Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing…
Opensource Planetarium Software
I started out running Astroberry on my Raspberry Pis for EAA. Astroberry is great and has most everything you need but it also has a bunch of stuff you may never use. Since Astroberry is not updated that often and it is…
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…
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…
I have had a few folks reach out and ask me about my workflow for capturing images with KStars/Ekos/INDI and then live stacking them using SharpCap for EAA. I am using Ekos to capture and save the FITS files to my local…
While I am waiting for the sky to clear I added a display to the Raspberry Pi running Astroberry which I have been using to control my camera and mount for my EAA sessions. I picked up a 10.1″ touch screen monitor…
This post covers polar alignment (What and Why) and the process I use (How) to accurately polar align my Celestron Advanced GT equatorial mount using Ekos for EAA observing. The details of the process will vary for different mounts and different EAA…
Sometimes it’s fun to just bounce around the night sky, but most of the time I try to plan out my EAA sessions. I especially like to have a plan on a school (work) night, when my time is limited. Having a…
I have an old Nikon D60 DSLR which has been in a box for about 10 years. It is still in decent shape and works. The Nikon D60 was a lower end inexpensive 10 Megapixel DSLR released back in 2008. It took…
I have been using my Raspberry Pi setup with Astroberry to remotely control my gear for a few EAA observing sessions now and it has been working out great. The clear nights have been cold and since I can access and control…
I set up and tested my Raspberry Pi with Astroberry a few days ago. The GPS Module I ordered finally arrived and this post walks through how I set it up to get real-time GPS data for KStars. This is not really…