Cafuego - the eternal pursuit of doing less

Indigenous Star Names

cafuego — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:42:36 +0000

Ever since people looked at the stars, they have given bright stars (and groups of stars) names. In the western world a lot of those names are arabic names that have been around for millennia. In science, stars are generally referred to by a Bayer Designation (a greek letter and the constellation name) or a catalog number.

About a decade ago, the A friend is a member of the IAU working group on star names, as and he told me about these newly assigned names some years ago, I decided I was going to try a nice image of each of them, taking into account the details of the story when possible. That is especially important with Unurgunite :-)

I finally got the last one mid last year, and then processed all the data in the same way.

For each star, I took an hour of data; 60 x 60 second exposures with a UV/IR cut filter on a 300mm focal length RedCat 61 and processed it the same way using Siril. This provides reasonably correct star colours and relative brightnesses.

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Astrophotography with Mac OS X - Reprise

cafuego — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:49:16 +0000

So, N years later, how is that going? It was going pretty well, but then there was a pandemic with lock-downs and curfews, which rather restricted access to dark skies.The obvious fix was to obtain access to dark skies, by way of a holiday house in the Wimmera.

In the mean time there were also a bunch of revolutions in astronomy, mostly to blame on open hardware. That means it is now possible to buy an off the shelf computer to control a bunch of mounts, cameras, auto-focusers, dew heaters and other gear. These are essentially raspberry pi machines with a modified operating system and (generally) a mobile app to control them.

Rather than fight software, keep laptops (and myself) out in the cold and kludge together VNC access, I got one of these machines (an asiair mini) and data acquisition is now mostly automated and not a problem. I set it up, tell it what I want, and in the morning I have images.

I do however still use open source software on Mac OS X to do my data processing. Notably I use

Dark Doodad

cafuego — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 08:30:11 +0000

It's been a while since I did a blog, so after twiddling the way the front page of the site displays, it's time to post a new one. The attached photo is of my favourite dark nebula, "The Dark Doodad". What looks like a long thin nebula is apparently a sheet over 40 light years wide that we happen to be seeing edge-on. On the left you can see a few dark tendrils that are par of the coal sack nebula. This is one of the first images created from a stack of subs I took using AstroDSLR. Each exposure is 2 minutes and I stacked 20 of them. My polar alignment was pretty decent, I think!

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Astrophotography with Mac OS X

cafuego — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 01:13:49 +0000

It's been a good three years now since I swapped my HP laptop for a Macbook Pro. In the mean time, I've started doing a bit more astrophotography and of course the change of operating system has affected the tools I use to obtain and process photos.

Amateur astronomers have traditionally mostly used Windows, so there are a lot of Windows tools, both freeware and payware, to help. I used to run the freeware ones in Wine on Ubuntu with varying levels of success.

When I first got the Mac, I had a lot of trouble getting Wine to run reliably and eventually ended up doing my alignment and processing manually in The Gimp. However, that's time consuming and rather fiddly and limited to stacking static exposures.

However, I've recently started finding quite a bit of Mac OS based astrophotography software. I don't know if that means it's all fairly new or whether my Google skills failed me over the past years :-)

Software

I thought I'd document what I use, in the hope that I can save others who want to use their Macs some searching.

Some are Windows software, but run OK on Mac OS X. You can turn them into normal double click applications using a utility called

Processing video data:

Processing and stacking DSLR files and post-processing video stacks:

Post-processing:

A few weeks ago I bought a R G B R 0.50 0.00 1.00 G 0.00 1.00 0.00 B 1.00 0.00 0.50

Southern Exposure

cafuego — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 04:06:40 +0000

From time to time you see photos pop up on the internet that show off bits of the northern sky. A good example is a montage of the Moon and Andromeda that show what size Andromeda would be in the sky, if only it were actuallty visible to the naked eye.

and pasted it onto (approximately) the south celestial pole on a long exposure photo I took of the southern sky over the 2016/2017 New Years weekend.

The visible part Large Magellanic Cloud in this photo is about 2.5 degrees on the short axis, so that makes it about 5 times wider than the full moon, which is about half a degree. If anything, I estimated the moon to be a little bit too big in this montage.

There are also fainter parts that I couldn't capture in this photo. On the long axis the full LMC is about 10.5 degrees across - 21 times the width of the Moon!

So, the next time you see the original montage with Andromeda do the rounds and wish you could see a large galaxy, all you need to do is go outside on a dark night and look up!

You can find my

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astronomy

Accidental Space Tourist - SocialSpaceWA

cafuego — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 23:30:49 +0000

Like many people, I love the beautiful images we receive from space telescopes and spacecraft that orbit other worlds in the solar system. Also like many other people, I expect, I never really stop to think how we get those images, just assuming they get sent to earth via some magic space internet.

