I have always been irritated that most adapters and extension tubes only come with a single set screw. This not only feels insecure when holding expensive eyepieces, but also allows excessive play burring astrophotography. I’m usually chicken about drilling into my equipment, but I finally added a second set screw to all my adapters and thought I would share my experience for anyone else who may want to do the same.

Takahashi FS102 Refractor This Apochromatic telescope provides very sharp images with no color fringed stars. When reduced to F/5.9 you get about 3 degrees of coverage in the sky. I prefer to take pictures of large, wide field objects and this is just about the right focal length for those objects. I also use the extremely well made Takahashi camera angle adjuster to make framing easy. I use a collection of camera bodies and lenses along with the telescope tube for pictures.

Because most CCD cameras made for astronomy are monochromatic it is neccessary to place a series of filters over the camera and take seperate images that each cover a different spectral region. These images can then be combined to create a “true-color” image. The problem with placing filters over the camera is that it reduces the amount of light that strikes the chip. This means you need to take longer exposures.

Update: I now use Noise Ninja for all my noise reduction. It works really well. Using Photoshop Adapted from a paper by mwcook@cris.com The idea behind this method is that the low-light areas of the photograph need to be smoothed in order to remove grain artifacts while the bright stars and nebulosity should remain unchanged. To achieve this in Photoshop you need to construct a mask for the Gausian Blur filter.

I used to do artwork for Vision Scape Imaging. Here are some work and personal projects from back in the day.

When I worked at VSI I created a bunch of custom Lightwave plugins. This is one that was never released, but it was pretty cool.

Plume is a volumtric renderer I have been working on for a while on my free time ( which explains the lag ). It is a pixel filter for Lightwave which originated as a stand alone Ray Marching program I wrote. I have ported it to lightwave and what follows are samle renderings. This is just the start of the project and I plan to have some downloadable beta versions soon.