Catching up

In these last few months I have begun two new projects and continued my persistent efforts to become better at astro-photography. I'm doing some math tutoring this summer, testing the waters to see if I would want to continue doing tutoring as a business. I am also learning Visual C# programming and used the tutoring to motivate my first project, a "mental math" trainer for potential students who need help with basic arithmetic. No, I'm not giving up on retirement! I'm just trying to continue learning and expand my possibilities for productivity.

I'm not sure I enjoy tutoring yet and probably won't until I learn how turn around some kids who (for whatever reason) hate math and have had their self-confidence shaken by their previous experiences with it. It is probably not possible to rescue all of them, but I feel far too many are being let down by public schools and some can be turned around. Even if I don't like doing the job of turning them around, some success could motivate me to do more of it just because it can be so positively impactful on people's lives. I already know that I enjoy programming and C# gives me another tool that can turn ideas into something worthwhile.

Astro-photography (or "astro-imaging" as I'm starting to prefer calling it) is continuing to lure me in. It is quite easy to spend a lot of money doing it, however it's becoming clearer every day (especially after this weekend) that it can be done well for far less than some people spend on it. I've started down the path of upgrading equipment, but have already made some mistakes in the process and wasted money. I have solved some basic problems though, in that I have improved significantly the quality of the "mount" and camera. This helps me with two of what seem to be the three key elements of astro-imaging... 1) minimizing the effects of objects motion through the sky, 2) minimizing the corruption of images through what you do to capture the photons, and 3) getting as much out of the incoming photons as possible to create an accurate representation of what the object is. The mount helps with item #1 and the camera helps mostly with #3. Item three could probably be improved the most by improving my telescope... though that is probably the toughest thing to do wisely (and why it's happening last for me, if it happens at all).

My new mount is an Orion Sirius EQ-G that cost about $1300 and my new camera is an SBIG ST-402 that cost about $1600. While both are a step up, they are still considered 'lower end' equipment. With upgrades such as this there are always new adapters and other small items necessary to make them work well. This last weekend I was unable to test out my camera (due to one of those adapters still being in the mail) but was able to start learning how to use the new mount with my Nikon D40.

The event was a "star party" at Flattop sno-park near Trout Lake, Washington. The best "seeing" was later in the night after early clouds and haze had cleared and I was unable to take full advantage of it because my Nikon battery died. Most of the value of the evening was in the learning I was able to do, with major help coming from my neighbor at the party (Neal), who has been doing A-I for five years already, has the same mount I have, and has produced some outstanding results. Because he has the same mount I have, he was able to help me understand and overcome my first major problem, which was that the mount did not have the most up-to-date firmware and had a bug which caused the mount to go to the wrong position in the sky. He kindly took time out from his own work to download the latest firmware into my equipment. Major save!

Once I had the mount working, I was able to learn how to align it (though I need to get better at it) and go to various objects in the sky. Even a good mount, once on the object of interest, needs some help keeping that object motionless in the field of view. The tough way to do this is for the user to watch the object constantly and manually make corrections to the position and the easy way is to use a cheap camera and software to automate the job (called "auto-guiding"). I had purchased an auto-guider but was unable to utilize it for several reasons, some known and some as yet unknown. One reason was that some of the hardware was defective (a mis-tapped hole for a bolt used to hold the camera) and another was that I forgot to set the gain back to 95% on the camera after setting it to 5% in the checkout procedure. However, I also got the impression that even with those issues solved I will have an issue focusing when I try it again. The lack of this capability made it impossible for me to improve my image quality much that evening, though I was able to get two new images (shown above, M103... an open star cluster, and M31, the Andromeda galaxy... double-click on them to get a better view). The one globular cluster I managed to image was no better than my last. I suspect that the seeing, tracking issues,focusing issues and the Nikon D40 all played major roles in giving me these poor images... all things that should be corrected or improved (or compensated for) when I go to the Oregon Star Party in August. The 'globs' will be my primary metric for my improvement and I'm hoping that, in the end, I will be able to better sort out the issues and quantify their contribution to the poor images taken to-date.

One may wonder why I'm doing the astro-imaging, when I can look at the images taken by the professionals and other amateurs to enjoy the "wonders of the universe". The answer, I think, is that working through the issues one encounters along the way is educational, interesting, and satisfying... even though it can also be extremely frustrating and expensive. It also allows me to explore the sky on my own, choosing where to look and when to look, and therefore adding some element of new possibilities... capturing fleeting events or seeing things that others may not yet have seen (things that you can't get from a book). Seeing pictures of Rome still can't capture the feeling of being there... but can remind one of times spent there. Likewise, astro-images can remind one of times spent underneath deep dark skies and all of the good feelings they can evoke.