On saturday morning I woke up pretty early and when boiling water for tea, I saw quite a lot of stars from our south facing kitchen window. I took the chance to take some pictures of Orion, which was still high enough. At that morning I was not able to take too many picture, there was a plane crossing on two images and then clouds came up, that’s why I have more darks than lights. [Read More]

Getting the stars in focus is not that easy. Sometime you find the statement “turn the focus to infinity”. However, at least for my telescope and my camera lenses “infinity” is even behind the focus. For that, there exist so called focus masks with the Bahtinov mask being the number one found in the internet. However, instead of buying one, it is pretty easy to make a simpler focus mask on your own. [Read More]

The last days were mainly cloudy and/or foggy. So there was no chance to look at the stars in the sky. Nevertheless, there was a bit of time to look up more interesting objects and since I once was a geographer, I like maps and I started inpired by the simple star wheel I have, to create my own map. So I started to code it up in python and store it on Gitlab. [Read More]

Now that I have a telescope, I need to find something to look at in the sky. Saturn and Jupiter were pretty easy to find since they are so bright. Nevertheless, the first photos taken look ugly. I compiled a list of potentially interesting targets. Let’s see, if I can find and recognize them. Some remarks to the following text All terrestrial position related times in here are given for Mainz, Germany (50°N/8°E) if not mentioned otherwise. [Read More]

Which child, in some point of its life, did not want to take a closer look at the planets, stars, galaxies, … in the sky?! At least I did and finally, after taking some pictures of the full moon lately with a telephoto lens I remembered those wishes and bought myself a telescope. Nevertheless, I do not only want to look at the sky but also take beautiful photos, now. So I started my search for a beginner-telescope with the ability to attach my digital mirror less camera (DSLM). Although a telescope is defined by its construction and two numbers and the two numbers of the eyepiece, it took a while to understand all the relevant parameters that could be calculated from those four numbers. So here I write about my way, how I found one.

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I was wondering how to manipulate my video picture for online conferences, e.g.

• show a static picture or
• a prerecorded video
• share the screen or
• a window
• or even run filters on top of the real camera.

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In meinem Garten steht jetzt eine kleine Wetterstation, die über WLAN ihre Daten an ein Raspberry Pi schickt und hier hier veröffentlicht. Im Folgenden beschreibe ich kurz, was ich gemacht habe, damit die Daten direkt auf meinem Server landen und nicht unwissentlich auch noch an den Hersteller in China.

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To keep my publication list up to date, I use a bibtex file and python to produce markdown and pandoc to further convert it to pdf. Here I show and try to explain the python script, how I do it. The converted pdf can, with some fine tuning, be included in applications.

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Um in Corona-Homeoffice-Zeiten nicht komplett einzurosten und mal ein bisschen Abwechslung zu haben, habe ich neben den zwei üblichen Jogging-Runden (7 und 11km) am Rhein in Mainz noch weitere Strecken mit dem Rad abgefahren. Dabei kam mir, das ich doch nun alle erreichbaren Brücken über Rhein und Main abgefahren/-laufen haben müsste. Oder fehlt eine?

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My Panasonic/Lumix DMC-GX80 contains a build-in function “Post-Focus”, where the camera takes several pictures with varying focus (Example image). Lately I was a bit disappointed by the results and I looked up the internet for alternatives. On Focus Stacking Macro Photos by Pat David I found a pretty easy and description. You need your pictures with varying focus (here shown 3 out of 30 I took). Ideally take them with a tripod and remote control.

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