M39 Region

The idea is to take a photo of a bright deep sky object and the surrounding region. The result should be an impressive starfield with something bright to give the image some punctuation. This does not always work.

In the previous image, Mirfak and Mellotte 20, the idea worked pretty well. Bright stars highlight a rich Milky Way starfield in Perseus. In this next image I processed the plan did not quite work as well. The target is the bright open cluster M39. At magnitude 4.6 I thought the cluster would appear brighter against the surrounding starfield. In this case the component stars are somewhat dimmer, thus the effect is not as dramatic.

There is still a lot of material to process from OSP, we shall see what worked and what did not.

M39 Region
M39 and surrounding region, TV-26 and Canon 60D, 10x10s + 10x60s + 10+240s @ ISO800

Postcard from the Universe – Mirfak

Mirfak is the brightest star in Perseus, punctuating a rich starfield in the northern Milky Way. The image was shot at Oregon Star Party 2013 with the TV-76 and Canon 60D…

Mirfak Starfield
The rich starfield between Mirfak (αPer) and σPer that makes up the core of the cluster Mellotte 20, TV-76 and Canon 60D, 10x10s + 10x60s + 7x240s @ISO800

Worpress 3.6 Running Slow?

So for the past few days Darker View has been really slow, ever since I updated to WordPress 3.6. Even the admin pages were slow, not just the public side. It could take 30-60 seconds to load a page, simply unacceptable. I knew it was WordPress as the part of the site that are static HTML had no issues, it was not the server… This time.

I have been poking about, trying to understand what was holding up the site, without much success. Today I turned off all the plugins, everything. Then brought them back one at a time. I expected the issue to be Jetpack, one of the more involved plugins that works on both the public and admin sides of the site.

One by one, with plugins restored, I tested page load times. Now I am at a loss to understand what was wrong… When I finished turning all of the plugins back on the site is working fine, with quick load times. Did I just need to reinitialize stuff? Turning Jetpack back on requires you to re-login to the WordPress servers.

All seems well… For now. I will have to keep an eye on things. Maybe next time just deactivate and reactivate Jetpack.