one monkey typing

I have been somewhat interested in astrophotography in the past, but have only done camera-lens wide field stuff with no mount (30 second exposure type stuff). I just wasn't interested in spending the time or money to get into what can be a VERY expensive hobby.

However, at this year's Astronomy on the Beach, I went to a talk about smart telescopes. I had been only vaguely aware of this new phenomenon, and went to the talk very skeptical. Long story short, about 3 days later I laid down $550 for a Dwarf 3 smart telescope.

The front runners in the $500 class scopes right now are the Dwarf 3 and the Seestar S50. The Dwarf has a newer generation 8 megapixel imaging chip and a wider field of view. The S50 is more telephoto and has a previous generation 2 megapixel chip. I find that a lot of what I'm interested in are larger objects, and I like the newer chip. Those considerations drove my decision.

Also it seems like Dwarf is pushing new features and updates out faster than Seestar is.

Anyway, my first night after the Dwarf arrived was hazy, but at 5:30 the following morning I had a clear window and took a couple of sets after doing some learning on the app.

As I looked out the back door facing south, Orion was right in my field of view, so M42 was to be the first target.


THESE IMAGES ARE CLICKABLE FOR FULL SIZE.



That went well. That's 100x 10 second exposures and a 120 gain, stacked and edited with the "auto" tool on Stellar Studio, a cloud-based simple editor with astrophotography specific tools. I did have dark frames set for this one. Also this has the duo-band (OIII+Ha) filter enabled.

I was inside getting ready to take my shower when this finished, and I thought from where I put the scope on the deck it could probably see M31 from there so I poked M31 in the atlas and let the scope find it. I set it to 100x 10 second exposures again, with a lower gain of I think 60. This one has the "Astro" filter (light pollution) enabled.



I'm pretty happy with this. I'm also happy that the thing is the size of a kid's lunch box, so it's a telescope I can easily bring moto camping on the motorcycle.

I've seen results this good from people using this scope in Tokyo, so light pollution need not be a show stopper. Both the Astro and the Duo-band filter are pretty good at filtering out light pollution.

I put Windows on one of my laptops last night. Why? I "interviewed" for an IT position yesterday.
The township office that Jenn works in is losing their IT guy, he's moving away. It's about an 8 hour a MONTH job. I'm already in their payroll system since I was on standby for elections last year, and I figured "eh, it's something to do that's different, and I can't imagine it's easy to try to hire someone for 2 hours a week of work."
The "interview" was just sitting down with the current guy and giving him a quick history and some war stories.
Interviews are very stress free when you absolutely don't care if you get the job or not.
But of course it's an all Windows office. My primary laptop is a utility machine used to just carry around to troubleshoot, and to provide entertainment while on the road so I don't actually care what OS it's running. I default to Linux simply because it's easier and less headache than Windows.
Surprisingly SO FAR it hasn't been difficult to get Windows installed and up to date without connecting to a Microsoft account. We'll see if that continues; Windows in my experience will just pop up in the morning and say "Time's up no more running without an account for you." at random times, forcing another fight.