M32 & M42, up to two hours stacked

So here is the same shot as in the previous post, with another hour added to the stack. Since it needs to be stretched less to achieve similar brightness, there is less "stress" visible in the image; the background is beginning to become an even black, etc. I expect this to take a total of 5 hours in the final stack to really work well, but I want to post the individual steps along the way. It takes 3-4 hours of shooting get 1 hour's worth of usable subs.

While most photographers would try and get a ten minute exposure to bring out the lower half of the nebula (which is FAR fainter than the upper half, I have found that my method of dealing with light pollution (which essentially limits my exposures to 30 seconds) is turning out to be a way to show bright nebula with the dynamic range adjusted. A normal photograph that brought out this much of the lower "jaw" of the fish's mouth would have the area at the top around the Trapezium totally blown out. One I complete this photo after another 3 nights of shooting, I should be able to not only capture the fainter regions, but still show detail in the very bright regions, and probably still resolve the Trapezium in the center of the brightest areas. The downside is that it does take many nights, and many hundreds of individual photographs, aligned of several nights of work. I've started calling the process "speckle stacking", since it really is a weird variation on the "speckle imaging" used by modern giant telescopes, but with exposure in the seconds, not milliseconds. It's a very low-tech way to take advantage of the pro's high-tech method.

I have an idea what may be causing the banding on the left and right images-I'll know after my next photo shoot if I am right.

And finally, full circle

When I decided to get serious about learning to shoot astro, if was February of this year, and Orion was still reachable in the early evening. So here is a good comparison between then and now-this shot is 55 minutes exposure, no multi-night shooting, just using what I have learned over the year. M42 is the perfect nebula to start learning with, but the level of detail in there just keeps going forever; there is no risk of getting bored with it.

I still have all the problems I started with, just in lesser degrees...vignetting is still a serious problem, and even the use of a good light box won't eliminate it. I'm still only able to use roughly half the subs I shoot, and I'm still spending more time tinkering than shooting. This shot from tonight is just going to be a foundation for more exposures; that will take care of the darkened corners and the trademark Canon DSLR banding visible up the left side, while each night's shots will bring out more and more detail inside the "fish's mouth".

It's still been a good year for learning-here's a reminder of what I was getting 10 months ago of the same target.

Running Man Nebula

This nebula lies just above the Great Orion Nebula, which means that I'm actually getting around to regions I was trying to shoot when I started this thing 10 months ago. When you look at Orion's sword, the Great Nebula is the middle clump of stars, while this is the top clump. It's been given three catalog numbers, since there are actually three separate areas of glowing gas that just overlap from our point of view. So say hello to NGc 1973, NGC 1975, and NGC 1977. Most people just refer to it as the Running Man.

Please forgive the satellites...that's the price we pay for cable TV and global telephone service-the geosynchronous orbits of most comm satellites carries them right smack through Orion's belt. Actually, each satellite seen in this area is stationary over our heads; the appearance of motion is caused by the telescope moving to track the stuff in the background. The software used to stack photos usually discards satellite tracks as noise, unless they are very bright, which is what happened here. Only 5 minutes exposure, so I couldn't toss the subs with streaks in them.

M38

M38 is an open cluster in Auriga, a constellation you have probably never heard of. If you find the Pleieades (an easy task) with binoculars, then start looking around a few fields of view north, you will find this and nearby M36 without much effort.

Like most open clusters, photographs don't quite capture the beauty like the view through a small scope or binoculars does. This cluster is famous for its odd shape, which is not that evident in this photo, and is completely impossible to notice with larger scopes. With a low-power eyepiece in my own scope, it is breathtaking, though.

Weather

No posts today-by the time I finished last night, it was 37 degrees and 98% humidity. My gear is still not dry, and I can't feel my fingers a day later. And yet the daytime weather was beautiful...California does this in the gaps between summer and winter. The clouds from the upcoming storms are also starting to appear, so the scope is going back in the newly-completed Telescope Shed; my custom-built 16'x16' centerpiece of the newly christened Observatorio Astronómico de El Rancho Titanico, ready for hosting Star Parties, Bar & Bat Mitzvahs, weddings and circumcisions. All with an Astronomy theme, of course.

NGC2024, the Flame Nebula

Orion is coming back...this is the Flame Nebula, next to the left-most star in Orion's belt.

Very early stack here, only 20 minutes, and this is a fairly faint nebula. But the real news is that the stack is made of 10 two-minute exposures; a serious victory in my year-long battle with cheap equipment.

I had expected that when and if I could start shooting longer subs, everything would be a piece of cake, but after shooting just a few items, it's not so clear now. My traditional method of stacking hundreds of short exposures may not be they way you'd want to do it with good equipment and a dark sky, but it does allow me to vastly improve the results with cheap stuff and loads of light pollution. And since the key to making it work is having scores, if not hundreds of individual exposures, the longer subs actually can be a disadvantage when shooting relatively bright objects. In particular, stacking huge numbers of subs allows the removal of more of the pollution. This shot is very grainy and noisy, but that just takes more exposure time to fix. What appears to be a blown-out background or a gradient problem in the upper left is actually caused by more nebulosity. Like I said, this shot is from an early stage in the process.

I keep a nice thermometer and hygrometer with me when I'm shooting. When this was done, it had fallen to 36 degrees, which is normally good for telescoping. But the humidity was 97%, which stinks. that is why the bright star-Alnitak, or Zeta Orionis-is so overblown and large. Still, makes for a pretty star.

In the next few days (while it's raining and cloudy, of course) I will be replacing even more of the mount, so in a week or so I could be back with more pictures. And with the return of Orion, I can start re-shooting things I did when I was just starting out, and will finally have some comparisons.

M30, without the moon right next to it...

A darker night, another 30 minutes of exposure. As is always the case here, as soon as I get one thing working another goes wonky; something is causing my flat frames to be heavily asymmetrical, causing the uneven gradient in the background. It'll get figured out eventually. This shot really seemed to suffer in being converted to jpeg as well.

I still say this little jewel is one of the nicest surprises in the sky this time of year...the three rows of giant red stars seem even more pronounced visually than in photographs.

M30

M30 has long been a favorite of mine. In a small scope or even good binoculars, it's a fairly tight globular cluster with two rows of bright red jewels. It can be a bit hard to find, since it's in one of those fairly rare "blank" spots in the sky, where we have an almost unobstructed view out of our own galaxy.

Since getting the replacement parts last week, after that first night it has done nothing but rain and drizzle. I tried to get this last night during a break in the cloud cover, and got all of 2 minutes exposure before the fog settled in. Assuming that one day there might be some good visibility, I can't wait to shoot some real time of this object. Given that I shot 60 dark and 60 flat reference frames, I am not sure where the background gradient came from here; it's possible that there was just too little data to work with in 4 thirty second subs.

