M51, again...

M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. This is a stack all the sets of subs which were of the same orientation, then subjected to the normal Photoshop treatment of stretching dynamics & c. Unfortunately, When I started this venture, I wasn't keeping a record of what angle I was mounting the camera and similar details, so I can't always add new stacks to old ones. The photo of my scope below is not meant for people to see; instead I am now including a snapshot of the setup used each night so that when I shoot the same object later, I have the scope and camera mounted the same.

The haziness around the upper part of the object is not noise; that is actually the traces of the disk of the upper galaxy. M51 is actually two galaxies; the main spiral, also called M51A or NGC 5194, and NGC 5195 or M51B. M51B is actually completely behind the spiral; they are very close, but not touching. The effects of M51B passing so close is responsible for the well-defined spiral arms of M51A, and wave fronts of dust being pulled along by the smaller galaxy are responsible for those blue knots, where large amounts of star formation are underway. These images from Hubble and Spitzer show not only the things that are just hinted at in my picture, but the sheer amount of star formation going on as a result of the encounter; this thing is on fire. My pics will tend to be much bluer; digital cameras have an infrared filter built in, since for regular photography IR is bad, but it does make my camera more sensitive to blue light. There is a modification available for the camera, but it's in imperfect solution; for now, I'll live with colors that aren't as accurate and vivid as what Hubble takes, knowing that my setup was somewhat more affordable.

While this image is certainly something I am proud of, the ways to improve it are simply screaming at me...I don't believe I can do much better using 30 second exposures. Those pixels that only receive occasional photons, even when those photons are ones I want, are too hard to sort from the noise, and they get dropped in the stacking process. So by adding more subs to this set, I might make it cleaner, but it won't improve the resolution or level of detail.

On the other hand, I am still thrilled and surprised by what I am able to produce-when Lord Rosse first drew his now-famous sketch of M51, showing for the first time that some nebulae had a spiral structure, this is what he drew. That was looking through a 72" reflector, in so many ways identical to my own scope. (Take a look at the Wikipedia article about Lord Rosse and his telescope; it's fascinating. At the time, he couldn't know that the light he saw had taken 31 million years to reach him (and was spared the headaches such numbers can cause!), and also did not know it was an entire island universe, like our own Milky Way. In fact, to this day we still refer to any non-star-like object in the sky as a nebula, which means cloud, whether it is one or not.But in anything but the largest scopes, faraway galaxies and nearby dust clouds often are very similar in appearance; only photographs make the distinction relevant.

So there is is-I've decided that now I need to make my mount cope with 60 second exposures, without having to toss half the subs due to gearing problems.

Light Pollution update

Last night, there was a man over the fence with the floodlights, testing some incredibly powerful flash gear. I went to go talk, and perhaps bring up the subject of the floodlights...it does turn out that he's the same man who's rented that property for nearly 10 years. He now has a live-in girlfriend, with several little rat dogs. Well, about a year ago, a coyote came over their fence from my own yard, grabbed one of the rats while they watched in horror, jumped back into my yard and went out front to consume the poor wretched creature. I have many emotions over this; not least the regret that I couldn't send over any more coyotes to eat the rest of those things.

He still works late nights, so his girlfriend is home alone with the remaining rats. She installed two 1000w quartz floods, shining UP toward MY HOUSE for some unfathomable reason, in the belief that that will keep the coyotes away. Now, if you live in an area with natural predators, floodlights don't keep them away. What keeps them away is to not raise FOOD for them in your yard. But I'm biased, since I loathe those awful little things she has, and feel guilty to be part of a species that created THAT from a wolf. Another rant for some other day. Another sad but true fact-if you live in an area with natural predators, you must accept that your pets are somewhat disposable. Don't love them less for it, just realize they may die horrible deaths at any time and accept it. Hakuna Matata and all that.

To keep a short story long, he began working a few years ago as a photographer and understands just what those lights are doing to me. (It's not just astronomy that suffered; it was never truly night.) So it seems we ought to have a lot less stray light around here.

Afterward, I spent another hour on my back, just looking at the sky again, while my camera happily clicked away...

