gear – Page 10 – Wolfgang Lonien

October 12, 2015October 21, 2015

Of stars, airplanes, light pollution, and the cold…

Yesterday I tried to collimate my telescope but ran into problems. So I asked Mirko Boucsein from the local observatory if he’d like to help me, and he suggested to meet me in Darmstadt.

After successfully collimating the telescope (which is a matter of minutes once you’ll get the right tools and the hang of it) I asked him if I could try some “Live Composites” using my Olympus E-M10 camera. “Live Composite” is a term invented by Olympus which does some stacking in-camera, taking one base image and then only adding lights (plus one dark frame in the end to compensate for noise). Mirko wanted to get some photos himself using the observatory’s biggest telescope, and accepted to have my camera mounted piggyback to the big tube and mount.

First he pointed the scope to Deneb, and the North America Nebula (NGC 7000), and my camera took 14 photos (of 60 seconds each at ISO 200 and f/2) which resulted in one raw file and one jpg:

After doing that he wanted to get some long exposure shots of NGC 6946, better known as the Fireworks Galaxy. So he programmed that into the mount’s GoTo system, and the big scope went straight up to our zenith (the point right over our heads) to track that one. Here I took 45 exposures of 60 seconds each, which the camera again stacked into just one raw and jpg file:

You don’t see the nebula and the galaxy in my photos which I took with the Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens. First this is a very wide angle, and those nebulae and galaxies are small (in fact they’re huge of course, but I mean a small angle in my photos here). Plus they are also faint, and since I didn’t use any filter against the light pollution (you clearly see Darmstadt city lights in the second photo), I had no chance to get anything like that. Plus my camera isn’t modified to allow h-alpha and other wavelengths to even reach its sensor.

What you do see in both images were airplanes flying straight through my frame. This you can’t get rid of if you let the camera do all the stacking “live”, while taking the image – you’re much better off with manual stacking if you want to avoid those.

But still – these were my first two astrophotos using a tracking mount which was even guided by a third camera, and PHD on Mirko’s Windows laptop. So it doesn’t matter if your exposure time will be 14 or 45 minutes like in my examples, or even hours (and some 10 hours over several days using different filters is pretty standard procedure in astrophotography) – your stars will be nice and round and pinpoint sharp if you use a Bahtinov mask to focus (which Mirko did, but we didn’t have one the size of my small lens).

You’ll need all of that stuff, plus something more: you’ll need to be able to stand the cold, and the wind. I was really feeling cold when I got home, and that was early in the evening (short before 10pm). Imagine having to stay there for several hours more – who said that stuff would be easy?

Anyway. Now I have my scope laser-collimated, and one more interesting experience as well. Thanks again to Mirko, whom I hope to see again soon.

Thanks for reading.

P.S.: this was also a test inspired by this thread in a German astronomers’ forum, to see if my Olympus camera can do something like an Atik Infinity – and no, not out of the box. Haven’t tried it through a telescope yet, but I surely won’t get any h-alpha colours on it.

October 6, 2015October 6, 2015

A long lens

Joking – this will be used for observing, at least in the beginning:

Sky-Watcher 150P (150/750mm Newtonian telescope) on NEQ-3 (equatorial mount)

But sooner or later I will use the mount for photography – instead of the telescope I will first use only one of the cameras with normal lenses on it, once I have motors which can perform some automatic counter-action to the movement of our planet. The result, when using and aligning the whole rig properly, should be pin-point stars at exposure times greater than only a few seconds. When using a normal tripod which stands still, there’s the “rule of 400”, meaning that you can divide 400 by the (“full frame”-equivalent) length of your lens to get the maximum exposure time before stars become star trails. So even with my wide angle 14mm lens (28mm-e), that would mean less than 15 seconds. When using this NEQ-3 and at least one motor for the right ascension axis, I should be able to expose longer. Then the stars will stand still, and the earth will move (like it does in reality) 😉

Of course I’ll take some pictures of the moon through this telescope next time we have a clear sky. This isn’t really a setup for flat field deep sky objects, where you’ll need really long exposure times (of hours). For doing that, you’d also need a coma corrector (since all “fast” Newtonian telescopes show some coma at the frame borders), and you’d also have to help the motorized tracking with “guiding”. Which means that you’d need a second camera just for that purpose. Plus this mount isn’t really made for it, you’d need a much bigger and stronger one, which alone would cost three times as much as this complete rig you see here.

So – I’m really looking forward to this. But since I’ve bought a 6 inch telescope, I’m responsible for the next six weeks of rain and clouds, as they say in the astronomy forums…

If you want to see more and better pictures of the thing, and read a test of it, look at Arkadiusz Olech’s site.

