In the gallery section of
this site is a picture of M51, the whirlpool
galaxy. It
was the fist picture I managed to take that
looked to me to be quite good.
I first took the RGB frames then at about
midnight I went to bed leaving the scope and
camera collecting luminance images.
Form that night I have been convinced
that the further away I am from a scope the
better the images have been!
With increased
computerisation of scope amateur astronomy is
generally moving in the direction of increased
automation.
However building and running an automated
scope is still a massive challenge.
As with any complex task
best to tackle it in smaller parts.
-
Scope must be integrated with the control
system.
With modern scopes this is relatively
easily achieved.
-
I choose to use a dome
to protect the scope.
This needs to point in the same
direction as the scope and open and close.
A run off would have been easier!
-
Weather detection.
It might be necessary to close up in
a hurry should it start raining
-
To image a camera is
needed, as are filters, guider, automated
focusing.
-
Then a control program
is needed to bring it all together and
execute an observing plan.
There are commercial solutions to all of the above.
Sadly there still are bugs and
shortcomings that seam to need tackling on an
observatory by observatory basis.
In this section I will describe progress
so far
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