Be the Change

The plan is still on, I am attempting to ramp up my business in order to get to the point where I can purchase everything that I will need. But I am restless, the problem is that I have a need to tinker. To this end I have bought an Aurduino Uno board as a platform for building a Temperature compensating focuser. The focuser software will run under Linux Mint.

The thing that has always bothered me about Amateur astronomy is that the tools we need for our hobby cost so much. Software which should not be expensive is either hundreds or thousands of dollars. This needs to change, which is why I started OpenAIP. However this project will never get finished as long as all of the tools needed to go around it are gestating. The good news is that there are good hardware platforms on Windows and Linux, ASCOM and INDI respectively. The next step is to build the tools on top of these platforms for image processing.

GIMP should do the job of Photoshop, and to a certain extent it does.  But we have no equivalent for Maxim DL (hence OpenAIP). My personal opinion is that a version of linux dedicated to astronomy should exist. One where you can simply boot your computer up and try it or install it and make it work for you. But this is a goal far off in the future, for now I will start with my focuser and eventually get back to OpenAIP.

Look forward to tutorials for installing INDI on Linux Mint/Ubuntu.

Ed. 
Of course after I wrote this Cinnamon inexplicably crashed so hard I had to re-image the machine overnight.

Using Acromats for astrophotography

So I am hoping to work and save a little money for a new telescope and some camping gear, more on that later. Right now I am looking into equipment for a new telescope rig. The interesting thing is that I have fallen in love with the Orion 120mm f/5 Achromatic refractor. Now this is for an astrophotography setup so you should be screaming that I need an APO. This is about 10x less than an APO because it has only two optical elements in the lens. The result being chromatic aberration. Now in the old days this would be a huge problem as you had no ability to process photos after they had been taken. You basically took the image on film and developed it and if there was the slightest error, you were screwed.

Digital cameras make the world a bit nicer. Here is an image taken by the telescope I am interested in: 

The original can be found here. (scroll to the bottom) The image has several issues, the focus seems off the tracking might be bad, but the thing we are going to deal with is the fact that its too purple. This purpleness the result of chromatic aberration, so I opened up the image in GIMP and used a filter I found called Darla's Purple fringe fix. Applying the default settings we get this:

Still not great but less purple. Interestingly Photoshop has this built in. If anyone from the gimp team is reading this, please implement that feature! Anyway I am hoping to post about my plans for astrophotography tomorrow.