We will also have light refreshments before the meeting (around 6:30 or so) to recognize all of the volunteers that served NOVAC so well during the past year.
Since we are having our volunteer reception prior to the business meeting, we will NOT meet for the informal pre-meeting dinner at Brion’s this month. Plan to come out and celebrate our volunteers instead!
We will also have light refreshments before the meeting (around 6:30 or so) to recognize all of the volunteers that served NOVAC so well during the past year.
We will elect officers for 2015 at the December meeting. Candidate nominations have been received for each position (president, VP, secretary, treasurer, three two-year trustee terms, one one-year trustee term). It’s not too late to get into the race, though; if you want to run for one of the officer or trustee positions, please self-nominate by emailing a statement of your desire to run to elections@novac.com. It’s also possible to nominate another willing volunteer; we do ask, however, that you obtain advance permission from the person(s) you want to nominate before doing so.
We look forward to seeing you Sunday evening!
NOVAC’s Byron Bergert Imaging Group will hold its Pre-Groundhog Day Image Processing Party on Saturday January 31 from 10am to 2pm at the Patrick Henry Library in Vienna. We’ll be in the meeting room, first door on the right as you come in the main door.
This time around we’ll have an addition to our normal routine of talking about imaging and processing our data. I’ll demonstrate how I processed a recent deep sky image, showing how I use Deep Sky Stacker and Photoshop to stack the data and process it. To make the most of this, I’ll post the data online (hopefully tonight), so that other imagers can try their hand at processing the data as well. At the get-together on Jan 31, we can look at different ways of processing the same data, and compare results. I’m hoping that one of the PixInsight users in the club will take a crack at this so that we can compare the different workflows. This walkthrough will require a projector! If you can bring one, please let me know.
I hope to see you there.
Kevin Quin
Tentatively, we’re hoping to hold this on 23 May from 10:00-1:00, in a meeting room at the Loudoun County Public Library on Hay Road in Ashburn, VA. This is of course the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but given availability of meeting space, it was the first option we’ve been able to find for a while that doesn’t conflict with Astronomy Day on the 16th, so we’re going to go ahead and scheduling it.
There’s not typically a really structured agenda; an important part of this is informal discussion. As a starting point for this session, however, Beth will be talking about solar imaging and processing techniques that she’s used for images she has sent out over the past few weeks to this list. Kevin Quin also may do an imaging processing walkthrough with PixInsight, unless another member has some imaging data they’d like to try and do a processing walkthrough with.
We’ve had a few of our past attendees indicate that they can make it, but newcomers are always welcome as well. This is really a low-intensity group; our aim is to make it really painless to join or contribute. If you have some astrophotography data you want some help processing, or something you’d like to show, or an imaging question you’d like to discuss, feel free to bring it up at the meeting–that’s what this is all about.
Note that this is a change from a date (Aug 29) some of us had discussed a while back. Apologies to anyone who wasn’t included in the rescheduling discussion. I was still posting to the listserv from my Yahoo address then, and most things weren’t getting through.
For the same reasons, I’m reposting a message below about a few galaxy images I processed recently:
I finally starting to get a stable processing routine in PixInsight for my LRGB images, and have managed to get through a bunch of galaxies that I shot since last fall. These were all taken from my little backyard dog-servatory in Dunn Loring, between Tysons Corner and the Mosaic District, so you know there’s plenty of light pollution. The springtime galaxy images really suffered from this, as transparency was lower then and the soggy air reflected more light back down into the scope. Seeing was also much better for the one image shot in the fall (NGC 891), so details are sharper in that image. FWHM (a measure of sharpness of the stars in the image) was 1.95 arcsecs for that one, vs. 2.7 for the three shot in the spring.
NOVAC’s Byron Bergert Imaging Group will hold its Not-a-Leap-Year Processing Party online on Saturday, February 27 from 10am to 1pm. As our planet’s satellite moves into its springtime prime, when the first-quarter moon will ride high in the sky, this seemed like a good opportunity to take a step sideways from our usual focus on deep sky astrophotography to do a session on lunar imaging. Our Special Guest Processor for this meeting is Tom Glenn, a skilled lunar and planetary photographer who lives in San Diego. You may be familiar with Tom’s work from his fantastic APOD of the International Space Station transiting Mars, but if you look at Tom’s Flickr site you’ll quickly see that he’s equally talented at lunar imaging, and in fact he earned his first APOD for that work. Tom images the moon with a 9.25” Celestron SCT and an ASI183 camera.
We’ll be holding this meeting online via Google Meet. Follow the link below to join the meeting (you can dial in for audio only):
Phone: 414-436-7479
PIN: 891 623 500#
We’ll open the connection about 10 minutes before the meeting time.
Details and Google Meet link TBA.