However, there is no internet (magic or otherwise, yet) in space and getting the data to create these pretty images (and to do science) is rather involved.

Quite by accident I got a chance to learn a lot more about that process.

SocialSpaceWA

Whilst not working, I stumbled across a in

Why not indeed. I applied a few days before the closing date and only a week later I got the happy news I'd been selected to attend. I immediately grabbed some return tickets to Perth and then started fretting about doing this thing with 15 total strangers. Eep!

Time-lapse of land-fall over southern WA, after crossing the Great Australian Bight.

Of course, fretting was totally unwarranted. ESA had organised a bus to drive us all to New Norcia from Perth, and a bunch of delegates organised to meet up with Daniel (the ESA chef-de-mission) before heading to the bus pick-up. Of course, my fellow delegates were all space geeks too and we all got on really well (especially once Daniel started handing out ESA swag :-)

The trip to New Norcia was in a lovely airconditioned bus, which made coping with the After dinner, , who'd driven up with cars full of (rather lovely) telescopes. Sadly I missed the talk because I was volunteered to help out with the telescopes. On the up-side, that resulted in Unfortunately, that meant the morning wasn't quite as early as I'd hoped it would be. Because of the dark skies, and three hour time difference with home, I had planned to not go back to Perth for the night. Instead, I wanted to stay in New Norcia and then get up early to catch the planetary alignment in action. I ended up seeing it just fine, but it was getting a little bit too light at that stage to easily cature all planets on camera.

Because most delegates elected to stay back in Perth overnight (where the hotels have airco) they wouldn't be back before 10am, which gave me time to have a nice and relaxing early morning at the hotel, with fresh coffee.

Aaaah, the serenity.

Down to business

Once my partners in crime had arrived, we all moved to the ESA education room at the New Norcia monastery for some enlightening sessions about the ESA Tracking Network (ESTRACK) and NNO by ESA engineers.

ESTRACK

Ground Station Operations

Next, Their location can also pose problems for the power supply. The sites use a lot of power to cryo-cool the amplifiers. Fire can cut power lines, so generators are needed.

All delegates became very excited when he said that due to the cost of power in Australia, NNO was actually going solar. ESA have built a 250kW solar plant on the New Norcia site, which will pay for istelf in only 7 years and save about 400 tons of CO2 per year.

They're not yet allowed to feed power back into the grid, because the infrastructure wouldn't be able to cope. But they built the plant to produce only as much power as they need, so there isn't that much to feed back currently anyway.

The trouble with big antennas

As it turns out, the 35m NNO-1 antenna has a beam with of 60 millidegrees and to acquire a signal from a spacecraft, it has to be somewhere within that beam. I did the maths on that, and 60 millidegrees equates to a circle with a diameter of only 200m at a distance of 1000km (eg: a spacecraft on its way to orbit just clearing the horizon) Now 200m sounds like a lot, but when you realise a spacecraft is doing upwards of 5km/sec at that point, locking on to it becomes a much harder problem!

That's where the wider beam width of the 4.5m NNO-2 antenna comes in. It can see a larger part of the sky, so can pick up spacecraft that are slightly off-course a lot easier. And if the space craft is even more off-course, the 0.75m antenna has a wider beam width still.

With some smarts, once the 0.75m antenna locks on to a spacecraft, it can be used to center the 4.5m dish on it in turn. And once the 4.5m antenna is locked, its data can be used to in turn lock the 35m NNO-1 on the craft.

Putting it all together

The final presentation was by mission on its way to the L1 langrange point. That was done by boosting its orbit with several engine burns, after ach of which the crafts position needed to be known exactly in order to caculate the next burn.

LPF is trialing equipment for detecting gravitational waves in space and should have started science operations today. Fittingly, this presentation was on the morning of the LIGO announcement :-)

Tour

We had a quick lunch after the presentations and then hopped back on the bus to go see the NNO dishes. The Inmarsat Cricket Team had prepared well and gave us a tour of NNO-1, allowing us to stick our heads absolutely eveywhere.

The only spanner in the works in terms of social media was that the inside of the dish is really well shielded against radio interference, so all our phones stopped working! Luckily, the Nikon with borrowed fish-eye lens worked fine.

You can see .

Good luck on you mission, NNO-2!

Image:
Thumbs up for New Norcia!

Thank you, ESA, Inmarsat and New Norcia!

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SocialSpaceWA

deep space

space

adventure

ESA

Social! Space! Western Australia!

cafuego — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 08:37:36 +0000

A few weeks ago I noticed a observatories and
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SocialSpaceWA
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Exploring the solar system

cafuego — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 09:44:42 +0000

At last week's telescope driver training I found out that Melbourne contains a 1 to 1 billion scale model of the .

The Sun is located at St Kilda marina and the planets are spaced out along the beach and foreshore back towards the city.

