**May Contest - COMMENT THREAD**
The MAY contest is Looking Up.
Please use this thread for comments, questions and discussion.
Thanks!
Mz Pip
= new reply since forum marked as read
bright sunny day and moon! This is what I couldn't get off my camera-- thanks to installing the software for the G15 that
I'm just not ready to take on our trip Monday--and the new software turned off the ability to install from the old camera to the old
software! Aggh!
Luckily, technology also came to the rescue. I was really pissed to think that a camera not five years old would have to be replaced because of technology. I still have my film camera from 40 years ago that works fine, although, alas, not with Kodachrome which was my preferred film.
I guess that we are just living too long. We are getting run over. And it seems that people no longer worry about things that are still working fine and were not cheap being obsolete. Well, cheers to being old farts. 
A film camera is basically a light tight box into which you put a separate sensor, the film. As film technology progressed you could update the sensor in your camera simply by loading better and more modern film in it.
A digital camera on the other hand has the sensor built in and for the most part and most practical purposes that sensor is not upgradable, as sensor technology progresses really the only way to take advantage of the progress is to purchase a new camera.
I can still recall the very first digital camera was hand made from a memory chip that happened to be light sensitive because it had a clear window over the actual memory IC to allow for erasing the memory by ultraviolet light. Digital sensor technology is advancing very rapidly at the moment and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Sensitivity to light, noise level, readout rate, number of pixels and so on are all getting more advanced on nearly a daily basis.
I'm not sure "obsolete" is quite the right word, as long as the camera does what you want and provides you with results that meet your needs a given camera is not really obsolete even if there are much better cameras available with far better specifications. I had a Nikon Coolpix 995 about ten years ago that was only 3.2 megapixels and yet took gorgeous photos if you knew how to use it and stayed within its limitations. If I still had that camera and it was working I could still take very nice pictures with it. In some ways it was superior to cameras I have right now, for instance the macro mode was outstanding and could nearly double as a wide field microscope although the lens was only 4x zoom and didn't go to a very wide angle either.
I'm about to buy off Craigslist a camera that is about eight years old and cost nearly a thousand dollars new, the asking price is under one hundred bucks and it is capable of performance well beyond my skills as a photographer. For a professional photographer it would be obsolete while for me it's not at all so.
It's an "obsolete" pocket camera, a Canon Powershot S90 (they are up to S120 now). But I found ways around the limitations of the camera (entirely through firmware, software and an "obsolete" computer) and got what would otherwise be a shot impossible to take with that equipment. But the little camera does have the two things that really count in a camera, a very nice and sharp lens and a good (but not great by today's standards) sensor. I got it off Craigslist also along with the Canon underwater housing made specifically for it, I forget what I paid exactly but it was well under $200 for both camera and housing. Practically everything I do is with "obsolete" technology. 
Almost none of the stuff in that image is visible to the dark adapted naked eye from my location, only maybe a dozen of the brightest stars. That was the result of four mornings of getting up at 3:00 AM and 263 exposures of 22 seconds each at ISO 3200 (I actually took over 400 exposures but screwed up one thing or another nearly half the time). I choose to do it not because it's easy but because it's hard and challenges me.
I live on the fringes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, called that for the haze that develops on them in the Spring and lasts through the Fall.
The third big problem for me after haze and light pollution is trees, every place I can find near me that doesn't have a lot of tall trees has bright lights so I was squeezing my shots between the trees. I'm pretty much limited to shooting straight up so I have to time my shots so that what I want to image is nearly directly overhead and the Summer Triangle is overhead about 5 AM at the moment. In the middle of the Summer that same piece of sky is overhead about midnight.
I guess looking at and imaging the night sky is a form of prayer for me and like the Muslim morning call to prayers says, prayer is better than sleep. 
I had bought a tracking telescope mount off Cloudynights.com the week before that would have made it much easier and was waiting for it to get here but one of the corollaries of Murphy's law is that any new piece of astronomical gear brings clouds with it and sure enough I got about an hour of clear skies with my new mount after it arrived and then the clouds rolled in and have been here since and once the clouds are gone it will be back to haze more than likely with rare exceptions until Fall.
Here's two versions of a shot of a different area of the Milky Way before and after I removed the light pollution in software, there's a tree at lower left in both shots, getting rid of the orange light pollution gradient in the after image turned the dark shadow of the tree white. The software is brilliant but not quite smart enough to deal with trees in the picture. 
You had a lot of light pollution to deal with, and it did an incredible job.
Now, about that "prayer is better than sleep" thing.......
The actual picture taking isn't that hard at the level I'm currently doing things, I set the camera to take continuous shots and then sit back with my binoculars until either the battery runs down, the memory card fills up, clouds roll in or daylight starts washing everything out. I don't really know what I've got until I take the pics back the computer, that's when I find out that the focus wasn't quite right or the stars are streaked because I set the shutter to be open a little too long or the lens dewed up while the camera was sitting out there and so on..
Getting everything put together after the picture taking is done is the hard part, even Hubble Space Telescope images aren't particularly impressive before processing and it's easy to "overcook" your processing and end up with something that looks cartoonish. I usually do it in two or three session separated by some length of time in order to come back to the image with fresh eyes and I often end up doing it all over again because I don't like some aspect of the final image. The picture taking is more science or technology, the processing is the artistic part where judgement comes into it.
Here's a typical individual frame before subtracting a dark frame (which will get rid of the amplifier glow in the upper left corner among other things).
Note the trees on either corner of the image, biggest hole I could find, you can't go wandering around just anywhere at 4 AM with a camera and not have people asking some pointed questions. If you look closely you can see the stars are elongated thanks to the length of the exposure, I to some extent fixed that in processing.
Now that I have a tracking mount I could do it with a lot fewer images because I can expose for five minutes or so at say ISO 200 and have a vastly higher signal to noise level in the individual frames. The main purpose of stacking frames is to lower the noise level so you can do things like stretch the histogram, maximum entropy or Richardson Lucy or Van Cittert deconvolution to round and tighten star images and so on.
The noise level varies according to the square root of the number of stacked frames, I'm pretty close to the practical limit, I'd have to stack over 500 frames to lower the noise level by the square root of 2 or 1.41 times.
After considerable experimentation in an artificial night sky environment (a closed drawer with light leaking in around the edges from an already dim room) I've found it takes about two hours of total exposure (24 exposures @ 5 minutes) before you start getting a decently clean image with the S90 in really low light, your new camera could probably get the same results in fifteen minutes...
Those photons just flew in from the Andromeda galaxy and boy, are their arms tired.
I have a 10" dob, but since my injury, I can't carry it.
Here's something I did last night with the Oly and a cheap Canon 75~300m Zoom. One shot
I had forgotten that I had taken this picture! 
I don't know if it's the right size. I am useless when it comes to that sort of thing.
Please let me know if it's not. If it isn't right, you'll have to fix it for me. But we can do that.
Thanks!
just took this on friday.
its the courthouse in waxahachie texas
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