Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing…
Opensource Planetarium Software
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…
I have been doing some more tinkering with the Libre Computer SBC that I picked up to test out as a Raspberry Pi alternative. I originally installed Raspbian OS on the 128 GB SD Card, but there were some quirks and I…
Remember when getting a new PC required hours upon hours of moving data to some type of removable media and manually transferring it between the old and the new PC. Software and technology like OneDrive and DropBox make this so much easier….
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…