Almost finished. Need a local artist to create a mural for the ceiling though. No dome rotation. Instead the top overlapping part above 20 degrees elevation (neighbor’s lights) is painted canvas in a frame I can unlatch, lift off, and set outside. Around seven feet high inside. Has a lock on the door.
I’ve used it a few times already. If ZWO equipment gets too cold below freezing, I can run a small space heater in there this winter for cold clear nights.
Here’s an ancient one from 2004 when Comet Machholtz swung by M45… I can’t even remember what camera I had back then. It might have been what they used to call film?
I have some neighbors with backyard lights… so built the fence to help block them more. And I’m not really losing the Western view next to the fence, as there are trees in that direction anyway.
Aww heck… now you’re forcing me to paint little fake windows on the sides, and put in a garden with a pump driven waterfall and pond alongside it!
I did look to see if I could just buy a premade dome. With the normal petty theft in the area, I couldn’t really leave the polar aligned tripod standing in the back yard, let alone the assembled tripod and mount with a weatherproof cover over it.
Zounds!!! You can purchase or quickly build a DIY roll off roof shed pretty cheaply… but once you start looking at anything more classic looking the prices get ridiculous.
Neighbor has tall trees to the northeast through northwest, but I moved it far enough away from the house to be able to still see most of the fun southern nebulae. Bortle 5 skies in my small town.
No, but for an oddball reason… and not just because it was a high ISO noisy background on that image.
Specifically, I’m kind of weird, or more accurately very weird, about that topic. <begin uncalled for off-topic rant> SIRIL, which I really appreciate, now has StarNet++ built in as a plugin for star removal. But I haven’t used it. Because in my head there’s a difference between art and astrophotography.
AI programs like DALL-E are not too far from creating amazing astronomical art. In the next year or two I’ll be able to ask for an image of a magnitude 4 comet with a blue / white split tail to perfectly frame the Trifid nebula between the two tails, and it will look exactly correct… if it cannot do that already. It will be stunning. But is that astrophotography?
Using narrow band filters and false color pallettes is still representing exactly what’s there, but pulling in more detail not normally seen in the visible spectrum. Still astrophotography.
But even before StarNet++, GIMP for years let you select all stars, and not nebulosity, and then apply additional sharpening and lower intensity to de-emphasize the stars, and punch up the DSO. But now is it astrophotography? Or astronomical art? It’s still highly creative, just as much if not more effort, and even more visually amazing to see every wispy filament of a DSO without as many, or even any stars to obstruct the DSO’s glory. Yet… Is it that different than painting that image in Inkscape by hand as an art piece?
Or what if I dimmed an image of a mineral moon, and pasted it so the two halfs of the Veil nebula perfectly cradled it? Even if I captured the shots, that’s still just art. Everything is a shades of gray choice, so I don’t know if dimming all stars by 50% without removing any of them still qualifies as astrophotography, or if that number is 5%. And my silly opinion may shift now that I’ve upgraded my equipment again. <end uncalled for off-topic rant>
Is the Pixel one of those phones that recognizes you’re taking a picture of the moon and then photoshops in a higher quality picture of the moon to make it seem like the camera is better than it is?
Nice… Fujifilm from my experience makes some of the lowest noise cameras for astrophotography if you don’t want to go with the pricey cooled astro cameras. When I got my first ZWO camera recently, and started pixel peeping and comparing it to Fujifilm XT20 shots, I was surprised to see the Fujifilm subs often looked better.
Astro Photography
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