More Star-B-Que 2013!

The Fall Star-B-Que of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association was held up at Kitt Peak this last Saturday.  I already blogged about the lizard-in-a-strait-jacket yesterday, so time for more mundane stuff, like the latest pictures...

I also recently told about my IR-converted camera's vacation to New York State, and I wanted to bring it along to the mountain to shoot the contrasts between the titanium-painted domes, vegetation and clear sky.  With the Fall sunset seeming to come early, I didn't have a lot of time to play given my responsibilities as Star-B-Que organizer, so only got the above images.  The one at left is a straight shot of the 4-meter and Steward 2.3 meter framed by a pair of oak trees at the picnic area.

The shot at right is a 5-frame mosaic of shots showing the wide expanse from the VLBA radio dish, located at the picnic area, across the profile of the Observatory.  This picture brings up a topic I've been wanting to discuss for a couple weeks - mosaic software!  I was happy for the last year or so with Autopano Pro in assembling mosaics, but a recent disk crash required a reload, and I couldn't find the version I bought (key protected), and I was loathe to pay another $100 for the new version.  Photoshop has a "Photo merge" feature, but it often has difficulty in assembling anything but the most simple panoramas...

A friend recently turned me on to "Microsoft ICE", which I understand means Image Composition Editor.  The website has an impressive demonstration where a 200 frame mosaic was assembled by the program in seconds, retaining the full resolution of the original frames, or zooming out to see the "big picture"!  The great thing, besides the incredible job it does, is that it is a free download!  The other great thing is that I've yet to be able to stump it - I've fed it star-field pictures and somehow it assembles them perfectly and seamlessly!  You will see the results of my latest effort below...

After the excitement of saving the lizard earlier in the afternoon, a variety of scopes were set up down the clearing of the picnic area.  My Celestron 14" might have been the largest, buddy Roger brought along a 5.5" F/8 refractor that was nice for scanning along the Milky Way.  We had a lot of attendees that couldn't stay late for one reason or another, and just came to socialize and look thru the scopes for a bit at some great skies before the 75 minute drive back to Tucson.  The picture at left is taken with a Nikon 8mm F/2.8 for a 2 minute exposure once it got fully dark.  The glow of the Milky Way bisects the picture vertically, and astronomers with red lights illuminate the foreground.  The outline of the C-14 can be seen in the right foreground.  The brightest star at the upper edge is Vega, below and left of Vega is Altair.  This is a tracked image using the Vixen Polarie.

As advertised, here is the Milky Way mosaic.  It is a 9-frame assemblage, each shot was a stack of two-2 minute exposures taken with a Nikon 80mm lens at F/4.  At left is a single frame, cropped from the one that shows the hydrogen clouds M8 (below) and M20(above and right).  Since the camera was mounted on a ball head on the tracker, I wasn't sure of the overlap or framing, but was hoping that it was sufficient to do the mosaic without any holes!  Once all 18 of the frames were stacked into the 9 individual shots, they were dumped into the ICE program and it was done in seconds!  It was cropped slightly to smooth out the edges, and had levels adjusted some, but is otherwise shown in all its glory at right.  Of course, as I've lamented before, the blog limits pictures to 1600 pixels wide, so you can't go exploring through the Milky Way like I can on the 6,000 pixel wide original...  The Teapot asterism dominates the lower left corner, with the dark clouds and Nebulae scattered along the plane of the galaxy emphasized with the 20Da camera.  The black bits are where the frame edges stopped, and I'm mystified how ICE assembles it without any apparent errors.  Anyone who has been tempted to try mosaics but has baulked at the price ought to give it a try!