More pics of lightbox

I didn't include a finished picture of the lightbox before-because it wasn't assembled yet. Here it is-four "white" LEDs are four inches from the top, shining UP into baffles and a ceiling covered with shiny aluminum tape (real duct tape, not duck tape-which IS, by the way, the proper name of that silver cloth tape we all know; it's made of cotton duck fabric. Don't use it on your ducts. If I don't tell people things like that once I learn them, eventually my head explodes.) It then shines down through two 1/8" layers of white plexiglass.

Here is the same view, without a flash...the cutout simply rests over the top of the scope, so that the camera only sees that soft white glow, which is hopefully extremely even, or what photographers and pilots call "flat" light. Hence, the photos taken of this are called Flat Frames, or flats. Now all is finally clear, eh?

In a perfect optical system (scope, camera, etc.) the actual photo would be equally as flat as the light source. In the real world, that does not happen. All scopes, and even cameras, fail to light the entire sensor surface (or film) perfectly evenly. You see in the last post how dramatic that effect is in my own setup.

With every object I shoot now, once the focus is set, ISO is decided upon, etc. I place the box over the scope and shoot about 20 pictures, with automatic exposure, of the flat light. Then those are combined, just like the actual pictures of the pretty stuff, by whatever software is being used. (I use DeepSkyStacker, aka DSS-not only the best, but free.) Notice that by the time that flat light has reached the CMOS in my camera, it is FAR from being flat any longer. DSS will now apply an inverse brightness to each and every pixel in my actual photos, cancelling the effects.


Not only will it even the field a great deal, but it repairs other faults. Click on the flat picture to see a larger version, and you will notice various splodges and dots around...those are dust on the sensor chip in my camera. The thing is filthy, but difficult to clean-for now, I'll let DSS handle that too. By comparing these flat frames with another reference called a dark frame (you guessed it-put on the lens cap and take pictures of the dark-really), it learns what is dirt, and extrapolates what should really be in that spot. There is a fourth type of reference frame, which is a combination of the flat and offset; and it's called the flat-dark frame. No, I don't quite know why yet...but in practice, one really needs only to use three of the four references, either flat-dark-offset or flat-flatdark-dark.

Another note-the flat frames MUST be shot with the camera in exactly the position and state it will be for the light frames-even the slightest change of focus or rotation of the camera makes them useless. Ask me know I know this...early on, I tried using one set of reference pics for every session; it was worse than using none at all. The dark and offset frames MUST be shot at the same temperature as the light frames. Digital camera sensor change their behavior with small changes in temperature. Again, using the set from the other night is therefore useless.

I won't show a copy of a dark frame, because it's just a black rectangle...but two types are taken. One is shot at the SAME exposure, ISO and temperature as the light frames (the one with the pictures.) I take 20 after each subject is shot. The other, called a bias or offset frame, is shot the same way, but with the fastest shutter speed available. The first allows any "hot" pixels to show up, generally as red, green, or blue dots, while the offset shots show any actual flaws in the circuitry of the camera. Once DSS has combined all of this information, it corrects the light frames. In this manner, it is actually able to make pictures from my 10 year old camera look even cleaner than it was on Day One, since all digital cameras have a certain number of flawed pixels.

So the basic process of a shoot is this:
1. Choose the target for the night. I mean a stellar target, not the neighbor's chihuahuas.
2. If not already done, place the scope, then set up the mount and drives to match the Earth's axis as perfectly as possible. This is done with a series of long exposures where the scope is slowly moved back and forth, and any deviation in the star trails shows up in the picture. I allow 30 minutes minimum for this step, for alignment accurate enough to avoid any star trailing for 60 second exposures. The more accuracy you want, the longer it will take-I seem to find that it requires 30 minutes of setup for each 30 second of trail-less exposure. If you just want to look at things visually, the whole process takes 2 or 3 minutes.
3. Set up the camera gear, deciding which side of the tripod the scope should be on, where the camera is mounted, exposures, ISO, focus...focus, in fact, is done with a handy tool called a Bahtinov mask. the eye simply isn't good enough to rely on for photo-quality focusing. I'll show some pictures of the process some day (if your just can't wait, Google it.) My Bahtinov mask is homemade, and is okay; I still make a series of pictures with it in place to home in on perfect focus.
4. Place the lightbox over the scope, and shoot 20 flat frames. 
5. Remove lightbox, and shoot my light frames. Currently, I shoot all of them at 30 seconds and ISO 800 which is "sweet' spot for the 300D; I want to increase to 60 or 90 if I can improve my motor drive. My alignment skills are good enough, but the poor quality gears are killing me. I'd like to shoot an object at least for two hours, and out of that, should have 90 minutes of exposure.
6. Shoot the dark frames, then the bias frames.
7. Load it all into DSS, push the button, and see what I get in the morning.

