North America Nebula (NGC7000)
After M31, and before the clouds started rolling in, I pointed my camera at the North America Nebula NGC7000 right beside Deneb (the bright star low/right).
A single 10 minute exposure at iso400, 70-200/4L lens set to 200mm and F5.6.
Andromeda galaxy (M31)
A stack of four 10 minute exposures at iso400 through a 200 mm F5.6 lens. I really need to get a handle on processing these RAW frames for best results...
Autoguiding now seems to work quite well, here's a comparison between 10 min frames with guiding on/off:
More exposure is better, this one has about 40 min in total, previous attempts had only about 12 min and 8 min.
A second GPS test
A secodn GPS test, this time with the 405cx on my left wrist and the N95 in my right hand. I had hoped this would expose the N95 antenna and improve its performance. Not so. The red trace (405cx) still looks much better while the yellow one (N95) jumps wiggles and snakes around. The summaries are:
N95: 8.30km in 53 min 13 s, 727 kCal
405cx: 7.92 km in 53 min 31 s, 627 kCal
If you zoom in, the N95 has me walking on water. To be fair the 405cx also looks a bit lost at the beginning of the run (far right), but it does get the street-crossing spot on (middle-right in the pic).
Then for a straight bit along 'Nokia avenue':
That's not pretty. I guess you could argue that on the way out (top) the street has tall houses on both sides, so the N95 (yellow) has a hard time finding satellites, while on the way home (bottom) it's more open and both GPSs perform roughly the same.
Here's part of the route in more open terrain. That seems to confirm that the N95 needs wide open spaces to do well.
For the record, my N95 8GB runs V 15.0.015 firmware (which I've several times unsuccessfully tried to update with Nokia PC-Suite 🙁 ) and I'm using Nokia Sports Tracker v2.06 (S60 3.1). Today I had GPS-filtering turned off in sports tracker.
Somewhat surprising results! I would have thought GPS-positioning is a plain-vanilla technology by now and every company does it with equivalent hardware and software. Apparently not, or the N95 antenna is really inefficient, or I'm doing something wrong...
N95 vs. 405cx GPS test
GPS-running is so fun I decided it's time for a new toy: A Garmin 405 cx ! Out on a walk we go, comparing the N95 running sports-tracker with the 405cx.
Here's a test where I wore the 405cx (red trace) on my wrist and the N95 (yellow trace) with sports-tracker running in my pocket. I didn't turn them both on exactly at the same time, but there does seem to be a difference in the distance and kCal values. In addition to the time/distance data the 405cx also uses heart-rate data for computing calories.
N95: 6.58 km, 1h 4 min, 576 kCal
405cx: 6.32 km, 1h 7min, 324 kCal
The N95 GPS data is much more wiggly, as seen in this picture of a long straight bit of the walk:
That probably also explains the extra distance on the N95, since the wiggles never go away:
Although the GPS-Filtering was set to "High" on the N95, it shows strange jumps along the shore-line where the satellite visibility to the South should be OK.
Here it looks like the N95 position (yellow) fix is first a lot to the east, and then significantly south of the bridge I actually crossed. Then for some reason the 405cx (red) and the N95 agree again. I think the 405cx samples position at 4 s intervals, so some cutting of corners is understandable.
This test wasn't entirely fair since the 405cx was on my wrist while the N95 was in my pocket. I need to re-do this test with the N95 and its antenna held at a similar height/visibility compared to the 405cx.
Garmin is doing a lot of things right with the 405cx: No extra GPS-pod like with the Polar products, a set of nice youtube-videos practically replace the manual, charging through the USB-port(why doesn't the N95 have this?), to name a few.
Links - September 10, 2009
- Forget Apple, Here’s the Real Snow Leopard -
- Every TED Talk Under the Sun -
- Chrome 4.0 Vs. Opera 10 Vs. Firefox 3.5 - "unscientific, but thorough"
- Star Trails on a Fixed Tripod -
- SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Extreme Observatories -
- Picking a Good DSLR for Astrophotography - me wants LiveView real bad...
- 35 Most Creative 404 Pages Around -
- Nokia Fears Carriers May Try To Undermine N900 -
- Vector graphic schematic symbols -
- Open source 'Frankencamera' is fully programmable! -
- 7D Hands On Video -
- Open Source Camera For Computational Photography -
- Suspicion -
- 09/02/09 PHD comic: 'Quid Prof Quo' -
- Garmin’s New Tiny In-Bike GPS -
Turku IOM Ranking
Thanks to Jussi Jaakkola for these images from Saturday's event. It's always nice to sail with the Nr 2 rig, we only get to do that once or twice per season usually.
Fireworks
The annual fireworks competition in Helsinki was fired off Hernesaari this year. Two sudden rain showers interrupted the show, and security had placed the fence quite a long way away from the fire and explosions - otherwise the event was nice. Taking pictures of fireworks is fairly easy with the right equipment, these are shot with a 40mm lens stopped down to F10 and exposing by hand via cable-release in bulb-mode for whatever seemed to be a suitable time/display. Bring a tripod.
Links - September 3, 2009
- 7D Previews -
- You’re Doing It Wrong: Boat Launch Edition [LOLCars] -
- Canon EOS 7D Preview -
- OS Performance — Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10 -
- Just posted: Hands-on preview of the Canon EOS 7D -
- Canon unveils EOS 7D high-end digital SLR -
- Canon EOS 7D video specs get detailed -
- EOS 7D Press Release -
- Selling science to the masses. -
- Pictures: Canon 7D All But Official -
- 8-Bit Trip: 1500 Hours of Lego Stop-Motion in Four Awesome Minutes -
- Optical manipulation for single-cell studies -
- Beginner’s Guide to DSLR Astrophotography -
- Medial axis of a planar region by offset self-intersections -
- Canon EOS 7D pics and specs leak out -
- 7D & 100 Macro Pictures -
- 7D & Lens Pictures [CR3] -
- A STED microscope aligned by design -
- 11 Inspirational Image Collections -
Fly Eddie Fly
Alas, neither The Eagle nor anyone else was training at the Herttoniemi ski-jump when we paid a visit.
12.57 km in 1 h 20 min, avg. pace 9.4 km/h
Now go listen to some music.