Thanks for reading.

September 6, 2015

A Barlow lens, and some adapters

In my last blog post I wrote that you need some additional pieces to be able to mount your camera to a telescope (or to a microscope, there aren’t that many differences). Here’s what you need if you want to adapt a Micro Four Thirds camera to a standard ‘scope with a 1.25″ focuser:

So besides the mentioned Barlow lens (German Wikipedia explanation is here; English one is here), you need a µ4/3rds/T2 mount, and some additional distance ring and T2/1.25″ adapter.

But a fair warning before you even start: if you really want to take pictures of the stars, and of deep sky objects, things can get pretty pricey pretty quick. A good motorized equatorial mount will start at 1000-1200 dollars / Euro, and that doesn’t even include a telescope (nor the second “guiding camera” which you definitely need for exposure times of > 30 seconds or so). So for deep sky objects, be prepared to spend north of 2000-3000 dollars / Euro for the beginning. Be also prepared to carry heavy batteries out into the fields and on top of some mountains, and to spend many nights in the dark and cold. And still your pictures won’t compete to Hubble’s because of our earth’s atmosphere, and the “seeing“. You can eliminate that with something called “adaptive mirror technology”, but then for us consumers, prices start at about a million… you’d rather ask the NASA or ESO to help you with this. 😉

If you start without a telescope, you can have it a bit cheaper with devices like this one, or with an AstroTrac for about the double amount.

Thanks for reading.

September 3, 2015September 3, 2015

A telescope, indoors

I have bought a telescope. No, not for me, but for Zuleikha who shows some real interest for space, the stars, and astronomy in general. The product we’ve got for her is called the Sky-Watcher Heritage 76, which is a 3″ f/4 Newton reflector on a small one-arm Dobsonian mount. Looks like this, with her camera beside it:

Here you see the scope in its parking position, with the (inside) main mirror on the upper end, the finder scope at its side, two eyepieces which come with it, and Zuleikha’s (my old) Olympus E-PL1 camera with its kit lens.

Why did I put the camera in the picture? Well because I couldn’t resist to get some additional pieces to adapt it to the scope 😉 And sure, I had to try that right away as well.

So, for comparison – here is a photo of the kitchen door on the far end, with the Olympus E-PL1 and its 14-42mm kit lens at the long end (42mm):

And here is the same shot but through the scope:

And no, this isn’t 300mm. A small Newtonian scope which isn’t optimized for taking pictures but for live viewing instead cannot get a camera in focus – the camera would have to dive into the scope’s shaft too much to make this possible. So your only chance is to use a Barlow lens, which I did (with 2x magnification). So this is real 600mm which would compare to 1200mm on a film (or “full frame”) camera because of the 2x crop factor of the Micro Four Thirds sensor.

We’ve got some books and a rotating star map for her as well, and tomorrow morning Zuleikha wants to see the moon with it (if the weather allows).

Thanks for reading.

August 17, 2015

Faster internet

We’ve got a faster internet line together with some hardware upgrades from our cable provider on Saturday. Here’s the new router which now connects us to the outside world with 120MBit/s down and 6MBit/s upstream:

AVM Fritz!Box 6490 Cable

Lots of devices to send back as well, which I still have to do.

And yesterday I visited my brother whom I built my old quad core CPU, mainboard, RAM, and a 1TB hard drive into his PC. And while calibrating his screen afterwards, we watched “Kingsman”, which was fun as well.

Thanks for reading.

August 4, 2015August 10, 2015

Upcoming projects, new arrivals

Last week I wrote about Windows 10, and about hardware. Well, concerning a full Windows 10 upgrade / installation, Mitchie beat me – she got hers today, for free as promised. And, just like Microsoft’s Andre da Costa promised in his article, the upgrade even left Mitchie’s Ubuntu boot loader unaffected. Perfect.

I decided to upgrade my PC first, and as much as I’d have loved to build the mentioned Quad Core recommendation from the German c’t magazine, their whole rig just wouldn’t have fitted into my somewhat cramped space. That’s why I finally thought about replacing their mainboard suggestion, an Asus Z97-A (ATX size) to a smaller but almost similiar one, the Asus Z97-M Plus (µATX size), and to keep my current Antec 2480 HTPC case which fits perfectly. So I started ordering what was needed, and the first stuff arrived today. Like the CPU:

Intel Core i5 Processor (i5-4460 boxed)

This is a middle of the road current generation quad core processor from Intel. Not the fastest or newest or most expensive one, but the one with the best price/performance ratio on the market today. It is rated with 84W power consumption at full power, with the integrated graphics core also on full power, which is about correct – the guys from c’t measured 85W for the full machine on full steam.

