Hawkesbury Amateur Astrophotography

Introduction

After over 20 years dabbling in amateur radio astronomy (chasing pulsars - see here) astronomy activities have migrated to visible light astronomy (i.e., I've gone over to the 'dark side' - or should that be the 'light side')... 

This change was triggered by a grandchild acquiring a small telescope for their birthday. This, in turn, led to much YouTube watching on my part of things optical astronomy - during which I came across information concerning using a Smartphone for Astrophotography. In particular information about the amazing 'Astrophotography' mode on Pixel Smartphones - of which I was unaware previously. I was aware of the 'Night Sight' mode on my Pixel 3a - but I thought that just extended the exposure time for low light. Turns out that while in this mode, if the Pixel 3a is taken out into a dark environment, pointed up and held steady (e.g., propped up against something or on a tripod) the 'Night Sight' moon icon on the shutter button changes to an 'Astrophotography' stars icon. Carefully pressing the shutter starts an approximately 1 minute process where a number of exposures are taken and 'stacked' to increase the quality and brightness. It also does some fancy AI processing - which is basically described here (Pixel 3a Astrophotography).

Smart Telescopes

Next along came two 'smart telescopes' - the Seestar S50 and the Dwarf Lab II. The relative ease of setting up and capturing subjects has meant that virtually all astrophotography data acquisition is currently via these two devices. See  About Smart Telescopes for more detail.

Purpose and Main Focus

The purpose of this website is to track personal activities in astrophotography. In what direction and how far those activities go will evolve over time.

The main focus is on processing the image data from the two 'smart telescopes' - the Seestar S50 and the Dwarf Lab II. Although there are a number of astrophotography processing applications available - ranging from free to breath-takingly expensive - interest here lies mainly with learning the basics by writing my own processing code in C# Windows Forms.

Primarily it is designed for personal use to document my own activities for later reference - and therefore is not to be taken as an authority on any subject.

Organisation

The website is organised in a slightly uncommon format - with the usual standard web pages, but some have embedded PDFs.  These embedded PDFs are designed to be viewed online - but are also able to be downloaded for viewing offline. I find this a convenient arrangement. Note that embedded PDFs are dynamically loaded - so there is a small delay before they appear on the entered web page.

Notes on PDF Documents

The decision point of what is done as a standard web page versus being packed into an embedded PDF is roughly determined by the amount of information in the topic. A rough guide - but not strictly adhered to - is anything over about 4 screen-scrolls is moved to a PDF.

PDF Viewing Information

• Scroll through the PDF while the mouse pointer is over the PDF using the scroll wheel.

• Use the controls at the bottom of the PDF window to step through the pages, enlarge/reduce the view using the -/+ buttons - or click the magnifying glass icon to expand the PDF to the width of the window.

•  Click on the 'arrow-in-a-square' icon in the top right corner of the PDF window to pop it open in a viewer. In the viewer the PDF can be enlarged for easier viewing or downloaded.

• See screenshot image below as an inactive example only of what an embedded PDF looks like...