Astronomical Society of Eastern Missouri

The workshop was held on Saturday, February 24, 2007 at the Interpretive Center at Weldon Spring, Missouri. Twenty-seven participants were in attendance.

10:00 am to Noon - Sessions
Noon to 1:00 pm - Lunch (provided, free)
1:00 pm to 4:00 pm - Sessions

The five hours of sessions covered the following subject matters:

• Session 1 - Basics - What is a digital image, how is it captured, rough divisions of astrophotography (ie, lunar and planetary, deep sky, scientific).

Leader:  Jim Roe.  Jim started digital imaging in 1997 and has taken and processed thousands of images with his SBIG ST-7 camera and Meade LX-200 telescope, mostly in search of new asteroids.  Lacking suitable software in the early days, Jim wrote his own image processing program thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the fundamentals.  Much better programmers have rescued him from such tasks in the present.

• Session 2 - Lunar and Planetary - basic techniques with web cams, avi capture (K3CCDtools?), aligning and stacking (Registax?), wavelet filtering, post-processing.

Leader: Jim Melka.  Jim has been an amateur astronomer since about 1954.  He has enjoyed observing and imaging Mars since 1971 and began the first amateur Mars photo patrol in 1973. He photographed Mars for Lowell Observatory using a 24-inch Cassegrain telescope on Mauna Kea in 1988. He has contributed observations to the Mars section of ALPO since 1971. Currently, he is imaging  Mars and other planets by eyepiece projection using a ToUcam 840 Pro webcam mounted on a 12-inch Newtonian reflector and uses Registax 4.0 for image processing.

• Session 3 - Deep Sky - basic techniques for long exposures, stacking, filters, processing - illustrate with one or more astronomical image processing programs (AIP4Win, others?) 

AND

• Session 4 - Photoshop(/GIMP?) techniques

Leader: Gregg Ruppel.  Gregg got started in imaging back in the 1960s with film.  In 1997 he built a Cookbook 245 camera using the book by Richard Berry and that got him started in CCD imaging.  He has 8 and 10 inch SCTs that he uses along with a Takahashi Sky90 for wide field work.  He has used Starlight Xpress and SBIG cameras in various different configurations.  He uses MaximDL/CCD for image acquisition and basic processing, but also uses AIP4Win for specific tasks.  He uses PhotoshopCS2 for final image processing, along with other free or shareware programs. Most of his  imaging is from his backyard in Ellisville, Missouri and many of his results can be seen at http://www.ruppel.darkhorizons.org.

• Session 5 - Scientific imaging - astrometry, photometry

Leaders:  Jim Roe and Wayne Clark.

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Thirty people participated in the pot luck supper and regular meeting of the Astronomical Society of Eastern Missouri.  Vince Barrows from the Cahokia Archaeological Society will gave a presentation on ArchaeoAstronomy.  He has conducted research into enigmatic Native American Tablets for more than 5 years.  Connotations of astronomy and mythology on the tablet forms will be discussed.  Barrows also described cultural connections with the symbolism found at the Cahokia Mounds.

Picture taken by John Duchek, February 3, 2007