Archive for the 'Pics' Category

Hotwiring the fragment-links and superceding the binary— binary— binary— binary— binary— binary— …

Posted by on May 4th 2014 in Photo hosting, Pics, Site update

If only I could do that, the task of editing all of the blog's image, image-link and mouseover URLs (to reflect the changes associated with migrating all of my pics out of the failing SmugMug and into WordPress) would probably be a doddle. As it is, it's a tedious manual-edit jobbie that's taking me ages.

Two months in and I'm still not a quarter of the way there. It didn't help that a fortnight ago WordPress updated to version 3.9 and the thing fell apart because of the limitations of the bundled "upgraded" TinyMCE visual editor which had been gelded of various features that I need to do the editing. The techies at BlueHost did a restore from a their monthly backup to get me back onto WP3.8.3 with the previous TinyMCE... that put me back in control, but it undid a month of editing and scrubbed a month of uploads.

So, expect this place to be a mess while the transfer is in progress. I reckon I have about 6,000 URL edits still to do, so it's going to take a long time.

FWIW, I did try reversing the polarity of the neutron flow but that had no beneficial effects. The sonic screwdriver...

is helping a bit.

Maybe I need a Doctor.

Every Which Way but Luss

Posted by on March 30th 2014 in Campaigns and Petitions, Pics

Here's a reminder that voting for the Woodland Trust "Transform the Trossachs" project closes tomorrow (Monday).

If you want to support this project you can find more details here.

The good news is that it looks like they've already started the transformation, with a little "flipping" help from Photoshop:

 See how easy it was?

Right turn: Clyde.

🙂

(Late) Observing Report 13th-14th March 2014 (Another Moon Mosaic)

Posted by on March 25th 2014 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
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There's not much to report here, no stargazing was done - poor seeing and too much haze for visual observing of faint and/or fuzzy targets. The Moon was about the only thing worth pointing the scope at. Suffice to say that 26 slightly hazy .avi files were taken, stacked, trimmed and stitched to make this image:

Moon (13/03/2014 @ 22:00 approx). 26 panes stitched with iMerge. Each pane is ~300/~3000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera on the GSRC6M.

(Late) Observing Report 26th-27th August 2013 (Another Moon Mosaic)

Posted by on September 15th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
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It was going to be a night for software-testing, there having been a new release of APT that needed checking out. The skies were clear but the heat of the previous day was still making its escape from the planet via the air, which meant that the seeing was marginal for any sort of imaging, therefore I wasn't intending to take any images.

And then I remembered the medium-bandwidth Hydrogen-alpha (H-a) filter that I'd bought on the cheap. In theory it would cut out the worst of the shimmer. It had to be tried.

It worked, and it worked better than I would have expected. I grabbed 22 .avi files of the Moon, and after a bit of stacking jiggery-pokery I stuck the resultant .bmps into PS's photomerge. That spat out a reasonably-good mosaic image which I processed with RegiStax, and the following image was the result. I'm reasonably happy with it, but there's room for improvement next time out:

Moon (27/08/2013 @ 02:00 approx). 22 panes stitched with PS CS3.
Each pane is 200/2000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera with H-a
filter on the GSRC6M.

(Late) Observing Report 12th-13th August 2013 (Perseid meteors)

Posted by on September 14th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

With one thing or another taking precedence, the processing of these was unavoidably delayed.

Perseid meteors - taster pic below - click it to see a few more.

Perseid meteor.

Observing Report 5th July 2013 (A big group of sunspots)

Posted by on July 6th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
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Yesterday saw an improvement in the weather. I managed to get out for an hour to nab this sunspot group:

Active Regions 1785 and 1787 (05/07/2013).
DMK mono camera on C80ED-R, Baader Solar Film filter.

What SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) saw.

Close-up of Active Regions 1785 and 1787 (05/07/2013).
DMK mono camera with 2.25x Barlow on C80ED-R, Baader Solar Film filter.