perhaps?

If its going to be in a hotel somewhere I hope this board will get a bit of notice before it goes public incase there is a rush to get rooms.

would there be any hope in trying to get an astro shop or telescope maker to sponsor the event? you could use their equipment (as long as its good!) and they could throw in a few discounts for orders over the course? the sponsor would pay for the room and might get a twist out of some of the course folk...

Graham

Just coming to this now.

I think it sounds like a great idea. It does need quite a bit of thought. I might suggest a venue like the Mullingar Park hotel since it is not hard to get to from all the major N routes. There are so many people here with specific expertise in individual area, I don't think it would be hard to find people willing to share this expertise. There are many areas which are common to all forms of astrophotography e.g field of view vs pixel scale etc which would be useful to many. I would suggest that a separate session for topics like planetary imaging (i.e data capture and processing). There is enough in autoguiding for a whole session in itself. For deep sky imaging data capture and processing could again be separate sessions. The trick is to try not to do much in one go.

I think a subgroup willing to lend expertise and do the organising needs to be agreed and meet up to flesh out a plan.

I certainly agree with Graham that it is better to have a less formal approach(more workshop than lecture) however when you have a situation where there are people at varying degrees of expertise then it is inevitable that those sharing knowledge need to go through the procedures and spell out the dos and don'ts etc. As for the software platforms, I also agree that the freebie packages should be favoured but I do think it is impossible to show people how to achieve excellence without some recourse to some payware, e.g. photoshop. However I think the payware programs should be restricted to the advanced levels using the freeware stuff for the more basic sessions.

Anyway, I'm happy to help out any way I can.

I just spent some time thinking about this and a possible set of topics which *could* be covered assuming the bodies with the relevant expertise are willing. I put it together in the following brief document.

www.webtreatz.com/resources/ifas_astrophoto.pdf

Sorry but you need to rotate the document (right click on the document and click 'Rotate Clockwise' three times.)

I'm sure I left loads out particularly in the area of wide field imaging. However it can be used as a base document to flesh out something better.

That looks very good Dave. It gives us something to work on.

Carl.