M45 The Pleiades

This deserves a much longer exposure, but the moon was only about 20 degrees away...in a couple of weeks it will be in prime position for me to shoot it properly.

The Pleiades have to be the best known star cluster.What makes it so much more interesting to photograph than most open clusters is the large about of blue reflection nebula around it. In this short exposure, there is just a hint around a couple of stars. The nebulosity is actually just a bit dimmer than the moonlight itself, so there isn't a way to bring it out any more in these conditions. If it hadn't been for the dearth of pics the last two months, I may not have bothered posting it-but Tuesday night way like this; since I could shoot something in 30 minutes for the first time ever, that's exactly what I did. When the moon is this close to the target, no amount of baffling and flat frames can make the field even and richly black.

By the way, next time you see a Subaru, look at the badge on the hood. Look familiar? "Subaru" is the Japanese name for the Pleiades; the car company is named after it.

M2

M2 is a few degrees south of M15, a little smaller, and a tiny bit dimmer. It's still very easy to find in binoculars.

Just to the south of M2 are several more globulars-I may be able to catch them in a few days right after dusk and before they dip below the horizon.

This shot is 10 minutes at ISO 3200. The exposure for the last two pictures is not needed in order to get the clusters to show brightly; unlike remote galaxies, these are part of the Milky Way and are much brighter. Instead, I use the exposure time to kill light pollution and moonlight.

At first glance, the last two pics look like there may have been a focus problem. Actually, the focus is essentially perfect. Last night was very clear, but the seeing was awful. Because of wind and turbulence in the air, stars with twinkling madly. Twinkling is actually the effect we see when the image of a star appears to shift around a lot; under magnification, it's much easier to see that the brightness stays the same, but the apparent position moves around. In a longer exposure, that makes stars look blobbish. Even Jupiter was twinkling; it takes some pretty bad air to make planets do that.

M15

I have a lot of favorite globular clusters-and this is one of them, M15 in Pegasus. The moon was so near and so bright that I couldn't even find Pegasus visually-not one single star. After a bit of hunt and peck, I nailed it down, and here is the result. 15 minutes at ISO 3200.

Our neighborhood lost a wonderful but sick 60' eucalyptus last week; because of that, I can shoot in the part of the sky that is actually darkest here. After missing the last two months, I'm feeling pressure to get those early Fall objects while there is a chance. Fortunately, that area is very rich in clusters and galaxies, which don't always take days of effort to capture. Here is the first of them, the Pegasus cluster. This is an easy binocular find when the moon is not nearby.

Last month we also got a new monitor, and it is not calibrated in any sense; it is altogether possible that these next few photos will need to be redone once I get the screen adjusted properly.

Back in the saddle again

Once I got through the weather delays last month, it went from bad to worse...several components that were being used far harder than the original designers intended finally gave out. That included the RA worm gear and the handset controller.

Today I managed to get a hold of a nearly complete EQ-6 mount, probably ten years old, but never sold. Many parts missing, but none that I don't have...and since this is the upmarket version of the mount I have, I was able to replace the entire RA worm gear block. I still have some handset issues (it will no longer power the declination motor, for instance) but that's nothing I can't work around.

Tonight I was able to enjoy the luxury-for the first time-of picking multiple targets, and even with the full moon I got some nice subs-once I finish the stacking and processing, there should be a lot of action here. Finally!

For starters, look for a couple of globular clusters in the next day. The tracking is VASTLY improved, and nothing shows tracking problems like globular clusters, so of course that's what I had to start with...

three weeks...

It's not neglect...for three weeks, I have been greeted by a foggy wet marine layer every single night. Across town-no problem. Here at El Observatorio Titanico del Rancho Conejo, no sky. Once I get a clear night; you can bet you'll hear about it here.

Night of the Triffids

This will probably be the last of M20 for me this season, since there are so many other objects I want to shoot. SO my final stack for this image was 260 frames of 30 seconds at ISO 3200, plus over 900 individual reference frames. Another 1500 or so 30 second subs were rejected, for a total of roughly 15 hours of exposure times. That is the secret to doing more with less equipment-add time, persistence, and some OCD.

Compared to the shot posted a couple of days ago, this is far smoother, more detailed, and shows a lot more depth-to me, it's starting to look like a place, not just an object. There are features in the dark clouds that I never actually have seen before, even in the better known professional images. It gives the impression that if I continued adding to the stack, the dusty clouds and globules would just keep appearing around the edges. In reality, the dust clouds DO extend on and on, but without bright stars in or near them, we can only see them in the infrared or infer their presence by the thinning of the background stars. The Spitzer IR images of the area show just how much there is in the area. For all practical purposes, this is about all that can be grabbed with an 8" scope in such light-polluted skies, and it did take a fairly silly amount of time to make. Better equipment would give tighter star images. Better resolution would be possible, but the only practical way to get much more of that is with more aperture. Still, I'm pretty happy with it.

Click the pic for a 1500 pixel view.

Galaxy Zoo-Hubble

Want to be an astronomer, but don't have a telescope or any of the other fancy kit they usually have?

Worry no more-because we are living in a world where data is being gathered at a far greater rate than it can be studied and turned into information. There are many ways that scientists are trying to cope with this, the best known being the BOINC projects that distribute problems involving massive amounts of data around a cloud of regular people's computers. Some problems, however, are not well suited for computers, and that especially includes pattern recognition.

That is where YOU come in. Our brains are far better at spotting subtle patterns than computers are. As more and more photographic data of the universe has piled up, the public has been enlisted to help classify each object being photographed. The best known of those projects has been Galaxy Zoo. Rather than enlist your unused CPU cycles, this project enlists your spare time and brain power. Very cool stuff.

The Hubble Space Telescope has done so much more than the Heritage images most people are familiar with, and it has produced an utterly unimaginable amount of data. Now there is a Zoo project to try and cope with that-the Galaxy Zoo-Hubble project.

If waste even a few minutes a day playing Solitaire, consider taking a look at this-it's a far more interesting way to kill time, plus you'll be doing SCIENCE!

back to M20

Not much time for shooting lately, which is unfortunate-the seeing has been great. Lots of time poured into efforts to improve my tracking quality, and not much to show for that either. Oh well; so it takes a long time to get the pics I want.

This is the stack I started a few days back, but with another half hour added. The nebula looks more or less as bright, but the stars are starting to look far more natural, and the fainter wispy cloudiness at the fringes is starting to come through. With a "short" stack, when the faint stuff is amplified the stars all become bloated white blobs. The more light I add to the stack, the less it needs to be stretched, and the more natural the appearance is overall. I should be able to add another couple of hours to this before it has passed from the summer sky. As I add more subs, I can remove some of the first ones I shot with the potato-shaped stars also.

