Astrophotography & Star Trails

While trying to photograph meteors in the Perseids shower recently I ended up taking a lot of longish exposure photographs of the same patch of sky. I was hoping to catch a meteor or several shooting though the frame. Reviewing the photos when I got home I found I caught no meteors, indeed I saw none either, but I did have a set of images I could make a star trail image from.

The usual way to make star trail images is to load the separate images into layers in Photoshop or Gimp and them blend them together. I’ve since found a nice piece of software that automates this process, StarStaX. The following two images were generated with this software. I only had a small number of images usable for the stacking, and there were quite large gaps in time between image, so the results are not as great as they could be. This is not the fault of the software.

StarStaX Test 1
Stacking some star photos. Originals were 20s exposures with 5sec between images, hence the dotted look to the trails.
StarStaX_DSC_2448-DSC_2455_lighten
Some shorter exposures stacked. Was looking for meteors, but saw none. Camera must have moved, giving the jump in star positions. There’s at least one airplane / satellite trail in the stacked image.

 

Playing Radio

Last weekend a bunch of us from the Havering Amateur Radio Club decamped to a field at the Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker and set about trying to contact as much of the planet as possible by radio.

It was a good excuse to try out my new radio, an Icom 9100, and break out the big beams and linear amplifiers.
IMG_20130721_130327

We had two HF stations, on 20m and 17m and one VHF station trying to work though some satellites.
A total of over 300 QSOs were logged, a good third of those using CW on 20m. There is a QSO map on line. Some photos of the event are on Flickr.

You’ve got to photograph a bug or two when you’re in a field. Here’s a ladybird larvae.
DSC_2392 - Version 2

The insides of things are beautiful…

…lets see what they look like.
These days I work with X-Ray systems. I’m just finishing up commissioning and testing of the latest one, so I’m using it to image various things.

This is a compact fluorescent lamp. At full size you can see the coils of tungsten wire in the electrodes in the glass spiral, you can also see some tiny droplets of condensed mercury at the end of the spiral. It;s this mercury that’s essential for the operation of the lamp, but is also what makes them (slightly) hazardous if the glass breaks.
Compact Fluorescent Lamp

Too soon.

Yesterday I read the news that Iain Banks wasn’t doing too badly all considered. This lunchtime I heard via Twitter that Iain had died.  Fuck Cancer.

I first discovered Banks’ writing via the internet, a recommendation in a long forgotten place lead me to a copy of The Use of Weapons and a whole universe of dubious ethics and arrogant, playful super intelligences. Now the last word in that universe has been written, while there are still tales to tell.

Not only have we lost two of the best authors to have come from Scotland, on a more selfish note, we’ve lost a whole universe (or two, or three) and any number of fucked-up domestic tales.

Fuck Cancer.