Posts Made By: Gianluca Valentini

After all I've read about the "Moonshine affair" in this forum, I decided to ask for help in evaluating my tentative choice of a small home dome. I have the crazy idea to have a 7' clamshell dome sent out to Italy (approx 1500 US only in shipping cost). But, before I decide, I would like to collect all the information I can on this product. I've seen it displayed only in the pictures of New Mexico Skies (the 12' though) and it seems a good design and concept. Any suggestion? I've seen the Sirius of the same size (imported in Italy and considerably a less expensive solution, but it is not exactly nice to look at! Furthermore I tend to be a bit claustrophobic and the clamshell design could be a lot of help in that.

Thanks a lot for any info you'll be able to give me.

Ciao
Luca

Hello everybody,

My ideas are still not very clear, but I'm getting there. I would appreciate some advice if anyone is willing to share some knowledge.
My first concern is with the height of the perimeter walls. Should I take into account that I will need a variable height pier? How high should the walls be to keep some light and some wind out, but to allow me to observe and image without having to climb on a ladder because the pier is too high? Would an 8x7 feet structure be comfortable for one person with an 11" SCT and a 4" refractor (SCT on pier, Tak on tripod) and all the equipment?

Hope someone will have the time and decide to take some to answer some of these questions, if not all.

Thank you all.

Ciao
Luca

Hello guys,
I've been bothered by a question for quite some time now and I always felt dumb asking, but now I'll spit it out:
I never had or used a cooled CCD camera, although I thought about buying one more than once. But I never decided to do it because
(1) I was shocked by the price of even the crappiest cooled CCD.
(2) I already possessed a 6+ megapixel DSLR and heard that I could do something with it even in the field of astrophotography, with some limitations that my budget constraints made very acceptable.

So my question is why the major manufacturers of digital imaging devices (Nikon, Canon, Fuji and so on) are offering DSLR with large CCDs (6+megapixels) with a more or less affordable price, while the same amount of money will buy you only the smallest insignificant cooled monochrome CCD? Is it possible that the incredible price differential is due only to the cooling system? What else is there that I don't know about? I would understand a 20-30% difference on the same CCD size, but we are talking of double or even more!

Unless I'm totally wrong (which is very likely, being new to this hobby) it seems to me that the cooled CCD manufacturers are over-exploiting a niche of the digital imaging market, i.e. us, amateur astronomers.
I believe that the people at Sbig or Apogee are extremely unhappy (and if what I write above is true, deservedly so) to see that some high end DSLR are beginning to produce results that are comparable to the ones obtained by some cooled CCD cameras. I also believe, furthermore, that buying a small monochrome cooled CCD camera today may not be the wisest choice, given specific budget constraints.

I hope someone will join in and tell me I'm wrong, so I can buy that damned cooled CCD camera and stop just thinking about it!

Ciao to all of you gentlemen.

Gianluca

Hello guys,

just wanted to know if anyone is using the Toucam 840K (Pro 2) and if there are any significant improvements from the 740K (Pro). Specifications seem the same, except for the higher resolution of still images (useless for astroimaging), but you never know.... So if anyone is using it, please let me know what ou think about it.

Ciao
Luca

Hello guys,

I was wondering why all my late images of Jupiter seem to be cursed by a very heavy ringing effect, whereas last year I never had this problem. Then I recalled that this year I decided to record with lower gain settings to avoid the overexposed images I was getting after processing last year. I guess I went a little too far.

Can anyone suggest a good rule of thumb to set the gain when imaging Jupiter and Saturn (although I did not have any problem with Saturn, as yet, it would be very good to know).

Thanks
Ciao
Luca

Hello there,

is anybody using the Rebel for astrophoto? If yes, would you mind giving some infos on its perfomances in comparison with the D60 or 10D.

Thank you all for any information you'll provide (if any).

Ciao guys

Luca

Hello guys,
I've tried a software modification from the site Astrobond. I did not want to upgrade to the RAW format (available among the upgrades) because the frames have to be individually processed in Iris and that is something I'd rather not deal with (I know there is AVIRAW, but what's the point of recording RAW if you then process a regular avi?). Sooner or later somebody will come up with a software that processes RAW avis and lets you work only ont the resulting image. I used a modification that the creator called OPTIMIZED COLOUR. To test it I took two identical shots, one before and one after the upgrade (absoultely identical settings). I attach the results below (in 2 messages as I don't know how to put 2 images in the same post).
The most evident effect is that the focus is softer (the developer of this upgrade told me it happens because the sharpness built in in the compression software has been turned off).
I tried and it is my opinion that, once you have used a light unsharp mask on the softer image to achieve a comparable sharpness the image obtained with the modified webcam is overall less noisy. Knowing that here are some processing masters, I would love to have some opinions, if anyone is interested.

Hello guys,
since I had no chance to do it myself yet, I tried to find somebody that compared the results that can be obtained with the OPTIMIZED COLOUR mod against those of the RAW COLOUR mod. Well I found it (a fellow Italian amateur told me where to find it, to be precise) and it is here for anyone who cares to see: http://astro.christone.net/jupiter/rawmode.htm
and here:
http://astro.christone.net/jupiter/macro.htm

I believe the images are unprocessed, however, if you download them and apply a very light unsharp mask to the image obtained with the optimized colour settings, the "softness" leaves place to details that are just as crisp as the ones revealed by the standard settings image, but with considerably less noise.

Hope someone will find it interesting.

Ciao & CS to all.

Luca

I followed with great interest the thread "Why live a moral life". In between the very interesting things I read, I singled out two hints:
the 1st is the cultural specificity of the different religious creeds. To me this is a fatal blow to anyone who wishes to claim his creed superior to others on any ground that is not sheer arrogance. If there really were one god willing to communicate with us, why would he choose to communicate only with a part of his creatures? Wouldn't this be a racist behaviour? I believe that, to anyone who's not simpleminded, this should be enough to dispense with all religions that claim to be the true will of god. When religions become institutions they destroy the most valuable part of the trascendental experience: the personal and intimate relationship with the creator (if we believe there is one, anyone, of course). On the other hand, if there were one such universal god willing to tell us his will, there should be some similarities between the interpretations of his message, cultural differences notwithstanding. If there is no such agreement (I don't know enough about the main religions to say it, but it doesn't seem to be so) then it would be clear that god is not speaking to us and the ones that say he does are either liars or simply disturbed.

The 2nd is that it is really far more interesting, in my opinion, asking why different cultures needed to create a trascendental principle to explain a few things about our "being here and now". What purpose does it serve, if any? Is it only a rational response to the difficulty of accepting that our most cherished feature, existence, could all of sudden disappear into nothing? One of the traits of human nature, and not only, is the self-preservation instinct, the individual will to perpetuate oneself. It is so true that we ask ourselves how could altruistic behaviour arise within species (human included) since it doesn't seem to serve an immediate evolutionary purpose. Well I believe that religion was created to give some of us hope for eternal life and it was created by men that needed to believe in that possibility. The rest is the same old story of human ideas (memes, to say it with Dawkins) and their own struggle to last beyond their creators.

Ciao
Luca

Hello, is there anyone out there that can give me an evaluation of the Sirius Observatory products? I recently ordered one and I'm having second thoughts: anyone can help me with some supportive comment?

Ciao guys and thanks.

Luca