Cosgrove’s Cosmos Update #6
January 26, 2022
Time for another Cosgrove's Cosmos update!
Hi Folks,
I had originally meant to do an update report at the end of the year - but I was side-tracked by processing the remaining images that I had captured in 2021 and of course the holidays!
So I have finally had the time to sit down and put this summary together!
It has now been 6 months since the website went live!
Six Months ago I barely knew what I was doing - but I knew that I had to start with a name.
So I brainstormed names for the site - getting friends and family involved. While literally hundreds of names were generated and played with, I finally went with one of the first ones that were Suggested: Cosgrove's Cosmos. This was suggested by both my son Kevin and My sister Dawn. At first, I thought it was a little too corny but after reviewing many alternatives, Cosgrove's Cosmos began to grow on me!
The next step was to come up with a logo. I wanted one both for the website and one to use as the watermark on my images. I ended trying a suggestion my son Brian made - I crowdsourced it by running a design contest on DesignCrowd.com. Once I created the design brief, I had hundreds of submissions from all over the world. I took a few that were the best and worked with the designers until I was happy with the final product. Then a winner was announced and the winning design was transferred to my ownership. It was a wild and wonderful experience and I am very happy with the results.
Then I needed to register a site domain, choose a host, and set up my first web pages.
I choose to do this in Squarespace for two reasons. First - it was a very user-friendly environment for someone new to all of this. Second, bandwidth and media storage was unlimited and free with the yearly cost of the site. I knew I would be using a ton of media storage and bandwidth and this was a great deal. They also made it easy to create a domain name and to create a custom google mail account tied to that domain name.
So then I spent about a month learning Squarespace and creating my first set of pages - at that point, I went live. It took me about another month to create postings of all the images in my portfolio at that point. In the past 6 months I have expanded things considerably and have never regretted going down this path!
Thanks to all of you that have supported this site and my efforts, and helped me to make it better over time!
Website Traffic
I have been very pleased to see that over time, the visits to the website have been on a constant growth curve with spikes evident whenever a new posting hits.
Website Traffic - a global perspective.
At this point, I have had visitors from more than 80 counties!
Having said this, the bulk of the visitors to the website are coming from the United States. I have had visitors from 46 states. I believe in my last update I said the same thing! There are four states that are holdouts and seem to have no interest in stopping by for a look! Those states are North and South Dakota, Maine, and Kentucky! I have no idea why these states are generating no visitors! If you have a friend or relative living in one of those states - convince them to check out the site - that way I will stop obsessing on this gap! :-)
Website Traffic - the United States. Come on North & South Dakota, Kentucky, and Maine - we want you too!
The fast bulk of visitors come to the site directly. The other main sources of new visitors are jumps from Facebook or Twitter, and from organic searches with Google and other search engines.
In previous updates, I have talked about how I promote new posts on the site. Twitter seemed like a logical place to promote new content but at first, I had a hard time getting any traction there. I posted for a month before I got my first follower and growth was very slow thereafter. But I have begun to learn my way around Twitter and now have 863 followers. With retweets this allows me to get up to 50K or more impressions for a posted tweet. I have also found a very active astrophotography community that has been a lot of fun to engage with. Sometimes when I process an image I can’t decide how much color saturation I want in the final image. So I then prepare two options post them to Twitter and ask for opinions. This has been a great way to get feedback.
If you are not following me on Twitter, I encourage you to do so, as I am pretty active there in general.
https://twitter.com/CosgrovesCosmos
Imaging Projects Completed since the Last Update
The last update, which was update #5, was posted on November second. Usually, the clouds shut me down in November. But as many of you have seen, I had a tremendous opportunity of having clear skies and no moon from November 5th through the 8th. I took advantage of this clear weather and the long nights this time of year and captured as much data as I could with three telescope platforms running simultaneously. I ended up collecting data on 10 different targets! It took me until January 12th to process and post the results of those imaging projects.
The results of these efforts can be seen below.
There are several other things I should mention about these new postings. I decided to really expand the details I share on how I did the image processing for the images. In the Image Processing Details section, I now walk through each step and provide interim images and screen snaps to show my work. Keep in mind that I am not claiming that these details show how it SHOULD be done - rather they are just notes on what I did actually did. You may have better methods or be more skilled than I. When I was learning I wish I found more sites that shared this level of detail - so I decided to take the effort to share what I did with the hopes it might help someone learn how to do this.
