For a change the skies were relatively clear on Monday night so I took the opportunity to take the scope out and take a few images. Unfortunately I made a few mistakes during setup that resulted in woeful polar alignment giving a 5 second max exposure time before star trailing became apparent, compared to the usual 5+ minutes I’ve acheived with previous drift aligning… With fog rolling in I had little time to correct it and instead made do.

Despite using the fastest exposure time my ccd camera was capable of 0.001s, the moon was still over exposed. Really a filter will be needed to reduce the light gathered by the scope for future attempts. Still with a bit of post processing I’ve managed to isolate the overexposure to a smaller area.

• Exposure Time: 1 x 0.001s
• Date: 2007-03-27 00:42:07 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 2×0.001s averaged

The second image was taken through the first wave of fog and suffered for it, especially with it been a 1/2 moon and limited to 5 second exposure times If I’d noticed the fog coming in, I’d have packed up before the corrector plate became saturated, the dew heater didn’t stand a chance

Still, you can just about make out the spiral arms of M51 and the companion galaxy above as well as the effects of the moon and fog despite post processing attempts to clean it up I plan to reimage this pair of galaxies on a fogless night with more suitable exposure times to really bring out the detail.

• Exposure Time: 20 x 5s aligned and stacked
• Date: 2007-03-27 01:26:36 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 1×5s

Tuesday was again a clear night, but yet again fog rolled in early. Knowing the nights imaging would be short, I decided against setting up for photography and instead spend the time collimating the scope to get the mirrors aligned correctly, which after allowing 90 minutes cooldown didn’t leave all that long.

Seeing was only good enough to collimate with a 12mm eyepiece, still I felt it improved views of Saturn and the moon considerably unless it was a placebo effect, guess I’ll find out next time I the ccd camera is setup. I’m sure given a night with better seeing allowing a 6mm eyepiece to be used, I could improve on the collimating further, which I’m hoping will improve the problems I’ve been having achieving a good focus whilst imaging.

Not only are Baen Books selling DRM FREE EBooks, but they’ve gone a step further by providing the first and sometimes second book in several series for free. Not a bad idea considering if you like the first book in a series it’s likely you’ll want to read and thus purchase the rest of the books in the series.

Here’s what they have to say about this:-

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a “matter of principle.” This all started as a byproduct of an online “virtual brawl” I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was….

You can find out why on the Baen Library Intro Page as well as the complete Baen Catalog

Another interesting part of the Baen site is the “Webscription eBooks”, which for $15 gains you access to 4 books. What’s novel about this is that you get access to the 4 books 3 months prior to their official publication, not the full book mind, just the first 1/3, then a month later you get the 2nd 1/3 and finally 1 month before official publication you can download the full book. All for a single payment of $15. Of course you can continue to pay $15 per month and every month gain access to 4 new books.

The idea of getting early access to only part of the book isn’t really something of interest to me, however if you’re a big fan of some of the authors that use Baen publishing, then the prospect of getting your hands on part of the book 3 months in advance as well as the complete book 1 month in advance of its official print publication may be quite appealing.

Still, the reason I decided to do what amounts to a sales pitch for Baen Publishing, is that they’re doing something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. DRM less publishing.

Considering when you buy a book in print you get to read that book and won’t find that you’ve lost access to it one day because you’ve upgraded your coffee table or had to change the model of your reading glasses.

Yet with EBooks, we’re expected to accept that if the maker of the software used to read the encrypted, DRM ridden books, stops been made or isn’t available for a future PDA we may buy or perhaps new OS (vista?), we would lose access to all our library of books.

With DRM less EBooks, this isn’t an issue. Buy once, archive it in a few format such as mobipocket reader, txt and html and you’re pretty much safe to assume it’s going to work or at least be importable into a wide range of ebook readers in the future. Even if it means converting the EBook into a proprietary format to get it onto your PDA of choice. The fact that you have a clean archived version of the book (html/txt etc) means you can continue to convert the book and never lose access to it. No need to worry about replacing broken PDA’s with new models, or perhaps if Sonys EBook hardware ever takes off, moving your library over to a new device.

Not only is the lack of DRM a big big plus, but the prices on the print and ebooks are reasonable too.

I’m sure it’s going to take time before EBooks take off en-mass, assuming they ever do. But I personally will never purchase an EBook that contains DRM, so I can honestly say I hope Baen books are around for a long while, I imagine I’ll be visiting their site a lot more in the coming years.

If only other ebook publishers would follow suit, it wouldn’t kill them to drop the DRM and it’d be nice to see EBooks cost less than their printed counterparts (I doubt the cost savings are been passed on to the authors! Maybe I’m just jaded)

Baen Publishing is doing DRM less ebooks, music.podshow.com is doing DRM less indie music and Stardock are making copy protection free games (well they use serials, but it’s at least a non-Draconian form of protection) All three are placing their trust in the consumer rather than assuming everyone is a criminal and really deserve as much success as they can get.