Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
KStars Ekos Opensource Planetarium Control Software
The ability to adjust the date/time in a planetarium program is extremely handy when planning an observation session. What will the sky look like, or what will be visible, later tonight/2 days from now/1 week from now/etc from now at 10 PM?…
Weather has been pretty crappy, looks like our next chance for clear skies is on Tuesday. Hope to get a bit of time on Goofi’s February 2024 challenge, IC 434 (the Horsehead Nebula) when the sky clears up. With all the clouds…
Been pretty cloudy recently, not only that I have been a bit under the weather. Feeling better now and looking forward to some clear skies. In one of the recent updates of KStars the way filename formatting is handled changed, in a…
Nice clear night with temperatures starting in the mid-40s and dropping down to about freezing as the night went on. The Moon was up but is only about 43%, so not as bright as will be in a few more days. The…
It was a nice clear night and even though it was a school night I decided to set up for a bit to try out using the Ekos Scheduler to kick off all the different tasks for an imaging session. I have…
My Celestron Advanced-GT EQ5 mount has served me very well for many years… but I am ready for an upgrade. I have been looking at Sky Watcher mounts for a while, and was thinking about either the HEQ5 Pro or the EQ6R…
Since Monday was a holiday I decided to get a bit of observing in. Sunday night was a clear cool night. The temperature when I started observing was around 40 degrees F but dropped down to near freezing. This session was a…
It has been cloudy, so I have been messing the with Raspberry Pi. I have a 64GB SD Card that I loaded up with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. No real need for 64-bit other than future proofing. I read somewhere that…
The Ekos Scheduler is primarily used for scheduling an automated Astrophotography session, but it can also help automate captures for EAA. This way you can spend less time setting up, or re-setting up, captures and more time observing and enjoying your live…
Last night I set up the gear and got things ready for the clear skies we are expecting this weekend. I wanted to test out the ZWO Electronic Automatic Focuser (EAF) focusing on the main scope using the Autofocus routine in the…