15th Feb 2024: Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta29 released - macOS native File Chooser, macOS CMD-Q fixed, read-only Fits on network fixed and other bug fixes
7th December 2023: added payment option Alipay to purchase Astro Pixel Processor from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and other countries where Alipay is used.
I am rather new to digital astrophotography, though I have been doing astrophotography for over 30 years. I have been using slide film a lot more than anything else to capture the wonders of the world. I started with SLR and slide film, then we used 12 cm x 12 cm glass plates on the 500/600/1031 Schmidt-Väisälä telescope (camera), which belongs to our astronomical club. Later I used hydrogen sensitized slide film with same telescope. When computers got better, the slides were scanned and post-processed in Photoshop. But no stacking was used, in my case the result has always based on a single frame. It was a lot of fun, but now the fun seems to be more in the stacking and processing than the actual shooting :).
I also built a portable heavy-duty equatorial mount for astrophotography over 20 years ago and it is still working perfectly. The tracking is based on Edward R. Byers 7 ½” worm-gear drive, which is stepper motor driven in sidereal time and which has +/- 10 arc seconds precision. This practically eliminates the need of an auto-guider. I take pictures with camera optics. My favourite lens for astrophotography is the Pentax SMC A* 300 2.8 , which I used with film cameras before, now it has been converted to Canon EF mount and I am starting to use my stock 5D Mark III with it.
I just received a demo license of APP and from what I have seen it capable of so far I am going to purchase the full license really soon. I am watching the tutorials and learning. Unfortunately the sky is very cloudy over here at this time of the year, so it is hard to get some lights taken to work with on APP.
I wonder if someone could help me get some sample data files to go through the tutorials with and learn. I think it would help many newcomers to learn the process flow, if there were some real sample files along with the tutorials. You could learn the basic stuff while knowing the data files where you start from is good material and the possible problems you come across while processing is a problem in what you did with the APP and not a problem in the original data.
Wow that is some amazing backstory! Love it, if you have some of those scans still would be nice to see!
I might, very maybe, move to Norway in the future and always wondered if astrophotography was worth in that far North. Given the climate and Northern lights (which are great but also a source of light pollution 🙂 ). Am I seeing that wrong?
You can get some sample data here for example: http://www.rawastrodata.com/ just something I Googled, but looking nice for your purpose.
Thanks for your reply! I just purchased the Owner's license of APP.
You can do astrophotography very well over here in the north. The weather can be cloudy at times, perhaps more than other places in the world, but we do also get clear skies. Of course, during the summer, there is never really dark. But then we can enjoy the amazing Noctilucent clouds during the twilight and Halos during the daytime. I think the weather of Norway is somewhat different from ours, because of the mountains and the Atlantic ocean next to the Norwegians.
I am in the South-West Finland, so the Auroras won't bother us too much 😊 . In the Northern parts of Scandinavia you can enjoy them a lot more.
I lost most of the large format slide films at some point (practically all astrophotos), they were misplaced somewhere and never found again. And the scans are somewhere on CD-Roms and also some on floppy disks (anyone remember them anymore?). So, unfortunately the old "treasures" are more or less lost unless I find the archives. It has been 15 or so years...
But I did find one really nice comet picture, which was taken on slide film with Pentax LX and Pentax A* 300 2.8 using the tracking mount which I described before. It was taken back in April 2002 of the amazing beautiful Ikeya-Zhang and M31. Of course the picture could be better, but you have to remember this image is processed from a single slide! So no stacking there, only some adjusting with Photoshop. If I remember correctly, this was a 10 minute exposure.
That is so nice, I have great respect for those who used regular film for astrophotography. Ofcourse there was no other option anyway, but when I look at the amount of work and cost involved (when I started regular photography it was just before the digital revolution, so couldn't afford that as a boy for long) I probably wouldn't have started. I do love the process though, such a pitty they got lost! I remember floppy's yes, so that's always a good age indicator, I even started with cassette tapes. BAM! 😉 My grandfather gave me a Commodore C-16 back then and I went from there to Commodore Amiga's.
Anyway, thanks for the info on the Nothern parts of the world, I might have to keep it more to the South of Norway then. 🙂 Thanks for the purchase and ofcourse, happy to help with any questions you might have.
I am rather new to digital astrophotography, though I have been doing astrophotography for over 30 years. I have been using slide film a lot more than anything else to capture the wonders of the world. I started with SLR and slide film, then we used 12 cm x 12 cm glass plates on the 500/600/1031 Schmidt-Väisälä telescope (camera), which belongs to our astronomical club. Later I used hydrogen sensitized slide film with same telescope. When computers got better, the slides were scanned and post-processed in Photoshop. But no stacking was used, in my case the result has always based on a single frame. It was a lot of fun, but now the fun seems to be more in the stacking and processing than the actual shooting :).
I also built a portable heavy-duty equatorial mount for astrophotography over 20 years ago and it is still working perfectly. The tracking is based on Edward R. Byers 7 ½” worm-gear drive, which is stepper motor driven in sidereal time and which has +/- 10 arc seconds precision. This practically eliminates the need of an auto-guider. I take pictures with camera optics. My favourite lens for astrophotography is the Pentax SMC A* 300 2.8 , which I used with film cameras before, now it has been converted to Canon EF mount and I am starting to use my stock 5D Mark III with it.
I just received a demo license of APP and from what I have seen it capable of so far I am going to purchase the full license really soon. I am watching the tutorials and learning. Unfortunately the sky is very cloudy over here at this time of the year, so it is hard to get some lights taken to work with on APP.
I wonder if someone could help me get some sample data files to go through the tutorials with and learn. I think it would help many newcomers to learn the process flow, if there were some real sample files along with the tutorials. You could learn the basic stuff while knowing the data files where you start from is good material and the possible problems you come across while processing is a problem in what you did with the APP and not a problem in the original data.
But I did find one really nice comet picture, which was taken on slide film with Pentax LX and Pentax A* 300 2.8 using the tracking mount which I described before. It was taken back in April 2002 of the amazing beautiful Ikeya-Zhang and M31. Of course the picture could be better, but you have to remember this image is processed from a single slide! So no stacking there, only some adjusting with Photoshop. If I remember correctly, this was a 10 minute exposure.
Thank you for your kind words and for the information regarding the raw data files. Yes, I noticed the multi channel processing tutorial, but have not yet studied it. I will need to learn the more basic stuff first.
While totally unrelated to the current topic, I noticed you're considering expanding the software development team of APP. I wanted to recommend you to have a look at the software development tools by Atlassian, if you have not already. Perhaps you're already using them 😉. Jira and Confluence are really great for all development, especially software projects. They are also very affordable when you have max. 10 users working with the tools. My team at work has been using them for about a year now with great results (we do building automation system development, hardware, software, different building systems integration etc...).
