Equipment

I attended virtually Howard's talk in the digital meeting tonight. Unfortunately, when I started the meeting zoom said I needed to upgrade to a new version. So I elected to run from my browser. That allowed me to hear Howard's talk, which was excellent, but I my microphone was not working, so I tried typing in the chat, but the letters kept repeating to infinity!

So the I closed the browser and did the upgrade, but when complete, the meeting had ended.

To answer a couple of questions that I heard.

Are the colors real? Actually, I was impressed. The Thor's helmet image showed as green in Howard's smart telescope image. The green is due to oxygen emission. There is a myth in the amateur astrophotography community that "there is no green in deep space" and many astro post processing workflows online teach remove green. I am impressed that the smart telescope is not only not removing green, but it is showing reasonably natural colors.

Here is an image I made of the Thor's Helmet nebula made with a 300 mm lens + 2x TC on a Canon R7: https://clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/thors-helmet-600mm-r7-rnclark.c01.14.2024-rthc-av183-h-c2-2023sw.html
It also shows the green oxygen.

Stacking. Stacking is averaging. The term originates from darkroom work where photographers would align and stack the negatives to reduce noise in the print made with that stack. The signal-to-noise ratio improves with the square root of the number of images stacked.

Howard's presentation of the newer (next generation) smart telescopes looks like they will produce amazing images, probably giving most current amateur setups a run for their money, but pricey like a good wildlife photography setup.

Howard, I'm not opposed to smart telescopes, but at this point I would not get one. My wildlife setup works very well for astrophotography, and when on a trip, I would not want to haul another 40+ pounds (next generation) of smart telescope too. My tracker only adds 3 pounds
to my wildlife setup (12 pounds of I take my heavier tracker).

One distinction I should have made in my presentation: most of the club members can do landscape milkyway photography with their current equipment (camera, fast wide angle lens, and tripod). A simple star tracker will allow longer exposures but is not essential. To do deep sky imaging (nebulae, galaxies, star clusters) with a telephoto lens requires a more robust equitorial mount. There are those who attempt deep sky imaging without tracking, but this requires taking 500 to 1000 1 or 2 second images and stacking them (my computer says don't even think about it). Roger's website (Clarkvision.com) mentions 2 excellent mounts, the Astrotrac (no longer in production) and the Light track II). These work well if you know your way around the night sky, but they are not "smart". Thus, many have gravitated toward so-called "GoTo" mounts where you select the target you want to image and the mount aims your camera at it. I just upgraded my little smart telescope to a later version with a larger sensor (still 12 lbs), so we'll try that to night.