LightningPaul

Four weeks ago we visited the Astrolab IRIS in Ieper, Belgium. It's run by very enthusiastic people during their free time. Besides looking at stars, the moon and the sun, they also educate other people and give young children a change to play and learn about astronomy. One of the guys, Jeroen, gave us a very nice tour with an extended explanation. It's a pity that the station is a bit too far away for me (and also I don't have much free time left) because I used to be very interested in those things when I was a young boy.

On the image you see one of their telescopes. This one is used to look at the sun. They strongly discourage to try this yourself at home. Here you can safely do this due to the many special filters inside this telescope.
All of that was really amazing to see. Especially if you know they made lots of stuff themselves, including the silver colored dome.


TECH-INFO: despites I had my tripod in the car, I took seven shots hand held each with a stop difference. First lens corrections in DxO Optics Pro, then I merged them into a HDR file in Photoshop. Unfortunately I moved too much during capturing so there were problems aligning them. To overcome that I used only four of the seven shots. By error and trial I found a good combination.

The HDR file is tone mapped in Photomatrix Pro and afterwards I enhanced several parts (mainly the telescope itself) using a bunch of masked adjustment layers in Photoshop. Also some vignetting is added. Finally a little bit of noise is removed with Noise Ninja.