To compare: my current 45nm ‘Yorkfield’ Core 2 Duo Q8400 is rated with 95W, about 10W more than this newer 22nm ‘Haswell’ chip.

But what is much more important is that ca. 98% of the time we use our PCs, they are waiting for us, not vice versa. So the real interesting value is the power they draw when idle (when they have nothing to do than just to wait for us). And that, for the whole machine running a Windows desktop was measured with 16W, on Linux it was even 2-3 Watts lower than that. And this is laptop territory, folks. Which is also the reason you won’t hear much of these machines.

I won’t reach these numbers exactly because I didn’t order the recommended power supply – my Antec case has a 380W PSU built into it. But still I’ll make a jump up performance-wise, with using less power than before.

My current hardware which runs just fine will go to my brother’s, because it’s still better than what he has now. And I’ll take some more pictures of the current and new build once I’m starting, even if it’s only for the wiring to the connectors and such. If it’s interesting enough to post these here, just let me know. Building your own PCs is fun…

Thanks for reading.

July 30, 2015July 30, 2015

Win10, and hardware

Let me tell you this first: I’m a Linux user. Since years. And happy with it.

So yesterday the latest and greatest (and probably last ever) Windows was released. A colleague of mine immediately tried the “Enterprise 2015 LTS” branch in a virtual machine at work, and I tried the “Pro” version yesterday evening at home, also in a virtual machine:

Screenshot from 2015-07-29 22:45:46

Windows 10 in an Oracle VirtualBox on 64 Bit Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie”

Looks pretty cool, especially the new “Edge” browser. But at the moment it cannot replace my also virtualized and small Win7 since VirtualBox on Debian is probably a bit too old to run the Guest Additions, which you’d need to share drives, or to use the full screen (1920×1200 pixel in my case) with a proper driver. For dual booting, sure, I’d probably give it a try, but since I don’t use the typical Adobe heavyweights, I don’t need it to access all 8GB of RAM, and to spread itself all over my boot disk.

Which brings me to hardware. Nasim Mansurov has a very nice and interesting article about building the optimal PC for photographers’ needs, and his recommendations even top the ones I read in a c’t special issue about the optimal machine for using Photoshop (a guy from Adobe themselves said that 16GB of RAM is just fine at the moment).

What makes Nasim’s article interesting is that it mentions stuff I didn’t know about, like his point 4 about M.2 SSDs. But both his recommendations are a bit overkill in my opinion, or to use his own car analogy, that feels like driving a Ferrari through the rush hour, when a Toyota Corolla would do fine as well.

If I were to build a PC these days (and yes, I have also done this since at least 15 years or so), I’d probably go with something like the Quad Core PC mentioned by c’t in January this year, updating it with the newer components from issue 16 sans the series 5 processor which would produce BIOS/UEFI problems with most boards.

So my choice would look like: 16GB of RAM, Core i5 or i7 processor, SSD as boot and OS drive plus that 4TB spinning disk data drive they mention. All in all, without OS, that would still be under 1k€ (or $) – cheaper than even the “small” machine recommendation from Nasim. And more than capable for the rest of us who don’t even have 36MP cameras.

Yes, I’d probably dual boot a machine like that, and have a look at Lightroom or Capture One Pro on Windows. Of course, the best part of it would and will always be Debian, or any other free (as in beer and as in speech) operating system. I’d rather trust my open source buddies than any corporation (whose best friends will always be the shareholders instead of the customers).

About cameras? Even my old 10MP E-520 DSLR can still take a nice enough picture, even if it has only about a quarter of the sensor of a D810 (both area and pixel count, so pixel density is about equal or even higher than with that top Nikon camera):

Orchid

Update: Please note, I’m not anti-Microsoft, or anti-anything. Tools are tools, you have to search the ones which are right for you and your needs. In fact, some of the guys working at that corporation are pretty cool, like this nice tip shows. Maybe my wife can use that to upgrade her new Dell notebook from Win8.1 to Win10, without affecting her Ubuntu bootloader. It also makes me think about upgrading my hardware, see above. Found via this and this page, during a quick scan of interesting daily news.

Thanks for reading.

July 21, 2015

The best value in (Micro) Four Thirds?

Kirk Tuck, well-known Austin-based professional photographer lately wrote on his Visual Science Lab blog about the Olympus 40-150mm/4-5.6 zoom lens. He has the Micro Four Thirds version, and as I commented on his blog, both Mitchie and me have the older Four Thirds version, which we still can use with an Olympus or third party adapter, even with autofocus.

