Over my head

[I confess: this is a hybrid post in which I have broken the golden rule of 'knowing my audience'. As a result, you may well choose to read only part of it. The opening few paragraphs speak of my experience in the planning and presentation of a talk on astrophotography to a non-expert audience. After a couple of tiny footnotes you'll get to two appendices. The first of these was written in response to requests to provide a synopsis of the above talk; it includes a lot of links to various packages etc. So far, so good. The second appendix was added as a note of my parallel struggles trying to get a replacement laptop to run all my astrophotography needs in the way my rapidly-fading older one did; it's distinctly nerdy and is also replete with links.]

It verges on the laughable really.

 
There I was, offering to lead a session for my local u3a branch on astrophotography even though I was struggling to master what others seem to pick up in their sleep. Oh well, I thought, it’ll be almost ten months until the session actually happens so that’ll give me time to fill in the blanks as it were. And surely it’s good for me to have these challenges in my life. Then came one of the cloudiest/wettest Autumn and Winter seasons I can recall combined with a near record-breaking run of injuries and viral infections – including my third, and far-and-away worst, bout of COVID and its after-effects – which left me a few weeks from the scheduled session with not one slide ready to be shown. Those ten months had simply evaporated. I would simply have to come clean regarding my ongoing inexperience and ineptitude and share what little I did have; after all, they’re a friendly bunch of people, and the u3a is all about ‘learning together’ isn’t it …

As I began putting slides together for the 90 minute session it slowly dawned on me that I had actually achieved quite a bit. In the few years since I’d first been hooked on the idea of creating images of what I had hitherto only peered at through my telescope, I had generated quite a few passable images. I had pictures of the Moon and Sun and most of the planets for example. (The exception to this being Mercury, mostly because it’s too close to the horizon for me to see from my garden, although I have seen it through binoculars from an upstairs window.) I’d also found some binary star systems and a couple of star clusters. (Several examples are included with former posts here, here and here). An integral part of this process has been the need to master a lot of software alongside coping with the equipment itself. To call it a steep learning curve would, in my case, be a gross understatement. I have often felt that the whole project was well over my head – a mountain to climb with only the sketchiest of maps. Yet here I am: still a long climb ahead, but I’ve evidently come a long way from my starting point of four or five years ago. It’s funny how we – by which I mean ‘I’ – sometimes tend to focus on the things undone at the expense of celebrating what has been accomplished.

Thus, as I begin to draft this post, some eighteen hours before the u3a session begins (7th March, 2024), I’m feeling relatively upbeat. I have a story to tell; it’s not yet finished – whatever that means – but the plot is reasonably sketched out and there are several sample chapters available.* For instance, we’ll be able to talk about taking widefield shots of entire constellations using a smartphone, the basic whys and wherefores of specialised astro-cameras and the software required to set everything up, collect data and generate a final image. We can cover what’s meant by ‘lucky imaging’ and the associated practices of ‘stacking’, noise reduction and image processing. I can even attempt to outline what it is I am yet to master and all the things that have to align for that to happen. As a show & tell item I’ll take along one of my telescopes and its computer-controlled mount together with astro-cameras etc.; there’s nothing quite like being able to point to some shiny toys. I might even share with everyone my hope that I manage to achieve my remaining goals well before I’m physically unable to carry the heavy kit to and fro between my garage and my garden.#

Here’s to the next phase of my astrophotography mountain-climbing 😊

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Endnotes and Appendices

* I’ve also been busy within the lovely creative writing class I attend, hence the analogy 😉

# I have a cunning plan should this not come to fruition for one reason or another: there are some impressive robotic telescopes on the market (e.g. here and here), and I suspect their capabilities will grow rapidly. So, if it comes to it, I could simply sell my existing kit and buy one of those. That would mean I could stand the robot in the garden during the cold and clear winter nights and give it wireless instructions from my phone whilst in the warmth of my living room.

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I have appended below a brief synopsis of the u3a session and also something approaching a flow chart of the download/installation route I took for the software I use as it may be helpful to someone.

u3a session notes:
We looked at using smartphones for wide-field images: one will almost certainly have to put its camera into ‘pro’ mode in order manually to control focus (‘infinity’), exposure times (~2 s) and ISO/gain (400, although this interplays with exposure times – double one and half the other – but note that higher ISO numbers relate to increased gain in the camera, and with high gain comes higher noise levels). One also needs to be able to keep it steady (- I use a simple tripod with an equally simply phone clamp on the top; I also select the voice/sound-activated shutter so that I don't have to touch it in order to capture a frame).

We moved on to using a telescope on a special mount called an equatorial mount; there are others which are simpler to set up but which have limitations thereafter. The equatorial mount I use (a Skywatcher HEQ5 goto) needs to be oriented towards North and adjusted to the observer’s latitude (e.g. for Canterbury that would be 51½°). It then needs to be properly ‘Polar Aligned’ to the celestial pole using the known rotation of Polaris (the Pole Star) around this point each day; I suggested a phone app called Polar Clock as an aid. The telescope needs to be balanced on the mount, which is where the counterweight comes in.

