Hello, and Happy New Year Surprised to see an Astronomy forum

Keith Myers's picture
Hotel Earth - 10 points
Submitted by Keith Myers on Wed, 2012-01-04 21:50

Rather surprised to see an Astronomy forum in a GPU Users group.  Of course, crunchers come from all walks of life I guess.  Anyway, the forum prompts asked what telescope I have and I thought I might get the ball rolling.  Started back in 2003 for the Mars opposition and picked up my childhood dream scope,  a Celestron 8" SCT.  That also started me on my path to learn how to do astrophotography which was another childhood dream.  Been pursuing the skills path ever since.  Current favorite scopes are a Deep Sky Instruments 10" Richey-Chretien astrograph for the small, galaxy stuff and a Stellarvue 6" APO refractor for the big stuff.  A Mountain Instruments MI-250 mount carries it all.  Currently use a SBIG STL-11000 CCD camera for image capture.  You can look at some of my efforts on my Flickr page.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/astroimager/sets/1180738/

 

Cheers,  Keith

 

P.S. I like the idea of this group which is to provide a narrow focus on hardware that the SETI project really needs to provide good service to the 1% percenters of crunching.

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FrazierM's picture

i actually was into astronomy

Submitted by FrazierM on Wed, 2012-06-20 05:58.

i actually was into astronomy when i was at school! smiley

Christoph's picture

Nice Pics

Submitted by Christoph on Sat, 2012-01-14 18:21.

Hi Keith,

nice pictures.

How long the 'lens' of the camera needs to be open for such pictures? In average or minimum?

Christoph

Keith Myers's picture

Hi Christoph, and thanks for

Submitted by Keith Myers on Sat, 2012-01-14 22:47.

Hi Christoph, and thanks for the complements.  Generally, I expose luminance data for 10 minutes and color data for 5 minutes. If I'm shooting through a Hydrogen-Alpha filter, then I expose for 15-30 minutes depending on the subjects signal strength in that passband. I normally gather between 15 -30 sub-exposures for each filter for the combined total exposure which generates the final image.

Cheers,  Keith

 

Phil Horney's picture

We're crunching data for

Submitted by Phil Horney on Thu, 2012-01-05 10:06.

We're crunching data for SETI@Home searching for radio signals from the nether reaches of space, so I'm not sure what seems odd about members being into astronomy?  I know a number of our members are amateur astronomers, so I was hoping to see more posts from them showing their gear.

If you're into astronomy, post some pics!

 

-=Phil (Deltoid) - webmaster@gpuug.org

Keith Myers's picture

Phil, I am not used to any

Submitted by Keith Myers on Sat, 2012-01-14 22:58.

Phil, I am not used to any message forum other than the dedicated astronomy image forums that endorse posting pics directly into message forums.  Usually, imagers just post the URL to their offline repository or just the specific URL to link to a specific image.  Not familiar with this message forum software to know how to post directly into a reply.  That is why I just posted the link to my offline repository in my first message.

Here is my attempt at HTML:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/astroimager/5447144520/" title="NGC2264_PS#4-LRGB by kemyers91384, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5176/5447144520_ca053dd453_b.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="NGC2264_PS#4-LRGB"></a>

Keith Myers's picture

Well, that didn't

Submitted by Keith Myers on Sat, 2012-01-14 23:00.

Well, that didn't work.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/astroimager/5447144520/

Keith Myers's picture

That image is of the Cone

Submitted by Keith Myers on Sat, 2012-01-14 23:12.

That image is of the Cone Nebula, a region that is experiencing both new star creation as well as older established stellar systems that might have planets.  Something that the Seti@Home  crunchers and the GPUUG members might  find interesting is the sheer number of exoplanets that the Kepler mission is discovering.  The textbooks are being rewritten daily as far as what kind of stellar systems might harbor planets capable of supporting life as we know it.

 

Cheers,  Keith