Galileo's Camera

Few days back, when I was trying to do some random stellar observations, I realised that the 4SE wasn't aligning properly and the goto function was off a little more than you'd expect. Given that weather wasn't on my side, I decided to let it go for the moment. I finally made a one star alignment and was trying to get the Sync function to work (the Sync function, when activated, would track the current position it is pointed to by auto adjusting to compensate for the stellar movement). The first worrying point when the controller returned an error that said "Offset too large, Sync failed". Yesterday, while I was trying the same, I was trying to align the telescope using the Two Star Alignment mode. After trying to align using two reasonably nearby stars (Alpha Centuri and Hadar and repeating with Alpha Centuri and Acrux), the controller was returning an error that said "Align failed". This was even more worrying. It is only slightly later that I rea...

Since it is the monsoon season again, I've been thinking of writing something about astrophotography rather than actually engaging in it. Coincidentally, one of my friends sent in an article based on some scholarly work where the team was working on combining deep space photos that are general public to create more detailed photos which are comparable with the ones that are taken from the most cutting edge telescopes. This is infact, what we all do as amateur astrophotographers. However the challenge for combining images from a large number of sources lies in the fact that you don't know what conditions they were shot under and whether all of them are of comparable quality.In this research, the team managed to set up a system where it queries for popular image search services for a given object, runs the images through a 'space locationing' software to get the accurate corrdinates, stacks them and enhances the image. The researchers claim that due to the sheer number o...