The interminable list of things to do.

Hi All,

Now that the semester is nearly over, I have a couple of announcements. First, I am not going to be returning to my Mathematics PhD program at ASU. For all of my friends still working toward their piled higher and deeper degree, I wish you the best of luck, and who knows I may drop by from time to time when I am tutoring on campus.

Now that that announcement is out of the way. I am currently working on a project with my little (read: younger) brother which may or may not result in more money coming my way. In any case, I am now as busy as I have ever been working on various projects.

OpenAIP is still alive and well though the code is still in rough shape, it probably still compiles though their is a lot of learning I need to do before I return too it. Unfortunately, my coding time has been hijacked by the project with my brother.

The telescope is still in boxes, for the most part I have not had time during the busy semester to use it and now that my time is clearing up the weather is not cooperating. I am still looking to get the equipment together I need to go camping, which should happen some time early next year.

I am still hoping to work on a focuser for my telescope, using my Arduino. I don't think I posted the videos from dipping my toes into Arduino programming so here they are:

Hopefully over the break I will be getting some more pieces, specifically a stepper motor, a driver and some optoisolators. If I can get that working I will post it. Also I have decided to start a Go Fund Me page because I am shameless and all of my projects seem to be out of my price range.

The next thing

So first light was a success, I was able to get a pretty good polar alignment and take some out of focus star images to run through WinRodder. For perspective here is a 1second black and white image of a star field from first light.

The bright star at the bottom of the frame is Vega.

I know what you're asking why would you want to take an image of an out of focus star. Well WinRoddier is software which attempts to reconstruct the wavefront of light coming through the telescope optics from Vega, the result is a reconstruction of the optical aberrations, or optical imperfections, of the mirror. In short this software will tell you if your optics are good, bad or mediocre.

Unfortunately I took images in TIFF format when I needed them in FITS format, the problem is that the software I used to operate the camera saves TIFF images in RBG (Red, Blue, Green) channel format, this results in the exact same data being written into all three channels.  Which lead me to have to go through a round of extracting the color channel data and then running it through WinRoddier.

Only to find that my aberrations were huge, not necessarily because the optics that were sent to me are bad but because I forgot about the first element in my optical system, the sky itself. Air pockets of different density refract light differently, and thus as you take an image the first lenses that light pass through are these air pockets in the sky, now from the above image I was able to measure the seeing, or the ammout of distortion caused by the atmosphere, its 2.68 arcseconds, which is not aweful (>5 arcseconds) but it sure as heck isn't good. (<1.5 arcseconds) The humidity on Monday night was high which probably contributed to the seeing. So now I need an artificial star to test my optics in doors.

Finally the software that I used with my camera is both old, and poorly designed, so I have now taken to working on a piece of software to replace it. But since have always claimed I wanted to write a Open Astronomical Image Processing software solution, now is as good a time as any to start. The code can be found at GitHub (in the Warp_Core1 directory) if anyone is interested in my next steps. It currently uses Visual Studio 2013 to compile.