Our speaker this month is astrophotographer Keith Mombourquette, who will be speaking to us about how to automate your astrophotography to save yourself a lot of time and headaches under the stars.
Keith’s talk is titled: “Imaging Automation: How To Get Some Sleep While Imaging”
Are you a sleep-deprived astro-imager? Perhaps its time for you to consider automating your data collection so that you can get a good night’s sleep while your system operates to your pre-programmed instructions collecting data on the target or targets you want to capture. This can range from things as simple as determining when to autofocus and doing a focus run, to a fully automated system that will monitor the sky conditions and start or stop automatically when conditions allow. In the last 3 years, Keith has gone from sitting beside his camera and lens on a tracker to sleeping through the night while his two and often three telescopes are happily collecting photons without worrying about changing weather conditions or power failures. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced imager there are likely things that could be automated in your workflow that would make imaging easier and encourage you to take images when you might not otherwise.
Keith came to Astrophotography late in life. It started as an extension to his nature photography one night in March of 2022. On a whim, after photographing the northern lights he decided to turn his camera to the sky to see if he could capture an image of the Orion Nebula. He was delighted when he got home and stacked the 10 frames he had collected and was able to see the nebula. The next night he was out under the stars with his camera and lens mounted to a star tracker to try for a better image. From that point on, he was hooked. Keith is a Professional Engineer who loves to apply his engineering skills to many aspects of his hobbies. He has used those skills to design and construct a roll-off-roof observatory which he uses any time that the sky is clear – even if only for a few hours at a time. Keith’s images are well received by family and friends, and the local community, with whom he regularly shares them.
Following Keith’s presentation, we will have our usual intermission, followed by door prizes, and then a second guest speaker in place of our usual Sky This Month. Our second speaker is the HAA’s very own Fiza Mehfil, who will be talking to us about her team’s upcoming submission to the CANSAT project.
The CanSat Design Challenge invites teams of Canadian secondary school students to design and build a “CanSat” – a small psuedo-satellite the size of a pop can. Fiza and her teammates will be doing just that over the coming months and will be competing in Lethbridge, Alberta this April with other teams from across Canada. She will be speaking to us during the second half of our meeting to us more about her team, Aphelion 5, and what their project is all about!
The Sky This Month will still be uploaded to our YouTube channel as usual the day of the meeting so you can all watch from home. The address for our meeting is the parish hall at St. Matthews-on-the-Plains Anglican Church, 126 Plains Road East, Burlington, ON L7T 2C3. Doors will open at 7:00PM, with the meeting beginning promptly at 7:30.