The Lagoon Nebula, M8, is just about two frames below M20; they are often photographed together, but I can't get any wide angle shots with my setup.

M8, six nights, four hours...

So here we have the results of six nights worth of shooting, sorting, stacking, etc. As I have mentioned before, DSLRs aren't terribly good at picking up the deep reds associated with emission nebulae, in part because those wavelengths aren't very easily visible to our eyes. But use enough exposure time and it starts to become apparent.this is a stack of over 400 30 second exposures, plus the hundreds of reference frames that were shot along with it (to make no mention of the nearly 1000 shots taken that were unusable due to periodic wobble.)

I've put a lot of time into this one, but hey; once you have a really good polar alignment, you hate to move the equipment, you know? Plus, M8 is our summer Orion. As many great things as there are in the summer sky, M8 is the only object that can compete with the Great Orion Nebula for spectacle.

Tonight looks like clouds, but once it's clear I'll be shooting the new supernova in M101. That was also one of the first galaxies I photographed this year, so I am looking forward to seeing if there is any obvious improvement in my skills...

Oh, and to make sure that Google feels the pain, this has been uploaded at 2000 pixels-be sure to click on the pic to see the large version!

Google Ads

Good News! Those of you that objected to the ads will hove nothing more to fear from this site!

Evidently, my previous post about the ads was considered a Violation of something or other by Google, and they have terminated my AdSense account, and caused me to forfeit the $102 that I had in pending earnings. I guess it's okay for Google to track everything about our lives so they can direct ads to us, but it's not okay to actually MENTION those ads, nevermind try and DEFEND them. Thanks a lot, Google.

And, after much careful reading of the Terms of Service, I am confident that there is nothing there that prohibited any part of the post I made about the ads. I did file an appeal, which I lost. Google also declined to say why the appeal was denied. Oh well.

I would not be surprised now if Google terminates this blog for failing to shower them with praise as well.

Here is one exposure taken last night of M8.

Take 1000 of these over 4 different nights, discard 800 because of periodic errors in the drive, stack the remaining 200, process out all that brown light pollution, and...

WALLA! You have yourself a picture. 

This is a nearly full frame, and it shows one of the features of a reflector telescope. The further from the center of the image, the more the stares are flared on an axis coming from the center.  For centuries, telescopes have been a collection of compromises; one has to choose which set of drawbacks one is willing to accept to get the features they want. Newtonian reflectors have a lot of coma (that flaring effect) but can gather more photons per dollar than any other design.

M17, more light

Same shots as previously seen, but with another 30 minutes added. In this case, I am using the additional exposure to draw out more detail, rather than expand the amount of cloudy nebulosity. Since stacking large numbers of short exposures allows the signal to noise ratio to be improved, adding exposures lets me enhance the contrast without the grainy noise increasing.

This sort of nebula is a challenge for DSLR users; nearly all the activity is in the infrared, like any red/lavender emission nebula. There are several dark and dusty dark nebulae in the mix, but it takes a great amount of exposure time in visible wavelengths to get the bright stuff behind evident enough to outline the dark clouds.

M17 is often seen in photos to be much brighter and redder. Just another example of how many popular astrophotos have "cheated" the image slightly by using crimson red to represent hydrogen alpha wavelengths, even though those are not really visible with our eye. Of course, that is all good; there is no rule that photos cannot help us see what we otherwise would miss, and even the "natural color" pictures I try and produce are a "cheat". Our eyes would never see anything this faint, at least not in color.

Sorry about the ads...

Well, not all that sorry...just one wafer-thin ad up in the corner. And if you click on it, I get paid.

Do not be afraid to click the ads; I need that new mount to be paid for somehow...

Oh, to the person who complained-I would be happy for you to step up and replace the (extremely) limited revenue yourself, at which time I should happily remove the ads-then we ALL win!

Folks, I am NOT making money at this. At my current levels, that new mount will be covered by Google Ad revenue in less than 30 years. I hope everyone understands.

More new pulsars

In July, the Einstein@Home project discovered two more radio pulsars using the Arecibo data. With their first discovery occuring on August 10, 2010, that means six in the first year-impressive, since they are looking for something around 10 miles across, located many light-years away.

Their site is http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/, and you should check into it-by using unused processor time on personal computers, and currently around 60,000 volunteers are providing nearly 300 terraflops of computing power, making the E@H "machine" one of the fastest computers in the world.

In addition to the pulsar searches, they are also monitoring an array of gravity wave detectors. Since pulsars are one of the few things that theorists say should produce gravity waves, the pulsar search is logical. The confirmation of Einstein's predictions about gravity waves would be a massively important discovery, at least to physicists-it may not affect our lives any time soon, but who know-eventually they could be used to find your keys or help you remember what you just walked into the kitchen for...

back to M20

Once the moon passes through the prime part of my sky, I can start shooting a few more subs...Here is another 30 minutes of exposure added to the previous picture of M20 below. Still a bit grainy, but notice how detail is starting to come out, especially the fainter nebulosity around the bright stuff.

In my never ending battle with equipment, I'm currently facing problems with wear in the reduction gears of the R.A. drive motor, and can only use 15-20% of the shots I shoot. That means this 30 minutes of exposure took nearly four hours to shoot. If there is any advantage to this, it's that when and if I get myself into a premium mount and drive, I will know enough to be able to take full advantage of it. In the meantime, I am just waiting for the inspired idea to hit me that will eliminate the current problem.

At least the color problems appear to be somewhat banished; there is no color correction or balancing in this shot at all-just stack the subs, stretch the dynamic range (surprisingly little) and increase color saturation; what you see is what the camera saw. Compare this to the last picture I took with the 300D.

Because it is so easy for me to only see what is still not up to standard, I thought I would include the first picture I ever took of the Triffid Nebula, before I started all the rebuilding of my rig.  This is AFTER stacking all the shots I was able to get, and after applying all the PhotoShop tricks I have learned...the original pics were even worse.

What surprises me is that these are all done with the same telescope. So many advertisements make is seem that if you spend 3 or 4 grand on their spiffiest stuff, you'll be shooting pictures like this-if nothing else, this year has shown me just how hard astrophotography is. Of course, truly good equipment costs many times that much, but those manufacturers are not trying to sell to unknowing magazine readers, and they make no claims that anyone can just do it by pushing a button.

(Don't forget that ALL of these pictures are clickable for a larger version)

M17, the Call-It-Anything-You-Want Nebula

M17 is usually called the Omega Nebula, except by people who call it the Swan Nebula. Or the Horseshoe Nebula. Or the Lobster Nebula, or the Checkmark Nebula. The names reflect a tendency our eye has to add pattern where we want to see it, even if there isn't any there. Early sketches of this object can look like any of the above names, and almost never look much like photos. Herschel gave it the name Omega in the early 19th century, so that is most commonly used now. I think Charles Messier came up with the best name for it-17.

