Playing with Big Cats

No sign of the sky through most of yesterday, apart from a really odd patch that appeared mid way through the storm. It was most odd. The contrast between the dark clouds in the foreground, the bright blue in the middle, and the top lit clouds in the background I thought spectacular, but I don't think the camera caught it to well.



This was taken in RAW mode, with the camera on full auto for 1/400 Second at ISO50. I used Noiseware to clean it up a little.

Given last night was cloudy, I spent the evening, mucking about in photoshop elements trying to improve on my Leo photo from the other night. Following the tutorials here, I've been able to stretch the histogram of the stacked image, and yes it brings out the stars, but there's a lot of noise and the clouds become painful. I have been trying to make a star layer, but even after spending hours tinkering and trying things in elements I have so far had a total and utter lack of success. It makes perfect sense to me to set up a star layer, allowing the removal of the noise and reducing the background cloudiness somewhat etc, without affecting the stars, but it just won't do it for me. I can't even manage to reproduce what I pulled out of the image the other night. I think it's safe to say, that I have no idea what I'm doing with image processing.

I know, I know, I should stick with it, it's a difficult skill to master with a steep learning curve. At the moment the learning curve is so steep, it's leaning back out over the top of me.

I know the RAW mode of the camera captures more information in the image, but the image is so much more noisy. I tried to restack the Leo images again last night, several times in fact, and I noticed that some of the images are more yellow, some are more red, and others are more like the sky. It's possible that what I thought are clouds aren't and are some artifact of the RAW mode mod. For normal exposures, the RAW mode works great. It's just for this longer and darker Astro images that this seems to happen.

The things I'm attempting to do with the camera to allow for piggy backed on the scope higher zoom also now look like it's not going to work as expected. May need to go back to the drawing board. However, all hope is not lost yet, as the adpater hasn't arrived.

Maplins have shipped my powertank. That should be here today hopefully, so I'll get that charged up. It looks like I'm going to need an additional cable, but that's an easy one to solve as Astronomiser make them and Steve at FLO sells them.

Something I found most peculiar last night as I was putting the bins out, I looked up and the sky was clear. I should point out that firstly this wasn't the peculiarity I meant, although given the day we'd had it was a little odd, and secondly, it didn't last as even whilst I was looking up, the clouds swept across and blotted out the stars. However, what threw me was looking up to find that the Big Dipper was now almost overhead. I'd got so used to seeing it fairly low down to the North. I think I was able to also see Gemini, Auriga and Mars, but again they were all in the wrong place. Now, I know about the effects of the Earths rotation, at least intellectually, but last night was the first time I've actually witnessed the effect in such a scale and within a well known frame of reference (i.e. my house and local skyline).