Howards Astronomical Adventures
Tales From The Night Sky
New image: M8 Lagoon Nebula, imaged Saturday night, July 22 in the Flint Hills.
A group of us got together and enjoyed a good night of observing and astrophotography. Phil and I were doing astrophotography. Chuck brought his trusty 13 inch dob while Fred and Richard had a new truss tube dob with them. Dan? and Sherry brought a Meade LXD 16 and a 20 inch dob.
Several website updates over the past week.
First I completely updated the Field of View calculator. Now displays in degrees-minutes-seconds by default. Cleaned up the code and enhanced the chart generator.
Second, I added code to detect Internet Explorer on the front page and suggest you switch. Ideas and code fragments from the website Kill Bills Browser and Explorer Destroyer.
Jim Solomon has revised and updated his Astrophotography Cookbook. Jim walks you through acquiring and processing your DSLR images using IRIS. I do not always agree with Jims steps but he has done an excellent job documenting the whole process.
I use IRIS to process the RAW images from my camera. IRIS is not the friendliest program in this area but has many features I like (can’t beat the cost either: freeware). I find the save to PSD format function very frustrating since I know it could be implemented better.? Hopefully this will be improved in the future or maybe I’ll get off my butt and write a PIC to TIFF or FITS converter.