Starting from M8 and scanning north with binoculars, this will be the third or fourth obvious patch of cloudy brightness you would find, depending on the size of your binoculars. It lies north of the Triffid, and just below the Eagle Nebula. There is a bright open cluster of a few dozen very young and hot stars in the center, which in turn are heating up the hydrogen gas in the area, which in turn emits the reddish light. The blueish bits are dust, which just reflects the natural starlight.

The main section of the nebula is roughly 15 light years across, and has a total mass of about 800 times as much as our sun. That sounds heavy, but that is still spread over a huge area...except in the very densest knots of gas and dust, that is still close to being a total vacuum.

Toward the right of the picture is another emission region; in this part of the sky, as you increase the size of the telescope and the length of the exposure, more and more stuff keeps appearing. If you are able to see the Milky Way from your location, this is all spread along the very bright patch around and above the Teapot. I keep saying it, but this is the perfect time of year to just point some cheap binoculars that direction-the night sky is anything but just a bunch of blackness, and you don't need a scope to enjoy it.

Po-ta-toes, Precious

Okay, excuses, but not apologies. I am leaving at 6 in the morning for Orange County, the Fun and Excitement Capitol of Southern California, and I wanted to get one last picture posted before leaving. So the stars are all shaped like taters; who cares about a little tracking error when you're in a hurry. At least it shows how much effort is required when I take pictures with ROUND stars.

This is M16, the Eagle Nebula-squint your eyes hard enough, and you might see an eagle's wings in flight, in a sort of "highly stylized, like a coin designer" manner. Or you might see the same shape as Eagle Rock near Los Angeles, which also requires that you lower your expectation of eagleness somewhat. So what-it's a very cool nebula, because it is the source of what is likely the most famous Hubble photos ever taken; ones that pretty much everyone is familiar with; the ones called the "Pillars of Creation".

Yeah, I know; this image is not nearly as inspiring. Hey, I did this in just a couple of hours, without ANY TAX DOLLARS at all. Let's see the Hubble boys make the same claim.

Next week I expect to shoot some better quality pics of this and nearby M17 as well. Stay tuned...

A better M8

This is a bit closer to the natural color balance as seen right in the camera. It is made from roughly 70 minutes of exposure, culled from over 5 hours shot over the last two nights. The full size master is really showing a lot of dimension that is not visible at the 1200px size here (click on image to enlarge it) but I can't post 12 megabyte pictures too often...so we'll live with this. It's not bad, at least in my own biased view.

By the way, this is not cropped-this is the full frame of the 40D, nearly 1.5 degrees across. That is nearly three times the size of a full moon. I know I go on and on and on about those binoculars, but really; try it.

SN2011dh

Never mind the grainy picture-loads of lights, including the chihuahua beacon aimed as ever at my scope. This picture is meant to show the relative brightness of our old friend supernova 2011dh. In this post, it was clearly brighter that nearby mag. 13.85 USNO J1330149+471027 (to the left of the supernova; it is a faint star of unknown distance within our own galaxy), and it held that brightness for a few weeks. That plateau of brightness is what defines this as a Type IIp supernova-p for plateau-nothing too fancy there. Now, it is declining, and is probably no more than mag. 14.5 or so. Within 6-12 months, it should be well below the reach of a scope the size of mine.

More improvements in processing...

This is the same image from the two recent posts. Every time I get to where I think I'm nailing a certain step, I learn some more...one teeny tine little check box suddenly cured some real trouble I've been having with color. This image was simply stretched for dynamic range, then the saturation increased. That's it.

Now, I am EXTREMELY anxious to get M31 into a dark sky and collect some serious photonage.

I have also realized that when sets shot on different nights are combined, DSS is averaging the reference frames for each, rather than applying each night's reference to that night's subs. That is why there is such an uneven background in the latest shot. Once I find those settings, this shot could end up improving even more.

Triffid redux

I think I am making some real progress here. This is one of my old favorites, the home of the Triffids...known to less geeky people as Messier Object number 20. If this fails to impress, look back a few posts...it was one of the last things my trusty 300D ever photographed, and is now one of the first for the 40D. This one looks a little more like the pictures the Big Boys take. There simply is no comparison. It's not all down to the new camera; I am still learning the ways of Digital Sky Stacker as well.

I am sure I have mentioned it before; one of the lovely things about this nebula is the presence of all three types of gaseous nebula-the red areas are dust and gas that have been heated by new stars within, enough so that the gas is now emitting light of its own. The bluish areas are reflection nebulae-they are not themselves producing any light, just reflecting that from local stars. The dark lanes are dense clouds of dust, and oddly enough often house the brightest and hottest stars of all-just hidden from us in visual wavelengths.

Astrophotography Expedition to Utah

A couple of weeks ago, I was working in Mesquite, Arizona, so we hauled my scope out for some dark skies and high elevation in southern Utah. Of course, it was a full moon, and the scope was never taken from the case. This is a 30 second exposure, with the camera resting on the hood of my truck. At midnight.

This photo shows two things-one, moonlight is just sunlight-leave the shutter open a bit, and you can't tell it from daylight, except that if you look hard, you will see that the sky has stars in it. Two, it shows just how hard it can be to get good images of deep sky objects when there are other sources of light around.

M31, another hour

New camera or not, there is a hard limit on what can be captured in a bright sky. This time of year, M31 is still to the northeast in the sky, and that region is full of city lights here. This shot adds about an hour to the previous one-note that noise is greatly reduced, but nothing fainter is showing up. To really capture this, I'll need to wait another month or two for it to be in a darker region of my local sky. This is still only the central region; the disk extends well past the cluster at the bottom of the picture.

As it is, just to differentiate just part of the galactic disk from the background sky, I had to stretch this image to the point that any meaningful color was destroyed. Here is what it looked like after stacking, but before stretching the dynamic range-the sky itself is just as bright as the galaxy. Once again, my thanks go out to Target and Home Depot, for choosing lights that shine up as well as down, and lighting up half of the valley at 3 in the morning. Remember them when your utility company tells you to use less electricity. (And let's not forget chihuahua lovers, who still believe that I can train coyotes to eat their stupid pets, and therefore aim floodlights at my house to ward them off, like some sort of electric garlic. As I have said, if I could train coyotes, they wouldn't have any chihuahuas left at all.)

This was, by the way, my first shooting session where the camera was controlled remotely from my computer, while I sat indoors getting a head start on the processing. Since I often sit outside minding the scope  in order to avoid hearing the stuff my family likes to watch on TV, I'm not sure I will use that feature a lot...

