[Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Telescope-11

[Anish Mangal]

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On 10/16/2011 11:27 AM, Gary Martin wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I had another chance with the fish that got away! The sky cleared, I tweaked the monocular focus a little – still all hand held with lots of hand shake. Here's some at 10x magnification:
> 
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> 
> And some at roughly 20x magnification:
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> And some at 30x magnification:
> 
> 
> 

Hmm... looking at some attachments, the size seems to be less than
640x480. I guess you took the images at different zoom levels, but the
ones at digital zoom set to '1' should be 640x480 if taken on an xo1.

Cool pics anyway. Couple of questions:

* Do the different digital zoom levels help with:
** Firstly, finding the moon (low zoom, x1)?
** Fine tuning focus (higher zoom, x2-4)?

* At high magnifications, even a gentle push to the xo can become a
rapid blur as far as the telescope/camera is concerned. Does the timer
delay help there, or is your setup already robust enough to minimize
vibrations?

> 
> 
> 
> Wishing you clear skies,
> --Gary
> 
> P.S. Anish, on the XO-1, Telescope-11 would frequently lock up or bomb out back to Sugar after taking more than about 7-10 photos, so after loosing several sets I took the hint and got in the habit of taking only about 5 shots at a time, Stopping the activity, starting a fresh New instance and taking another 5 shots. Telescope-11 didn't seem to save photos if I only switched away from it and then back again, so fully Stopping and Start New each time seemed the safest option (though I needed to remember to reconfigure the exposure settings each e.g. setting the exposure slider to the far left minimum so the Moon image almost vanished and then clicking on the right of the slider bar 10-15 times to nudge it's value up very slightly).
> 

Re: having to change the exposure and other settings everytime you start
the activity, I agree its a defect, or rather a 'missing enhancement'
;-). Currently, the activity remembers the zoom level and timer delay
settings across restarts. Soon (newer versions) will have it remembering
camera settings as well.

Re: bombing after 5-7 pics, hmm... I need to look into that. Can you
enable GST_DEBUG to warning or error level and send the log, also if
there is some error when it bombs (other than the Gdk ... 'your program
has a bug' message) please share.

As far as saving images is concerned, everytime you click a picture, it
is saved in the 'instance' folder immediately and its patch entered into
the xml file storing activity data. So, unless there is a crash, the
image should be viewable even if you pause and resume activity in any
manner.

As always, thanks a lot for playing around with Telescope and helping it
get better :-)

Clear Skies!
- -Anish

> On 16 Oct 2011, at 05:25, Gary Martin wrote:
> 
>> Hi Alan,
>>
>> On 16 Oct 2011, at 04:09, Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have the same problem in 0.92.2
>>>
>>> Where can I get the "monocular" to the XO? (I'm from Uruguay)
>>
>> It's monocular I've ordered myself to help with testing (arrived today). A 'Brunton Echo 10-30x 21', a little expensive at £40 UK pounds, but I could do with a monocular any way and it seems quite a nice one. I also ordered an alternative monocular model that is about a 1/3 of the price, called a 'Praktica 12x 32'. It has a fixed zoom at 12x but a larger aperture (I doesn't get here until end of November for me to try).
>>
>> Any way... This was my very first random grab through the clouds of the Moon, with just the XO-1 camera and no time to adjust any of the Telescope activity settings:
>>
>> <x4 dig zoom view of moon.jpe>
>>
>> And here's some more through my window and quite hazy cloud (I live in a city centre with lots of light pollution) and the monocular set to 10x magnification. This was all done holding the monocular by hand (!!) in front of the XO camera with lots of hand shake blur (I don't have a way to securely mount it to the XO yet) and no time to try adjusting the focus, or the Telescope activity settings.
>>
>> <x4 dig zoom through monocular at x10.jpe><x4 dig zoom through monocular at x10 v2.jpe>
>> <x4 dig zoom through monocular at x10 v3.jpe><x4 dig zoom through monocular at x10 v4.jpe>
>> <x4 dig zoom through monocular at x10 v5.jpe>
>>
>> Right after I added the above images to this email, the sky went clear for a few minutes and I managed to take ~10 _much_ better shots... The Telescope activity unfortunately locked up, and I had to force quit it :-( None of the extra shots had been stored to its Journal entry. Sigh... Such is life – always there is the fish that got away! :)
>>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
> 
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