The 1000mm lens now has auto-focus

It’s been a very slow process getting here. Not helped in the slightest by my procrastination and putting it off for months and months.

When I bought the Megalens, almost a year ago, I intended to use it for astrophotography. I tried it once and discovered that it was almost impossible to focus manually, even during the daytime, and the stars in the corner of the image had massive distortions - they looked more like birds in flight or the letter ‘V’. (Not to mention the insane amount of vignetting!)

For a very long time, I’ve been pondering the idea of getting a longer focal length telescope for my astro imaging. The SW72ED is a great scope for the imaging I do and my current skill levels. There have been times when it’s 420mm focal length was too short for the target I wanted to capture.

I’ve seen some 500mm ‘mirror’ lenses on eBay selling for a couple of hundred dollars. I’ve always been put off by the fact that they don’t have a standard Nikon mount, and seemed too cheap to give good results. I was also put off by the (relatively slow) F-ratios of F8 or F11.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days up at Lake Tyrell in Victoria’s north.

It was gorgeous up there, and I came to realise a few things.

• After spending days in a landscape so flat you can see the curvature of the Earth, under a giant bowl of blue sky, I hate the crammed-down and shoehorned-into-a-box feeling that being in the city gives me

Nothing else I can add to this, really…

One of the battles I’ve been fighting with my astro imaging is light pollution. The higher sensitivity of the astro-cam and the horrible LED streetlights means I can’t take long exposures to capture the faint detail of DSOs, and what images I do capture have a terrible blue colour to them.

In an ideal world, light pollution would be two or three distinct colours (like the old sodium or mercury vapour lamps) that a filter can remove. Sadly, the new LED lights emit a large number of colours (they all blend into what our eyes see as “white”), but have a very strong blue component.

Back in May, I captured some excellent data of Eta Carinae - the first time I’d had the telescope and mount out to a dark sky site.

The image I ended up with made me very happy - it was a (to my eyes) a brilliant picture of an iconic sight in the night sky.

Over the intervening months I have picked up more image processing skills and more confidence in pushing the data to reveal previously hidden detail.

I recently purchased a ZWO ASI183MC astrophotography camera. I won’t bore you with all the technical details nor spout about how much of an improvement it is over my DSLR. (Oddly enough, if you search for my DSLR on various astro forums you will have ’experts’ spouting off about how rubbish it is for astro and that Nikon’s quality control team should be shot for releasing it. I’ve never had problems with it and it’s created images I am very happy with, so I’m of the opinion these Internet ’experts’ are just full of crap.)

We’re past the equinox, so the days are now longer than the nights. Daylight saving just kicked in, so all our clocks jumped forwards an hour. (Don’t get me started on the stupidity that is daylight saving. Remember - they implemented it so that workers in the armaments factories during World War I would have more daylight to work by.)

I’ve been waiting on better weather for about a month now, since my trip to the Dark Sky Site in August. The September new-moon weekend was washed out, and the weather has been generally poor.

I did an OS upgrade yesterday. Now the graphics tool I use to rescale and add the watermark to images is acting up. I suspect that I may have to downgrade the OS (never a fun task) and hope that fixes the issue.

But then - I did the upgrade to close various exploitable security holes.

Do I convert my images one at a time (and force-kill the program after each one) or do I increase the possibility of getting my computer compromised?

Following on from my previous post about software upgrades breaking things, I’ve spent a few days trying to finding a new piece of software to write these blog posts with.

My requirements weren’t terribly onerous - fast, easy to use, and created static web pages.

After looking at a few packages - both Free / Open Source and commercial, I have decided on “hugo”. It’s fast, relatively easy to use, very fast to generate site updates and generates static web pages. Perfect.

Software… If builders constructed houses like software developers write code, the first strong breeze would destroy our cities.

I have a ‘hackintosh’ as my main computer. It’s fast, stable, and gives me all the cool macOS programs that I have been using for years (if not decades) now.

‘Hackintosh’ machines have a special EFI boot setup, and you can’t upgrade macOS versions without the correct OpenCore version.

Sounds simple, right? It is, but the prospect of bricking your main desktop is good reason to take care when messing with OpenCore and it’s tree of kernel extensions, settings and patches.

I’ve just picked up a (new) second-hand laptop to drive all my astro gear.

I am heading out the the Dark Sky site next Saturday, so have spent this evening quickly putting it all together (bye-bye Windows, hello Kubuntu) with Kstars / Ekos and compressing what was a multi-week configuration and test process into a couple of hours. I think it’s all there and ready, so hopefully I can get something out of it all.

As always, the astronomer’s curse strikes.

Buy new gear, the clouds and rain arrive for a couple of weeks. Now I understand why some equipment suppliers put a label on their packaging: “Warning: May contain clouds”.

After coming back from a week away in the country (about 4 hours drive from here), I really need/want to relocate there.

Not only is the place so much quieter, the air fresher and cleaner and the skies are a Bortle 1 or 2. (Bortle 1 is the darkest you can have.)

House prices are what I would call reasonable, although the cost of everyday items like food and petrol are significantly higher than here. Swings and roundabouts, as they say…

A long overdue update and addition of my latest sets of astro images, along with photos of Hatsune Miku.

I could rave about the quality of the T2M resin figurines. I’ll ask you to take my word for it when I say that they are a joy to work with - the resin cuts and carves like butter, there are no air bubbles or surface defects, and the detail is wonderfully sharp.

I have no idea who has been doing the ‘Rain Dance’. Whoever you are, please stop.

What can I say? Being locked down (yet again) to try and contain the spread of CV19 sucks.

Melbourne now holds the world record for the ‘most locked down city in the world’. We’ve beaten London, and left every other city floundering in the dust.

Which is not something to be proud of, not in the slightest.

Well, that was a bit quicker than anticipated.

The server rebuild has been completed and both machines are up and running perfectly. I still have a few things to finish off before I am completely happy with things - but this is ‘The Way of The Nerd’. There’s always one more thing to work on or improve…

Now to wait for the Internet to be connected and update everything!

You know that old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”??

Yeah, I decided to upgrade the server to a newer version of everything. Bad move.

It broke.

The next time there’s a full upgrade available, I will leave well enough alone. Systemd does not help matters with it’s baroque, opaque and fucking awful design and implementation. As a consequence I am working at migrating the servers to Devuan - the Linux distribution without the cancer that is systemd.