M31

Only 20 minutes, and very hasty...but what a difference from the shot a few posts earlier. That;s M32 bottom center, a globular cluster orbiting M31.

This image is uncropped, and was not magnified...M31 is a big sucker, many times larger in the sky than the Moon is. It will take at least three shots mosaiced together to show the entire galaxy.

Canon 40D and Messier 8, together at last

Okay, I was not exactly prepared for how much better this camera would be...

This is only 12 minutes of exposure, and less than 5 minutes of Photoshop post-processing. I don't even know how to operate the camera in the dark yet, and it is already putting all my past pictures to shame. I don't have a shutter release cable for it yet, so all these subs had to be shot by hand-and since none of the reference frames I have on file apply to this camera, I had to shoot all 60 of those manually as well. Hence, only 12 minutes left for gathering photons.

Gear Replacement

Well, the 300D won't be missed for long...I got a 40D on eBay today. Assuming I'm not going to be totally ripped off, that solves the camera conundrum quite nicely. And also, thanks go out to my sister and her famdamily for a "laser" collimator, soon to be delivered via Amazon. Both of these items are big steps up the quality ladder- am proud of what I've been accomplishing with the stuff I have, but in some areas I think I am ready for a step up.

Pics to follow soon!

Right on time-another setback

Well, in the last six months, I've had a mount that was irreparable damaged, which somehow was restored to life. Then my scope was squished, and miraculously was revived. This weekend, after removing the battery from my camera, the power sorted in the flash capacitors somehow shorted to the motherboard, causing-quite literally-a small explosion. It is now an ex-camera. It is not resting. it is not pining for the fjords. It has met its maker; it has, in a word, snuffed it. Photography is, for the moment, off the menu.

However, it is still July, and I have a nice telescope-and eyes! The views available to the direct south this month are spectacular, even with nothing but your eyes and some darkness. A small pair of binoculars will easily bring 20 to 30 of the Messier objects into plain view, some of them dramatically so. So while I figure out what to do about a camera, there is still much to do, and as I have mentioned before, photography has often distracted me from enjoying the spectacle that looking through a scope can provide.

If you only have some binoculars, here is what I recommend that you try. Late this evening, look south and find Antares-it will be the brightest star to the south, and is clearly reddish. In binocs, it is striking-almost uncomfortably bright to look at. About half of one field of view to its upper right is another star, and forming a shallow "V" between them is a globular cluster, M4. Let your eyes adapt to the dark a bit, then see if you can see a fuzzy cotton ball to the right of Antares. At first, you may see it best if you look slightly to one side of it-the very center of our vision is not very sensitive to light, actually. Looking just to the side while paying attention to the target is called "averted vision" and is a learned skill for visual telescopists.

To the left of Antares, see if you can find a group of stars (not a full constellation, but an "asterism") that looks like a teapot. Find a trapezoid shape, a bit leftish of the bright band of the Milky Way if you are lucky enough to see that, and in Saggitarius if you happen to know where that is. There is another star above the trapezoid that forms the top of the teapot, with the spout to the right. Once you see it, it will forever be obvious.

To the lower right, where this picture says M7, there is a bright star with a smaller one to the right and lower-the sting in Scorpius' tail. Above it and to the left is M7 itself, a wonderful binocular view of an open cluster that was even described by Ptolemy 2000 years ago. M6, to its upper right, is the Butterfly Cluster, dominated by one red supergiant star and a few blue supergiants. These things don't show their splendor in photos, so they get passed by a lot (by me as well-I've written about open clusters before in this blog.) But with binoculars or even a very small scope, they are dazzling.

Above the teapot's spout, almost like steam, are a couple of the most magnificent nebulae in the sky. M8 is easily visible with the eye alone in a dark area (I can even see it from MY yard, after 20 minutes of dark-adaptation.) Just above it is a "w" of stars, around which the Triffid Nebula M20 is located. There is another cluster around the upper left of the W too.

Once you find M8 in binocs, try moving directly to the left about two fields of view and see if you can find another cotton ball-this is the globular cluster M22. If you scan around the area between and above M8 and M22, there is almost no limit to what binoculars will show, and be sure to notice the background to it all-the utterly uncountable number of stars fading as far back as your eye can see.

This is definitely the best month of the year to watch the sky, especially if you don't have a load of fancy gear. And the area to the south is so full of beautiful sights that you need not be able to read 9or even own) star charts to find the good stuff. My binocs were only about $25, and they offer splendid views; this hobby definitely does NOT require a large budget. Get outside tonight and look up!

M20 the Triffid Nebula

The name "triffid" refers to the three lobes of this nebula, not to the home planet of the Triffids. Pity, in my opinion.

This is another early shot, only 20 minutes and with a near-full moon close by. In 2-3 weeks I should be able to get some much nicer subs. The star field in this area is just as fascinating as the nebulae there; M20 (and M8, which is even more spectacular) are located in the dark band that runs through the middle of the Milky Way. Scan around due south with some binoculars around midnight and you'll likely end up finding this without much trouble.

This nebula is a major star birth region, and like the Orion Nebula, has all three types of nebulosity present-the red is light emitted by gases heated by stars within, the blue is simply reflected light from stars inside dust and gas clouds, and the black is clouds of dust. Once I get some more light collected, the blue will be much more evident.

If you can't beat 'em...

Now that the Summer Milky Way is coming into the slice of my sky that isn't as blown out by light pollution as the rest of the sky, here comes the Moon again. May as well take a shot of it. Here we have 50 exposures, averaged with Registax.

M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy

M31 is probably the largest deep-sky object in our skies, over three times as large as the full moon. It is also our closest neighbor, and is fairly similar to our own Milky Way galaxy. It's still early in the year for this one; I just happened to be up an hour before dawn and managed to grab about 10 minutes worth of photons, and it's not a spectacular image. The disc of the galaxy is easily seen in most photographs to encompass the large globular cluster at the bottom of this picture (M32.) This is an uncropped photo; I would need to make a mosaic of at least three shots to include the entire galaxy. The bright core here is easy to find with binoculars in even a polluted sky, and can be seen by eye alone by many people in dark skies. However, the rest of the disk is relatively faint. In this shot, the main dust lane closest to the core is pretty obvious; less so is the larger band of dark dust further out, simply because I didn't get enough starlight for it to stand out. The color balance is a horrorshow as well. Ultimately, using large numbers of short exposures is not in any way a substitute for long exposures, and when there are only a few shots to stack, the flaws in the technique are pretty obvious. I'm uploading this shot merely as a baseline; I have never tried shooting it before, so this is what I have to build on once it's within range a little earlier in the night, during August and September.

M4 Globular Cluster

A break was needed from the supernova; for the last few nights there has been a wicked fog bank rolling in like a locomotive around 10 or 11, but I managed to grab this before it hit last night.

