Monday, December 11, 2006

First Light: Meade DSI+Nebulosity

I'm borrowing Barry's DSI to try it out with Nebulosity and OS X, and boy, do I like it. I had tried this camera before using the Meade software, but it's Windows only, and, to me at least, it was everything that's wrong with Windows--ugly, counter-intuitive, and uncontrollable. Nebulosity, on the other hand, is a breeze to work with.

Anyway, here's the heart of M42, the Orion Nebula. This is a short, quickie job--just 10 frames X 15 sec at full gain, through the LX200 with the f/3.3 reducer.



Update: I reprocessed the capture using Drizzle, and found some more detail:

2 comments:

Species: Cheekius_Geekus said...

I'm borrowing Barry's DSI to try it out with Nebulosity and OS X, and boy, do I like it. I had tried this camera before using the Meade software, but it's Windows only, and, to me at least, it was everything that's wrong with Windows--ugly, counter-intuitive, and uncontrollable. Nebulosity, on the other hand, is a breeze to work with.

I can see we are kindred spirits.
: )

I found your page while searching for "nebulosity" "OS X" and "Philips SPC900NC". Lo and behold they are on the same page, but (alas) not the same post.

Do you happen to know if Nebulosity works with the Philips SPC900NC ? I've seen that the webcam works with Macs (at least Skype recommends it for Macs, but a lot of people seem to be asking about it too). I'm just beginning my investigation, but interested in the Philips to tie to a Mac laptop.

Thanks for the post. Amazing shots!

imjeffp said...

Thanks!

You've come to the right spot. Sadly, Nebulosity doesn't support the SPC900NC--the app is geared at DSO type things while the Philips is a planetary camera.

But don't despair. The SPC works great with the Mac. You'll need a driver. Some folks claim sucess using macam, but I've never gotten it to work. I use a beta version of the IOXperts driver. Next you need an imaging app. Prior to OS X 10.5, I was using EquinoX, but the webcam portion is sort-of broken under 10.5. I've had better results with BTV. Lastly, you need a processing app. I used Keith's Image Stacker for a long time, but switched to Registax when I got my Intel MacBook. Lately, I've been using Astro IIDC with pretty good results. (I processed all of this years' Mars shots with it.

I've been pestering Craig to write a planetary processing app to complement Nebulosity, but haven't gotten very far with him. Maybe we should gang up on him?