Since the weather was lovely today, I thought ... why not? The guide says you can walk from the Sun to Pluto in about an hour and a half, which would make your speed approximately three times the speed of light, or

The

The walk now takes you past the millions of tiny grains of sand that make up the

The outer solar system is rather large, so it would be wise to purchase an ice cream at this point.

No longer a planet, but still included.

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C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)

cafuego — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:14:54 +0000

I trek out to a fairly dark sky site on the odd Friday evening to partake of some amateur astronomy at an observatory in the Dandenong ranges.
A few weeks ago, we decided to have a go at locating what was then a fairly dim object, C/2014 Q2. We found it with binoculars and in a relatively small (10") telescope. I'd just gotten a tripod-mounted motor drive for my DSLR, so of course we decided to have a go at imaging the comet.
I don't really have a great zoom lens (I've annotated the brightest stars and a few open clusters down the bottom of the image.

I used GIMP to process the levels and colour balance for both images, so they approximately matched (the moon was out when the first image was taken on Dec 12) and then to rotate and stretch the second image to align with the first one. It's not perfect, but it'll do I think.
In fact, there are a few multi-pixel size blotches that seem to be present in one image and not the other, as well as some that move by more than the half-pixel or so that image alignment is out by.
Some are likely artefacts and noise, but I can't help but wonder if some are asteroids. I've checked against the ten or so thousand largest and/or most visible asteroids, but none of them are anywhere near.
I suppose I should get a third image in another week or two... to be continued?
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iPhotography Widget

cafuego — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 01:42:48 +0000

A while ago, I was contacted by , which piqued my interest. When I mentioned this, they sent me one and asked me to write a blog about my experiences using it. Happily, I was about to go on a road trip past some very large holes in the ground where it would come it very handly indeed!

The (to give it its full and proper name) olloclip iPhone 5S / 5 Fisheye, Wide-angle, Macro Lens Kit comes in a fully recyclable plastic and paper package. It includes the phone adapter with lenses, an insert to make the adapter fit iPods and a fabric pouch to keep the lenses free of scratches when not in use. The pouch also doubles as a lens cloth.

First Light: Royal Park

I've been taking an image of Melbourne's CBD once a day (when I'm in the country) from the same spot in Royal Park for close to a year, so I thought I'd start by using the olloclip for the same image:

iPhone 5c standard.

iPhone 5c with olloclip wide angle lens.

iPhone 5c with the olloclip fisheye lens.

Oops, it turns out the lens kit doesn't really fit the iPhone 5c! The adapter is made for the 5s model and the rounded edge on the 5c means it doesn't slide all the way on, so the lens and the camera don't quite align. Mind you, a little bit of image editing to trim this image still results in something useable for blogs and twitter :-)

To give you an idea of the field of view of each of the lens adapters, I've stacked the three images on top of each other at the approximate same size:

Relative sizes of the fields of view of the olloclip wide anfle and fish eye lenses.

Big Things: Road Trip

The main reason I agreed to review this lens kit was to play on the road trip, which was through the south eastern USA, from Los Angeles to Austin. Happily, that included a few choice large holes in the ground subjects for wide angle photography, as well as a friend with a iPhone 5S, on which the olloclip fit just fine.

Cathedral, Sedona, AZ. iPhone 5S with olloclip fish-eye lens.

Barringer Crater, Flagstaff, AZ. iPhone 5S with olloclip fish-eye lens.

Grand Canyon South Rim, Desert View, AZ. iPhone 5c with olloclip wide angle lens.

As you can see, the olloclip fits just fine on the iPhone 5S - there is no assymmetric distortion like there was in the iPhone 5c fish-eye image.

Small Things: Macro

The wide angle lens consists of two lenses, the top one of which you can unscrew and remove to make a macro lens. I didn't really have anything to take photos of, until a house move left me with a large pile of small change to sort through.

It turns out that some old Australian coins have minting errors or oversights, which make them sought after by collectors. Specifically, the some of the 2 cent coins are missing the designer's initials (S.D.).

Here was a lovely way to try out the macro lens. It works fine as a magnifying glass, too!

Australian 2 cent piece with 'SD' initials (just left of the lizard's toe), iPhone 5c with olloclip macro lens.

Australian 2 cent piece without initials, iPhone 5c with olloclip macro lens.

Australian 1917 penny, iPhone 5c with olloclip macro lens.

Conclusion

The macro attachment has come in incredibly handy for close-up images of items to put on eBay. The fact that it doesn't quite fit the iPhone 5c has not been a hindrance, in the way it was for the fish-eye lens.

All in all, I've found the olloclip to be a nifty little attachment and nice to have handy.

Full disclosure

I am not affiliated with olloclip or MobileZap. MobileZap provided me with a free olloclip to review.
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