Pity how this fared in converting to jpeg; I'll try png later and see if I can't bring back some dynamic depth.

More M51 & SN2011dh

Taken June 14th. Roughly two hours exposure time. All the really interesting stuff seems to happen when there is a full moon...

A few more facts about the New Star

Here are some randomly assorted tidbits about SN2011dh and other supernovae.

First, the simple...in 1572, astronomer Tycho Brahe noticed a new star where there had been none. This was just before the age of the telescope in astronomy, and Brahe was one of the first scientists to collect careful data about what he saw. He published a book about this (and many other things) called De nova stella (On the new star) the next year. "Nova" is Latin for "new". In time, astronomers came to call "new stars" novas, or novae. In reality, novae are not new stars at all, they are stars that have become brighter, but that would not be known for a while yet.

In the 20th century, astronomers began to finally understand how impossible big the universe is. When novae were observed in other galaxies, it was obvious they must be pretty bloody big explosions. The term supernova was coined in the 1920s to describe those. 

There are two types of supernova. Type I involves stars about the size of our own, which for various reasons blow off their outer layers. Our star runs by converting hydrogen into helium, using the vast heat created by its own gravity. Once the hydrogen runs out, it will fuse the helium into other stuff like carbon, and then sort of shrink into a white lump of hot stuff called a white dwarf. That will be the end of the road for our own Sun. But if a white dwarf has a close companion star, and if they are close enough together, it can collect matter from that star. Once enough stuff is collected, it explodes; that is a Type I supernova, and it usually leaves the original star not too badly damaged. Binary stars can do this repeatedly, and many planetary nebulae are the gases blown off by Type I explosions, still lit from within by the parent star or stars.

But really big stars can keep fusing elements into heavier and heavier stuff, until the core is finally made up of iron. Unfortunately for the star, fusing iron doesn't release any extra energy, and the core collapses under the incredible force of its own gravity, and at nearly 1/4th the speed of light. Once it collapses so far that the nuclei in its atoms are touching, it can't go any further, and the collapse is stopped so rapidly that a shock wave bounces back out, blowing away the remaining part of the star. THAT is a Type II supernova. If the original star was less than 20 times the mass of our sun, it will leave behind a Neutron Star, such as the one that I "discovered" earlier this year. If it' over 20 solar masses, a black hole will result.
 
Supernovas used to be observed only every century or so, but with the sheer number of amateur astronomers today, there are a few hundred per year seen throughout the visible universe. They are still very rare-out of the scores of billions of stars in our galaxy, supernovae only occur once every 50 years or so. Supernovae are given names made up of the year they were observed, followed by a letter A-Z. After the first 26, they start with aa, then ab, etc. This would therefore be the 112th supernova detected in 2011, although it is certainly one of the most visible.

Even though Type I and Type II events are so totally different, to the eye they appear very similar. Only when instruments were invented that could detect the presence of certain elements was it learned that there were two types. A spectrograph can show what elements are present at a light source. A Type I explosion shows no hydrogen, since the parent star has already used up its hydrogen. The kind of star that is big enough to implode can do so before the hydrogen runs out, so it does show hydrogen spectra. The names Type I & II were well established before it was understood just how unrelated the two things really are. Words have a way of sticking around unbidden at times.

With an estimated peak brightness of around 1 billion solar luminosities, if SN2011dh had occurred 30,000 light years away it would appear to us to be as bright as our sun.30,000 light years is a terrible long distance...our entire galaxy is perhaps 100,000 light years across. If such a supernova happened within 3,000 light years, it could be pretty bad for us, since the radiation from the blast would remove all of the ozone from our atmosphere. That is bad for our DNA, since ozone blocks much of the dangerous stuff from our own sun. There is some evidence that the Ordovician Extinction nearly half a billion years ago was caused by a nearby supernova.

There are no stars within that distance today that are candidates for such an event, so the job of wiping out all the life on our planet is left in our capable hands.

All of the elements heavier than iron are formed in the explosions of this type of supernova. If you are wearing any gold jewelry, that gold was created in the few moments after the collapse of the core in a supermassive star. By heavier, I mean having a greater atomic weight-go Google "periodic table" and have a look.

SN2011dh hit its peak brightness within a week or so, and will fade over the next year until we can't see it in amateur scopes any longer.  After a couple more weeks, it is expected to fade to a plateau for several months, then continue fading. that plateau will still be easy to photograph with scopes like mine, however.

As a last unrelated thought-if they are correct about the progenitor of SN2011dh being around 25 solar masses, then it formed a black hole in the first moment of the event. However, contrary to the popular notion, it will not "suck up" everything in its area. For a simple thought experiment, imagine that our star were to become a black hole (it can't, but just play along.) Assuming it had the same mass as it did when it was just our sun, the Earth would not be affected at all-it would still be orbiting something with the mass of one sun. Our year would remain unchanged; the moon would still orbit us at the same rate, etc. Of course, it would get very, VERY cold.

ba-BOOM!!!!

Oh, it's been a long couple of months...broken computers, new computers, software that won't run on new computers, etc. etc. etc. Once all of that was sorted out, it's time for June Gloom and overcast skies all night. Thankfully, last night stayed clear enough to get two hours of subs of M51. Sure, it seems like I shoot M51 a lot...why again? Because on May 31, the first images were taken of a supernova in M51. here is a link to an article about it, and some info on one interesting fact about it-it's not uncommon for supernovas in other galaxies to be discovered by amateurs, but this one also had its debut via Twitter. I don't know if that means anything or not. Certainly, it doesn't concern the start that exploded-it happened over 25,000,000 years ago; the light just reached us this month.

The upper photo is from May 2, the lower from June 12. Compared to the photos in the article I linked above, the supernova is even brighter-compare it to the star to its left (USNO J1330149+471027, which is in our own galaxy, and is a lot closer.) In the raw data from my camera, the supernova is brighter than the core of the galaxy itself, and may still be getting brighter. That happens not because the explosion itself takes weeks or days-it doesn't-but because as the fireball grows, there is more surface radiating light. At the Keck Observatory, they have measured parts of the fireball expanding at 11,000 miles per second.  The most up-to-date news articles I have found are about a week old, and it was still clearly around 14th magnitude, slightly fainter than the star next to (which is mag 13.85.) The star that blew up was about 20 times the mass of our Sun, making this a Type II Supernova, which is what happens when really big stars run out of fuel and collapse. It has been designated SN 2011dh. Once the fireball diffuses, the remnant will be a planetary nebula, although sadly we will never see it from this distance.

