New subject: Hawaiian imaging session this evening?

22 Dec 2009

      Jerry -
...
  The noise is about what I would expect with this camera running at -10 deg 
  and a 240 second exposure. . . . . Would it be possible for you to post on 
your site the raw image as well as the darks and flats you used?
Jerry, it was a 300 sec exposure.   I 'll get the raw, dark and flats up on a public server in the next couple of days so anyone can grab them. The files are 13megs each so initially I did  not want to post the source files figuring no one would download that much data. 
...
I have been following your adventures with the 
Rent-a-scope program. In your experience is it difficult to get time 
on a particular scope or do you post a request which gets 
put into the ACP planner queue?
To keep the cost within - for me - reason, I subscribed to the $40 per month GRAS plan which does not include scripting.  The next subscription level is at $90 p/m and includes scripting.  

I have never felt scope resource constrained with GRAS Australia.  During the best time to use it from Utah - 4am to 8am MST - there is always one high-end refractor free (106 Tak) and one large 10 inch or greater astrograph with a high-end ST camera available.   One usually is available on login or becomes available at most with a 5 to 10 minute wait.   Since my experience level isn't such that I am hot for just one specific larger aperature scope. Therefore, I have not felt constrained. 

For GRAS New Mexico, the situation is the same but the probability of having to wait a few minutes before a scope opens up is higher.  

For both the New Mexico and Australia scopes - at least for this time of year - weather outages is the constraining factor.  Even in southern hemisphere Australia, I am average maybe a 25% chance of having the domes open.  The other 60% of the time they are weather closed.  Another 15% is service outages.  Because of that, I'm not too optimistic that you would get that much out of imaging by a scripted run.   It felt is was better to have a list of targets of opportunity and to get what you can manually when the weather is clear. 

The GRAS high-end mounts and auto-exposure all run spot on target as instructed.  IMHO, auto-focus is less than what one could get with monitored manual or monitored auto-focus.  I haven't used it, but I'd feel confident about submiting scripts and just picking up the image results by FTP later. 

My next planned test targets are Mars in northern hemisphere and a comet in the southern hemisphere. 

Overall, the experience is much less satisfying than setting up my own scope and taking images with my inexpensive equipment.   I view it mostly as a way to capture a few images to play around with during the overcast northern Utah winter season.  It's also educational to work with these high-end megapixel cameras and mounts that I ordinarily am unable to afford.  One quickly gets the message that the name of the imaging game is "tracking accuracy, tracking accuracy and tracking accuracy" followed by "long-term exposure, long-term exposure and long-term exposure."  

Those are just my general impressions. Hope that helps. 

Clear Skies - Kurt

Re: [Utah-astronomy] NGC7320

Canopus56

Patrick Wiggins

Patrick Wiggins

Josephine Grahn

Steve FISHER

Rob Ratkowski Photography

Joe Bauman

Rob Ratkowski Photography

Joe Bauman

Rob Ratkowski Photography

Joe Bauman

Patrick Wiggins

tags

participants (6)