Astrophotography Workshop - thoughts?

Some good ideas coming in.
Myself and Dave and going through these at the moment and trying to come up with a format which tries to cater for most people. Again, the idea of a workshop rather than a lecture is the kind of route we are thinking. It would be great if people had laptops with them so wthat e could go through hands-on processing in the workshop with different types of images (DSLR, CCD, planetary, deep sky, lunar, solar etc). Obviously, there are issues re. commercial software. But, if the person doesn't have a particular program, they can still watch and learn.
What would be great also is if we had a CD for everyone with the images used in the workshop so that people could practice on them when they go home.
The nature of a workshop is that we need to keep it small (say, 20 people)to ensure everyone gets the most from it. If there is interest for a re-run of the workshop, I don't see any reason why we can't do it a second time. If there is enough interest from 20 people in a particular area (say, the west of Ireland for example), then we can look into having a second workshop in that general area.
As we put a structure to it and come up with options on suitable venues that are easily accessible to all, we'll keep you all posted.
Michael.

dmcdona wrote:

3. Given the geographical diversity of astronomers around the country, there are a few choices available that would make sure it was as available as possible to all:

....

e) Have it at Seanie's house (I'll be unavailable - tied to a balloon )

I have just put in planning permission for the conference centre in the back yard this morning... Surely you'll touch ground by the time it's built Dave!

Seanie.

Hi Micheal,

I can make plenty of planetary AVI's so everyone can work on the same set of AVI's at once. Everyone must download registax V4.and just follow along.

I think we should organize a get together and work out a plan of action. What do you folk's think.

Carl.

That would be great for the processing part, everyone singing off the same hymn sheet but could you deliberatly take bad ones so there would be problems to fix?

but capturing the image in the first place should be taught, frame rate, size, compression and all the other settings I havnt a clue about!!

While this idea is developed can I suggest that think about updating the Astro Software section in the "Links" section under "Main Menu" on the forum. And I'm specifically thinking of software that assists with astro images in one way or another.

The state of play with software changes over time and there is a range of software that we should probably provide links to - free and commercial.

I know Dave G recently recommended a commercial program - PEMPro - which I will look to trying soon. There's really loads of stuff that we should be sharing our experiences of.

* PHD - free and simple guiding (have it but no personal live experience yet)

* Craterlet - free - produces AVI for moon and planets (Meade LPI, for example doesn't come with AVI producing S/W) I use it.

* DS9 (Harvard University) - free - I use this for quick examination of FITs images
its very fast to open, scale, and adjust brightness / contrast (via novel right click move mouse up-down left-right) and to view FITs headers.

* GIMP - free - comprehensive image processing - final rendering - same leage as photoshop. GNU licence software - I expect to be using this more as my captures improve. Hell of a learning curve.

* Fits4win - free - software that integrates with windows explorer that allows FITs files to be viewed as thumbnails (what I use it for) I think it does other stuff too.

* Autostich - basic flavour is Free - creates a mosaic frrom overlapping images - written by University of British Columbia. I created a nice mosaic of moon using this - no thought required it works it out itself. Is licenced in some commercial software.

* AIP4Win - commercial about £100 with book - very impressive - book holds no punches with respect to maths and details - comes with sample images and tutorials - I highly recommend this. Note to self - please read book properly.

Aladin (University of Strasbourg) - free - I use it (occassionally) to retrieve professional images of different regions of the sky and to use as reference for the very little astrometrics that I've done - for example to determine platescale.

I've probably provided enough for those interested to find on the web - but am happy to retrace ground and provide a list of URLs etc.

Mark

Depending on timing and location I'll be up for this one.