M51 is actually two galaxies; the upper object is another galaxy that is passing near or through the other. The interaction caused gases and dust that had been spread thinly to condense, all along the arms of M51, and there is furious star birth going on there, lighting the dust up with blue light (a lot like what is going on far closer to home in Orion.) When these sort of star nurseries are formed, they tend to create hugely massive stars with very short lives relative to our star. In the "before" picture, notice how that band of gas has many blue knots of dense star formation; based on the supernova's location and size, this star was likely not more than 100 million years old. (I have heard that a candidate star has been identified in an older Hubble picture, but I don't know any details of that yet.) That's a fast and furious life by stellar standards-our Sun will live ten billion years before dying, and it's actually brighter than all but 15% of the stars in our galaxy; most stars probably live even longer.

I was initially worried that the nearly-full moon plus the chihuahua lights in all their glory would kill any chance of seeing this, but there is obviously no problem there; this thing is bright. Plus, since I was not trying to make the galaxy appear as bright as possible, I didn't have to "stretch" the contrast much in post processing, and that makes for a very tidy photo; a handy lesson for me as I keep learning to grab better raw images. While stretching is one way to make dim objects visible, longer exposures are another, and this clearly shows the increase in quality that would result from being able to keep the camera open longer. (This picture is a stack of 30-second exposures; as always, the quality of the clockworks in my drive is still a limiting factor.)

Pretty cool for the first supernova I have ever seen!

Oh, the weather...

Akay, there were a few great nights a couple of weeks back. Since then, it's been AWFUL. This is what life is like to scope fans, and we accept it, but I do admit it makes a pretty boring blog. I have a lot of older photos that are much better looking as my post-processing skills have improved, but honestly, with some of the other steps forward I have taken I just can't get excited enough about the to bother posting them.

So, if you are following this blog and are as aware as I am of its recent lack of new items, do what I do-look at what other photographers are up to.

I REALLY recommend this-just amazing.

First, a Sky & Telescope article about a very special photo project-
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/121786019.html

And then the website of the photographer in the article-
http://skysurvey.org/

Really, this is worth looking at, even for those people that aren't goofy about stargazing.

NEWS FLASH-Amateur Astronomer Discovers Massive Neutron Star

There are many ways telescopes are put to work. On one end, there are the amateur instruments with good old-fashioned eyepieces attached. A step up from that are the rigs like mine, where cameras are doing the work. At the other extreme are the big monsters in Hawaii and Chile, which are used by scientists from around the world, often remotely.

A small step below those are the scopes, both optical and radio, that were state-of-the art not long ago, but no longer attract the front-line research (and money that goes with it.) One example is the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It still is in great working order, and these days it is still collecting as much (if not more) data than ever. But it its case, that data sits around waiting for some grad student to take a look.

The Einstein@home project was started at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee was started to study information from gravity wave detectors, which were made to test one of the last unobserved phenomena predicted by Einstein. But they have added to the project, and also analyze data from Arecibo, searching in particular for massive neutron stars, especially those in binary systems (which are more "measurable" because of their effect on their partner star.)

Why is this in a blog about my backyard astronomy? Because their research is done on my home computer. Rather than use expensive and hard-to-fund mainframe time, Einstein@home runs on a cloud of home computers, using my unused CPU time. So while I may be taking astronomical pictures that have nearly no scientific value, my hobby is not all just play-I've helped discover two pulsars as well. In my twisted mind, that makes me a real astronomer too...

The second was announced just a couple of months ago, called J1952+2630. It's roughly 95% of the mass of our own sun, which is unusually heavy-it's only the fifth pulsar discovered in that class-and has a "day" of 1/48th of a second. Yep; something the weight of our sun is spinning 48 times per second. It is likely no more that 14 or 15 miles in diameter. A "preprint" report is available here.

 Pulsars are formed when super-massive stars die, when they no longer have any material left that can be part of a fusion reaction. It's the heat of fusion inside a star that holds it up against its own gravity. Run out of fusion, you run out of anything to fight the gravity, and the star collapses in on itself, causing one hell of an explosion. Most of the star's matter is blown into space, but some remains, squeezed by it's own mass into a form of matter unlike anything else, called degenerate matter. Here, the bits that make up atoms are squeezed together, and the density is beyond our imagination-the common analogy is a teaspoon of the stuff weighing the same as a battleship. If the star was massive enough, this squeezed core becomes a neutron star. A bit heavier, and a black hole is formed. A bit smaller, a white dwarf is formed. But since white dwarfs are still made of regular matter, and black holes can't be directly observed, it's the neutron stars that interest scientists. Their formation should cause gravity waves to flutter through the galaxy, and they're observable, and that is why this research group is studying them; if they detect any gravity waves with the detectors, great. But if those waves can be correlated to real objects, even better.


If you're interested in using your computer in real front-line research, look into BOINC, which is the program developed at Berkeley that allows researchers to use computers distributed throughout the world in people's homes. It's a massive resource that is barely tapped right now. I've been part of several projects for some time, and that is how I discovered another pulsar, with nothing but a primitive 8" telescope and a home computer.

More light

So here we have M64 again, with another couple of hours worth of light added. Ultimately, I'm not drawing out more detail, since the resolution of my scope is fixed. But with less noise, the existing details stand out more and more. Compare this shot to that from a couple of posts back and the difference is dramatic. In the first shot, it took some fair amount of work in PhotoShop just to make the background black; here nothing was done at all beyond the normal stretching. I'm not bothering with that yet, since I have more subs to add to this stack already.

In the first post of M64, the background was just barely darker than the spiral arms, but in darkening the background much of the overall size of the galaxy is lost. Here, the actual size is showing, and the line marking where the edge of the object is lost in noise has moved out quite a bit. With a few clear nights and a few more hours of exposure...

I just found this website  from the Calvin Observatory about M64. A lot of good information. And an interesting photo...shot with a 16" Ritchey–Chrétien telescope at high altitude in New Mexico. Sure, it's a better picture than mine...but not by a whole lot, to be frank. No word on results from the Hobbes Observatory as yet.

Periodic Wobble

SO the issue this time wasn't my previous fix; one of the bolts that holds the RA drive worm gear block to the main body stripped. Or rather, the hole tapped into the body stripped, not the bolt-that would have been too easy to fix, of course. So, more drilling and tapping for oversize bolts. I have to say, the aluminum that the main body was cast from is not what anyone would mistake for real metal...scary.

 

Obviously, this was not a trivial little thing; notice that the Dancing Galaxy is moving quite a lot more than its own diameter. More Mambo #5 than Astrophotography 101. I'm shooting some new frames now to see how the fix worked; it's one thing to have a dial indicator say it's right; it's altogether another thing to actually get the pics. Stay tuned...

M64 The Blackeye Galaxy

It started out so clear and nice...so knowing that I would be throwing out half of the shots I took (I haven't fixed the drive error yet) I decided to do this anyway. Well, I went out to later collect the pictures only to be greeted by clouds...so this picture is only about 29 minutes of total exposure.