These small and inexpensive tele zoom lenses are marvels. Total gems within the system. Consider this:

Sunrise in a garden

You can click on the picture to get it on Flickr, even in the original resolution. This was taken at 76mm with the aperture fully open – and the picture was not sharpened. It’s pretty much like it came out of the camera.

If you shop around, you can get these (or the Micro Four Thirds version which should focus a little faster) for around 150 Euro or Dollars. And if you plan to get into the Micro Four Thirds system, definitely consider getting a double zoom kit which has this lens as well. It’s really good as you see, so for the price it’s a steal.

Highly recommended. And no, I’ll get nothing for doing so.

Thanks for reading.

July 14, 2015July 14, 2015

Made with another “camera”

Free floating plastic dolphin

Made for Zuleikha, using our HP OfficeJet all-in-one printer, scanner, and fax device. A bit post processing using GIMP and RawTherapee.

Thanks for viewing.

July 11, 2015July 11, 2015

Olympus OM-D E-M10

Late last month, a colleague asked my advice. A friend of his wasn’t sure whether she should get an Olympus OM-D E-M5 (first version), or the E-M10 which I also have (they are at about the same price right now).

“Tough decision”, I said, and told him about the differences. But now, thinking of it after owning the E-M10 for about 5 months (it was a birthday present), I think that this is my favourite of all the Olympus cameras I have, or had. Which are/were:

– Olympus E-520 DSLR (since late 2009)
– Olympus E-PL1 (given to Zuleikha)
– Olympus OM-2N (film camera, some 40+ years old)
– Olympus E-PL5, and, the latest,
– Olympus OM-D E-M10

I thought I’d best write a short summary about this latest camera I’ve got. Not a review – you can read lots of them elsewhere – but just my reasoning why I like it that much.

But first, let me show you the camera as it’s on my desk right now (with the Panasonic Lumix 14mm/2.5 “pancake” wide angle lens attached):

This is the very first picture I took with, not of the camera. It shows my birthday card, hand-made by Zuleikha:

Here’s a tight portrait I took of Zuleikha, using my Four Thirds 50mm/2 macro lens:

This little camera has quite a few tricks in its sleeves. It has for instance a “live composite” mode, which is ideal for fireworks or for star trails:

With using this mode, the camera will take one base exposure, and then several other ones where it only adds additional or moved lights. I think the photo above took some 45-50 minutes and was made from about 90 exposures, which the camera composes to one raw and one jpg afterwards. Easy trails without fumbling around with 90+ layers in your favourite photo editing software. And I’m not sure if the E-M5 could do this already.

The sensors of the cameras since the E-M5 and E-PL5 generations are the same, with the exception of the E-M1 which adds phase detection autofocus onto its sensor (which is said to be from Panasonic again; these here are from Sony). So it’s the same 16MP (Micro) Four Thirds sensor, with about the same colours as my E-PL5 has:

Speaking about the sensor: a (Micro) Four Thirds sensor is about half the size (quarter of the area) of 24x36mm film. It measures 13.3x17mm, and has a diagonal of about 21mm, again, half of that of what 135-type film had. So it has a so-called “crop factor” of 2, which means that a 25mm lens on the digital OM-D is like using a 50mm lens on the film OM-2N. And that makes them tiny, both the cameras and the lenses. The OM-2N was one of the smallest film cameras, and the E-M10 is about the same size:

To give you an idea of its size, here’s a self portrait I took in one of the company lifts:

So what can it do? This for instance:

I started a series of black & white portraits lately, and absolutely love the performance of both the camera and also the tiny 45mm/1.8 lens even when used wide open like here.

Could it be better? Well not for the price I guess. At the time I’ve got mine, the price for the camera body was about 600€, or 100€ more with the typical kit lens (I had one of these already, so I didn’t need it). And both the E-M10 and the slightly older E-M5 (first version) bodies are now at or even under 500€.

If you shoot sports events or anything fast moving, and you need a good and fast continous autofocus with perfect tracking, then there might be better cameras around for that. However, if you want small and light, with absolute precise autofocus for bright prime (single focal length) lenses like I do – well I couldn’t think of a better camera for the money.

Another point: the batteries of the smaller E-PL “Pen”-type cameras and this E-M10 are compatible. The E-P series and the “bigger” OM-Ds (E-M5 and E-M1) have slightly bigger batteries. So if you own one of these cameras already, that might be an additional factor to consider.

So I hope this could help my colleague and his friend (or relative), and I also hope this explains why I like that camera that much. It’s affordable, tiny, and still delivers top-class results – what else could one ask for?

Thanks for reading.