I use Sharpcap to control my astrocams; I have also used APT on occasion. (Alongside these, I also have/use NINA and hope to be in a position to need PhD2 in the future to enable long-exposure frame captures.) For the solar system images I shared, these were typically derived from a few hundred to a thousand individual frames which were quality-ranked using a programme called Autostakkert!3, and then the best ones stacked. The stacked image is then sharpened using the wavelet function within Registax before being ‘polished’ in my very old version of Adobe PhotoShop. (As an added note: I plan to try out WaveSharp as an alternative to wavelets; it is a more modern 'spin-off' from the Registax stable and may be downloaded here.)

Stellarium (available for PCs and phones) is a popular package to display/find objects in the night sky although I mostly use Cartes du Ciel. Both packages are able to link to software (EQASCOM/EQMOD) allowing the telescope to be pointed towards a selected target. (There are several phone apps offering a quick look at what’s visible and to help identify objects. I often employ an easy-to-use one called SkyMap; for an excellent lunar map, consider an app called Lunar Map HD.)

We ended with a selection both of my images and a couple shared by participants.

For those wanting to learn a little more I suggested the local Beacon Observing Group and/or a local amateur astronomy society (e.g. here).

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Software I downloaded/installed in order to control my telescope mount (Skywatcher HEQ5 pro):

Coincidentally, during the ten days or so in the run-up to the u3a session mentioned above, I also had the task of transferring everything from my struggling decade-old laptop to its replacement. Unfortunately, the most time-consuming tasks were those associated with astronomical packages. In particular, it took me ages to get to the point where I could steer the telescope mount from the new laptop using something called EQASCOM/EQMOD. (ASCOM – Astronomy Common Object Model – is a wonderful suite of software programmes which is very widely used by the astronomy community.) I succeeded in the end, with helpful input from Jon, Mark and Roger at Ashford Astronomical Society, from Alex and Grant of First Light Optics; and from the legendary Tim via the Beacon Astronomy Group. (Yes, I know: an all-male list; however, despite the appearance in this post, astronomy is emphatically not an all-male preserve.) I’ve named several other people in previous posts who’ve offered valuable help over the years: amateur stargazers are extraordinarily approachable and helpful.

Not all these packages need to be installed in a particular order, but some do so beware. Also, please note that this is an idiosyncratic list: these are the programmes I have chosen to download, install and run in addition to the software packages mentioned in the paragraphs immediately above.  There are URLs listed for which I offer with no guarantees – you need to take responsibility for what you download and install: one or two of these may require that you ‘green/allow-list’ the site in your anti-malware system; it's your choice.

o ASCOM drivers for the astrocams – in my case from their supplier, Altair Astro (note that you’ll need a login, which is a different one to the customer login you might have set up in order to buy the camera initially). I use an AA290c and an AA533c_pro-tec on my AA80ED-R refractor and my Skywatcher 150PL Newtonian reflector telescopes. (I have a smaller Skywatcher 72ED refractor on a Skywatcher EQ3/2 mount for visual observing: it's light enough to be transportable.)

o The driver for the cable connecting my laptop to the telescope’s equatorial mount, an EQDIR cable; here.

o Prerequisites for ASCOM: this and this.

o The next stages can be problematic – I certainly found them so and tried more than once before achieving success. I was advised to install ASCOM itself from here then install the EQMOD driver from here. It was the latest version of EQMOD (v6.6SP1Release) that caused issues and in the end I went here and then here in order to find, download and install this file EQASCOM_V200w_Setup.exe

o Next connect the laptop to the mount and power the mount up. It’s a good idea at this point to go into Windows’ Device Manager (in Settings) and look at the COM ports – the mount ought to show up as a port (e,g, COM port 3). Note the port number as you’ll need this later in programmes like Cartes du Ciel, CdC. EQASCOM isn’t stand-alone – you can’t start it up in isolation – but it’ll be called by programmes like CdC when you go through the ‘Connect Scope’ routine. Other tips include setting Baud rate to 9600 and Epoch to J2000 (- jargon you’ll recognise as you set up CdC and the like.)

o One of my helpers/advisors suggested using this guide, which I found very useful.

o As a final note, I was also pointed towards a new approach to the problem of telescope mount control using a laptop: Green Swamp.  I like the look of it and I may well explore it further once I’ve recovered from the software battles I’ve just completed.

It was frustrating to find that this process was no more straightforward on my replacement laptop than it was a few years ago on my old one. I suspect that it takes a lot of ‘practice’ to master the art and I, for one, have no great desire to invest that sort of time and energy more often than is strictly necessary. I therefore hope my new laptop lasts as long as my previous one and remains stable, after which I doubt I’ll be doing a lot of astrophotography or I’ll have switched to a fully robotic ‘plug & play’ setup 😉.