Other than that weird black band of dust, M64 looks to be a fairly normal spiral galaxy, but that dust is a tip-off that something isn't quite right here. Most of the stars are orbiting the galactic core in the same direction, as expected. But most of the gas, and the stars in the outer reaches of the galactic disk are orbiting the other-it's actually two spirals that have recently collided and merged. When that happens, all the diffuse dust and gas can get scrunched up and condense into dust clouds, as has happened here. It may look dark in visible wavelengths, but an infrared picture shows that as those dust clouds condense they start giving rise to new stars, often some of the largest, hottest, and shortest-lived stars of all. Infrared light does not pass through our atmosphere very well, but this image from Hubble shows how hot the stars actually are in that dark cloud.

M51 again

(EDIT from June 19-I have changed computer and video card, and now can see the gradient in the background in this shot. Wow, not nice. Another lesson learned, I suppose; I need to get my hands on a hardware-based monitor configuration tool. There are much nicer (by my standards, at least) pictures of this galaxy from June, when Supernova 2011dh appeared.)

It's so tempting to find new objects every night that I am with the scope, but after changes are made, I prefer shooting objects that I have done already, so I know if I have indeed improved anything. So, sorry if M51 is getting a little worn out here. If you don't like it, get your own scope. Better yet, get a scope whether you like this or not!

With the great seeing the last few nights, I thought it would be a good test of the changes i have made to the scope itself, rather than the mount. All of the screws and such used to line up all the mirrors were replaced with much larger hardware, with finer adjustments control, and the difference was staggering.

This alignment (called collimation) has some effect on the shape of stars and focus away from the center of the field, but it actually has an even bigger impact on contrast. That is why the last two nights, I've been picking objects visually that I never have gotten the faintest glimpse of from here.

And yes, it turns out it does have a large impact on the photos, too. This is only about 70 minutes worth of subs, far less than I would really want for a quality photo. In fact, it's very noisy and grainy in the fainter parts of the galaxy-that is strictly a sign that more photons need to be rounded up; you might remember how my pics of M81 took a huge leap forward in quality once I was stacking several hours of data, not tens of minutes. There's no point combining this with any earlier M51 sets, so I'll just use this as a new base to build on. Compare this to this picture, which was previously my best M51 shot.

I had a college astronomy prof who had worked on the Palomar All Sky Survey. He would show slides in class and whine and moan about the colors-his view was that the best way to find the proper color balance is to look at the colors of stars in the field, then match that. He would complain that pictures that purported to be a visual image should match reality, not just take advantage of whatever the more sensitive films showed. Hard to argue with that view, but it is not the standard way faint objects are photographed. (All that lovely bright red in so many pictures is simply wrong, for example; it should be lavender. That started with the Palomar survey; the filters they used in the RGB composites failed to allow a large part of the blue spectrum to pass into any of the images.) It's another matter when the purpose of the photograph is to show wavelengths we cannot see; those are called false-color photographs so that it's well-understood what you are seeing. Go Google some Spitzer Space Telescope pictures to see what false-color photography can uncover. If you've seen many images from that survey, you'd see that his opinion did not win out.

Anyway, getting long here-I have reached a milestone where my raw data is getting good enough that not only do my stars actually have color, I can use that as a reference in post-processing. See kids; sometimes you learn something in school that you end up caring about eventually!

I've also determined what had re-introduced the periodic bobble I mentioned earlier. Rather than rely on the fix I used last time, I'm waiting for my brain to stumble upon something a bit cleverer that will allow finer adjustment of gear angles and lash in the RA drive. I tend to get those ideas when I'm trying to think of something else, so I may spend the next few nights trying to clean the garage or something.

Don't forget your eyes...

Tonight we had a bit of a star party at my place...not all could make it, but those who did got a treat. It was windy all day-40 mph sort of windy, and when darkness fell, stars weren't twinkling so much as dancing around the sky. But as often happens, an hour later, it was one of the best nights of seeing I can remember in ages.

No cameras tonight; this was a night for eyepieces and viewing. After all the non-scope fanatics got to see the usual views of Saturn (who, as usual, did not disappoint) the seeing improved enough that objects like M65 and M66 were not only there easily in my 8" Newt, but in Mark's 80mm refractor. For a short while, even NGC3628 was visible in the Newt. We we did the quick tour of globulars as well, and M4 was especially brilliant; many bright stars with that lovely glowing ball behind them.

Sometimes I just forget to look at plain old stars-not binaries, not the odd stuff, just stars. And as a result, I had forgotten how incredibly striking Antares is. As the home star of the cat that lives with Mark, it was especially poignant for us.

I have been so utterly focused on photography the last few months that I have neglected the eyepiece. But much of the last two weeks has been spent fine-tuning my scope itself, not just the mount-all the hardware used to collimate (align) the mirrors was redone, with larger screws with finer threads for adjustment, and the reward was tonight; much of what I could pick out has never been seen from this site with this scope before.

Hope you're feeling well soon, Scott.

One step forward, ten back...

As soon as I finished he last photo, we were hit with a week of clouds. Now that they have passed, somehow I have picked up a periodic tracking error. 30 second shots are still possible, but roughly half the subs shot are trash. And what is odder, the problem that was causing this before does not seem to be to blame-so that is why there have been no new pictures this week; I'm playing Master Detective/Junior Machinist instead. All part of the game, though.

M81 & M82 remastered

Yeah, there has been an awful lot of this pair here lately...the post-processing is as much a part of learning this game as the scope is, though. Here is our pair once more, but with each galaxy exposed more evenly, and with a cleaner background. Since each object was being handled on its own, it isn't necessary to amplify the background a huge amount to bring out detail in the target objects.

Note that I tried to avoid making the background truly black...not only does that lose the faint wisps of many distant stars, it's never seemed right to me-the sky isn't black to begin with. All in all, for three months now sepnt trying to learn this art, as well as all the repair work, I am not ashamed to give myself a pat on the back for this one.

For those that care, this is a total of 491 30 second exposures (yes, over six hours.) North is to the right. (Generally, I leave North up, which would seem the obvious choice...but astro pics are most often shown with north down, since many scopes invert the image. First, I figure that any "up" or "down" is an artificial thing anyway, and second, Newtonian telescopes with a camera in the prime focus don't invert the image; that only happens when lenses are used, and there are none in my system; only mirrors. So I can put north anywhere I want it to be, just be turning the scope in the mount.) M81 seems somewhat brown and ruddy to me, but I was using the Hubble image of same as a color reference; can't argue with that. While I had some links to info about M82 a couple of weeks ago, I haven't said much about M81. In the middle of the lovely soft-looking center bulge is a black hole of over 70 billion solar masses. For such a pretty thing, it's in reality an incredibly violent place.