I have also been adding links to the full resolution image for those pixel-peepers out there. I have also begun creating my own finder charts - using the new tool in Pixinsight called FindingCharts.
If you have any suggestions on what I could do to improve these posts, I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!
Recognition
Of course, I love the challenge of doing Astrophotography and I find that the results are their own reward. Having said that, it’s always nice if every once and a while you get some positive external feedback. Since my last status update, I have had my first image published in a major Astronomy publication, one of my Tips and Tricks posts was published on an online e-magazine, and Flickr granted one of my images "Explore" status:
• Astronomy Magazine published my image of the Rosette Nebula in their January 2022 issue! Now I can say I am published!
• Amateur Astrophotography Magazine published my article “Overcoming Barriers: Flat Calibration Frames” in their Issue #96.
https://amateurastrophotography.com/magazine
• Since the last update I have gotten "Explore" status on my image of NGC 7293 - The Helix Nebula. This is the 12th image that Flickr has so honored.
Other articles
I have a long list of articles and Tips and Tricks posts that I want to write and I have to admit that I have not made much progress on this front. The main reason for this is that I was working through the trove of data I was able to collect this past November. Doing the image processing and then creating the imaging project post does take some time.
But I am completely done with that data set and probably have 4-6 weeks before I get any further clear skies, so I expect to make some good progress on this front. Stay tuned!
Observatory Project
As I mentioned in my last update, my wife and I are currently looking to buy land that would be suitable for building an Observatory. Well - actually, we are looking for land to build a house that would also be a site for an observatory.
We have started in on that process and we are only now beginning to realize how much effort this will be.
We are now working with a realtor and so far, the only land we have seen are flat farm fields that have to be developed. My wife would like some trees on part of the property for the house, and I need another part of the property to be clear for the observatory. But this is also the quiet time of the year for real estate activity so I hope we see some more interesting parcels soon. Here is basically what we are looking for:
12-15 acres of land - part with trees, part clear
Further south of Rochester that we currently are, but not so far south that access to the greater Rochester area is too far to a comfortable drive
No towns or cities located to the south
Screened from other building and light sources
Preferably with access to town water supplies.
I think it might take a while to find the right property for our needs but the search is underway.
I am also interviewing custom builders that would build the house and at the same time the observatory. When they pour the house foundation, they can also do the observatory foundation. When they frame the house, they can frame the observatory, and so on. This should help manage observatory costs. However, building costs are another story! The housing market has gone crazy during the Covid era, and our timing for this project could not be worse! But it is what it is what it is.
I am looking to build a 15' x 15' Roll-Off-Roof Observatory - with four telescope piers, which has been inspired by this East Texas Observatory that I saw in this Cloudy Nights post:
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/764679-west-texas-observatory-wto/
This was built by Backyard Observatories. I have reached out to them as they do sell the blueprints for their plans - but their website does not offer the plans for this specific observatory for sale. I have tried to contact them several times to see if they would be willing to sell me a copy of the plan. B ut so far - no luck! Based on comments on Cloudy Nights, these guys are not quick at getting back to people since they travel around and install on-site. I did finally get an email response from them proving the link on their website for ordering plans, but they never addressed the fact that they have not offered that particular plan for sale. I will keep trying.
Update 1-26-22: I just heard back again from Scott Horstman of Backyard Observatories. He recommended purchasing the plans for the 11’6” x 11’6” observatory - which is sold on their website and simply scaling that to the 15’ size. So I have just placed an order for those plans!
I have been in contact with Yuexiao, who posted the story of that observatory and he has been very generous with his time and shared a lot of good info on the build process and what they would change about it if they were to do it again.
I think as we make more progress on the Observatory, I will add a section to the website that tracks the project. I am thinking this might be helpful to those who are considering their own such projects!
Wrapping Up
So that’s it for this update. Here’s hoping for some early spring clear skies and the chance to collect more photons!
Thanks again for your interest and support! If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me!
May your skies be clear,
Pat
