Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
Telescopes, Cameras, and other Astronomy Gear
It has been cloudy, so I have been messing the with Raspberry Pi. I have a 64GB SD Card that I loaded up with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. No real need for 64-bit other than future proofing. I read somewhere that…
I have been wanting to test some other methods of connecting my to astronomy gear for EAA observing. My Astroberry Raspberry Pi is working great but just want to do some tinkering. Since the Pi I built with Astroberry is working great…
No not an observatory… I wish. This is not really an astronomy post, but it was a neat project and the purpose of it is to support the hobby, so I figured I would share it. I have accumulated a lot of…
If you are into amateur visual astronomy, astrophotography, or EAA you likely have a telescope, a mount, finder scopes, cameras or eyepieces, and a plethora of other astronomy gear dedicated to observing. There are a number of other things you should look…
The Ekos Scheduler is primarily used for scheduling an automated Astrophotography session, but it can also help automate captures for EAA. This way you can spend less time setting up, or re-setting up, captures and more time observing and enjoying your live…
The ZWO Filter Drawer and the ZWO Duo-Band Narrowband Filter I ordered last week were delivered on Monday. Last night the forecast looked promising, so I decided to set up to give the drawer and filter a quick test on NGC 281…
Last night I set up the gear and got things ready for the clear skies we are expecting this weekend. I wanted to test out the ZWO Electronic Automatic Focuser (EAF) focusing on the main scope using the Autofocus routine in the…
Dark frames, dark calibration frames, or simply darks are used to compensate for hot pixels, thermal noise, amp glow, and other camera sensor noise artifacts in images, especially in longer exposure images. Most EAA software can apply darks during a live stack…
Even though I have my gear set up to remotely operate the mount and cameras using Ekos/INDI there are several times during a EAA observing session where I am required to take a trip out to the scope. Whenever I need to…
Still have not had a good clear sky this month 🙁 Over the last week the temperatures have been a bit cooler and the nights are getting a bit longer, but the clouds, and recently the full moon, have been keeping the…