Our Colorado Springs Astronomical Society (CSASTRO) club has a monthly Imaging Group meeting. The organizer and host, Brian Clary, kicked off a series of presentations on image capture software during the April meeting with his presentation on N.I.N.A. At the end of that meeting, he asked if anyone could give a similar presentation on Sequence Generator Pro. Since that’s the software I use (and I had asked him to give the N.I.N.A. presentation!), I volunteered to present on SGP on 12 May. The meeting was at Brian’s house in Black Forest and on-line through GoToMeeting. Brian shared the link to the video recording with us, so I thought I’d share it with you…for any of you who are (really bored), er, I mean interested in learning a bit about how the capture process works.
If you’ve been following along with my blogs (and some of the capture details in the gallery), you know I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Sequence Generator Pro. If you need a reminder, take a look at the Frankenmosaic post (https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/frankenmosaic-of-the-vela-supernova-remnant/) and the “framing planning error” I refer to in December 2023’s Jellyfish Nebula post (https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/1-session-2-session-3-session-four-jellyfish/). But I do know my way around the software and love many of the features it provides…even the framing and mosaic wizard, that caused those issues! So, when Brian asked if someone would be willing to give the May meeting’s presentation on SGP, I felt like I was in a good position to do that.
I had been holding off on updating the SGP software to v4.5 until I got back from Chile. I did NOT need any “new features” or other SW upgrade issues (you know that drill…“it used to be able to do that, the command was right here, where IS it now???”) while I was under precious dark Southern Hemisphere skies! So, once I got back (and before I headed out for a work trip to Australia!), I downloaded the latest version. I built my presentation mostly somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in a time zone far, far away from our own.
Here’s the link from Brian’s email: “We had another great meeting this week discussing “Astro Imaging Capture – Part 2” with Suzanne Beers. If you missed it, here is the GOTO meeting link.
Fair warning: I’ve only watched a few minutes of the beginning of the recording, so I can’t vouch for my speech patterns (No! I will not take a shot for each “um”!!) and I know there were a few moments of technical challenges while we tried to get the slides to project both through the meeting app and on the screen for the in-person attendees. A big shout out to Will, the club’s amazing AV/IT guy, who does the best he can (with what he has to work with) to make us look and sound good!
Presentation post-script: You’ll hear that there were a number of new features and interfaces with the release of v4.5 that I wasn’t able to talk to and/or hadn’t had the chance to explore. I did have a chance to do that this weekend. Let’s just say that Friday night was a long, cold, learning experience while I tried to troubleshoot issues outside. Last night went much more smoothly, from the SGP perspective, although there was the issue of clouds that came through right after I went inside, confusing the autoguider and having me lose about two hours of imaging time. It’s that time of year again, when my favorite (obsession) target is visible starting at about 22:30MT. That post will come later, likely much later – I’m experimenting with the mono camera – so it takes 7x times longer to gather the data than it would with a one-shot color camera. Not to mention, my very nascent mono imaging processing skills… Do NOT hold your breath… …and if you want to read/learn more about SGP, their website is: https://www.sequencegeneratorpro.com/ (and no, that’s not my version of Rho Ophiuchi on their cover slide show!)