Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing…
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…
Dark frames, dark calibration frames, or simply darks are used to compensate for hot pixels, thermal noise, amp glow, and other camera sensor noise artifacts in images, especially in longer exposure images. Most EAA software can apply darks during a live stack…
Even though I have my gear set up to remotely operate the mount and cameras using Ekos/INDI there are several times during a EAA observing session where I am required to take a trip out to the scope. Whenever I need to…