I’ve finally decided to end my Windows hosted server and revert back to good old Unix. This means that the Astronomy section of my webby which was all coded for ASP will no longer run. It’s going to take a few weeks to untangle all the text from the Access database and republish all the images back into individual HTML pages.

The new Observatory, the DBO 2.1 as it is now called, is now up and running again and I’m hoping the weather will play ball this Bank Holiday weekend so I can get back to my deep sky observations and a little photography as well.

While Deep Sky imaging is satisfying if you can get a long enough of a clear spell, I want to get to grips with objects that are a lot closer and brighter – namely  The Moon and the large Gas Giants. I’ve ordered a new DMK 21AU618.AS Mono USB Camera from Ian King Imaging.

I should get my hands on this within the next couple of weeks, so in the meantime I plan to play around with a Nikon D5100 and its HD video mode to accomplish the same thing and see what I can come up with. I’m trying to figure out how to convert the D5100 video file output with one that can be read within Registax, so for the moment, all I have done so far is to extract the best single file from a 30 second video sequence, and process that. As an aside, I didn’t realise CS5 could manipulate a video file in much the same way as a still image. Anyway, here’s the first image from a few days ago.