The flash came on the school bus home. It didn’t look like a life-changing event at the time but looking back it was the first unambiguous step in a teenage obsession, a career and a life centred on astronomy. 

It was early spring and I was coming up for fourteen and my friend Detlev and I were riding the school bus home as we did every weekday. My family home was out on the level fens of East Anglia and fifteen miles from school in the nearest town. The bus had to cover quite a long and winding route visiting a string of widely spaced country hamlets and farms. After a few stops the bus got clear of the town and moved out in to the open countryside and I was sitting looking out of the window, in the accustomed manner of victim’s testimony, quietly minding my own business. But almost immediately, as the view changed from concrete to hedges and fields, I had noticed a bright silvery white object shining and blinking in the clear blue sky.

The object appeared to be hovering or sometimes moving slowly back and forth just a couple of miles away – or so it seemed. I noticed that as the bus turned and meandered, this bright white object was always there in low flight over the trees and scattered houses along the bus route. And finally it struck me: it really was – there was no doubt about it – it was following us!

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A brief review

Whilst Meade’s fortunes may appear to have declined a little in recent years, the company is now on top of their financial difficulties, and the new Lightswitch technology ETX-LS is the first sign of  them roaring back to full strength.

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The greatest show on Earth!

My wife Maria and I visited Florida in May 2009 to witness the launch of the space shuttle mission STS125 – the last service mission to the Hubble space telescope. The launch was flawless and quite simply unforgettable; no amount of seeing launches in pictures or on TV prepares you for the gut-wrenching emotion of a live launch.

Don’t expect to see pictures of the launch in this segment.  We did take a couple – they are as good and as bad as every other picture that tries to capture a live launch.

We got to the space centre at 9am with the launch scheduled for 2pm. After four swelteringly hot hours sun dodging we got to within an hour of the launch and Maria started to get excited, she was unsure about what to expect. But I was calm, cool even, I knew what was coming, and reassured her accordingly. ‘We’ll barely see anything at this distance‘ I said flatly, ‘and in a few seconds the space shuttle will be so far away there’ll be nothing at all to see’. 

STS-125 the day before the launch at LC-39a

I’ve made a point of watching just about every televised launch since I was a boy so there would be no surprises for me, I thought. We found a hot but less crowded spot to watch from as the minutes ticked away. A big colour TV screen in front of us showed the countdown for the last few seconds. Sparks shot across the screen and the motors flamed in to life – just like I’d seen on television many times before. Then we looked away from the screen at a patch of blue sky just above the trees five miles away.  Slowly at first, a nose appeared above the tree line.  We gasped with everyone else. Christ! There it is!

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A personal recollection of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

By Robert Dalby

A few words of explanation. The term ‘First Light’ is a long-standing tradition among astronomers and refers to the moment a new telescope is used in action on the night sky for the first time. The term is not restricted to new telescopes exclusively, but refers more generally to a personal and self-referential use of even an old telescope – what matters is that it is the first time you have used it. 

Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. From a plaque on the leg of the Apollo 11 lunar lander.

In July 1969, when I was ten, my family was still living in the house were I was born in Ilford, Essex. My father, who had no history of interest in astronomy, had recently purchased a 3” brass library-type refractor from an antiques dealer just off Ilford Broadway. I remember the shop – it was on the other side of the road opposite my father’s business premises in Roden Street, and was more weird flotsam and junk than antiques. It had a small fly-blown front window that was so grimy you could barely see through it on a sunny day without cupping your hands on the glass. I recall vital bargains looming out of the murk including a mangy looking stuffed monkey, a photographer’s enlarger and a cigarette machine. Read the rest of this entry »

LRGB  composite image assembly: A procedure for Adobe Photoshop V4

This document was first published on my old Hundred Foot Observatory (HFO) website in 1997 and was one of a sequence of evolving LRGB methods to cover various versions of Photoshop. The procedure outlined here, with small changes, can be adapted to work on current versions of Photoshop. The links in this document use a web archive service as in some cases the host sites no longer exist.

Introduction

LRGB is the name of an colour image compositing technique, developed independently in the winter of 1996 by myself and Prof. Kunihiko Okano of Japan. The technique allows a radical improvement of the apparent resolution and signal to noise profile of the four element composite over traditional  tricolour astronomical CCD image composites. The defining step of the LRGB image is the complete replacement of the data channel responsible for just the brightness, contrast and resolution of a composite colour image with new data either from a completely separate imaging episode or with data that has been subject to processing independent of the original colour composite image.  The luminance swapping or transfusion technique today enjoys a wide field of application and great popularity in the field of astronomical CCD imaging.

From the central discontinuity of the original L and RGB data used in an LRGB composite certain opportunities become obvious. 1. Recording the LRGB image set at differing image scales with the same camera. So by binning the shots for the RGB files the overall exposure time for the image set will be greatly reduced. 2. Or a further variation, recording the LRGB image set with different specialist cameras. For example, recording the monochrome L data with a larger chip small pixel camera positioned at the f10 focus of  a 10” telescope and recording the colour data with a single-shot colour CCD camera mounted on a separate lower f ratio telescope. Doing this was actually the motivation that originally inspired me to developed the LRGB technique. I refer to composites constructed this way as ‘incommensurate’ LRGB images. 3. LRGB offers the opportunity to gain significant improvements in resolution and noise attenuation in any three part RGB data set. By simply adding the RGB data together as monochrome files, a single so called ‘synthetic’  L file, can be generated that because of its additional signal bulk and higher range pixel values can be subjected to more aggressive statistical deconvolution processing (eg Richardson Lucy) than the less weighty individual RGB files can support. The resulting synthetic LRGB will show significant gains over the straight RGB composite – even without this additional high-pass processing – smoother backgrounds and overall better signal to noise performance will be achieved in th(L=R+G+B)RGB composite.

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