Note that more than an hour is spent on setup and reference frames for a given target. Hey, who said this would be easy?

A note on that ISO 800...digital cameras still use the old film terminology and standards, so that the same language can be used to talk about and shoot pictures as was always used. So the same "sunny 16" rules and the like that worked with film also stay the same with digital. But while film tended to have larger globs of emulsion in high ISO varieties, a digital camera uses the same sensor for ALL ISO settings. It changes the sensitivity by amplifying each pixel more or less aggressively. Higher ISO settings in a digital camera are still "noisy", but the grain remains the same size. Digital has the same resolution with high ISO settings; film has a lower resolution due to the grains being larger. Almost the same, but not the same. The very nature of stacking digital images is based on this-if a pixel has a certain value in every shot, it's signal; if it's not in every shot, it's noise, and is dropped. So even at ISO 800, DSS can produce extremely smooth and fine-grained pictures. With film, since the blobs of emulsion do not line up perfectly, adding frames to each other simply blurs the focus. That is why film astrophotography required very long exposures, and also needed very well-made sophisticated equipment to keep the scope aimed perfectly at a moving target. With digital, even people like me with obsolete cameras and shoddy gear can still play.

I don't mean for anyone to be entertained from posts like this one. The purpose of this blog is to show my own progress on the trip from decent photographer and very amateurish scope hobbyist to becoming an astrophotographer. Often restating what you learn makes it stick better. So sorry if it bores you...anyone reading is always free to skip the text and just check the pictures.

I am wondering if DSS can be used to correct the same problems in regular daytime photography...at least the bad pixels, dirty cameras, and uneven lighting.

The Lightbox and the Leo Triplets

 Here is an image of the Leo Triplets, M65, M66 and NGC 3628, the same one shown earlier. At that time, I was not shooting "flat" frames properly, and the vignetting is pretty obvious-ruinous, in fact. Simply put, the scope is able to send far more photons to the center of the image than around the edges. This was from a single night's subs, with no PhotoShop work done to even out the background. In fact, that was pretty much out of the question anyway, since each galaxy lies more or less on the boundary between light and dark backgrounds; efforts to flatten the background all looked artificial.

One of the principal purposes of flat frames is to measure and correct this, by essentially underexposing the bright areas and overexposing the darkest. There IS an increase in noise caused, so more subs are needed to get the same detail.

This is last night's set...and no background monkey business with Photoshop was used. Before the actual pictures were taken, the light box is placed over the scope and about 20 shots taken of white light through a few layers of translucent white plexiglass. This not only tells the software what the vignetting is, but also defines things like dirt on the CMOS, which it also corrects for.

I shot 160 30 second frames, and tossed about 40; this is roughly an hour exposure. ( I say roughly-stacking is not exactly the same as taking longer exposures.) The result from this single night, however. is better than the combined results from ALL previous shots. Since I don't have the proper flats for the previous nights, I likely won't try adding them to this, but will use this as a new foundation to start building more detail. Also, with the nearby floods off for the night, I was able to capture FAR more detail, especially of NGC 3628 at the top.

In the next few days, I'll also make and process crops of each galaxy; all three are very different and don't really look their best when processed together. Like I said before, the lightbox is a great leap forward, especially compared to the old method of putting a T-shirt over the scope and shooting some shots of the sky the next day.

Subscribe!

If anyone is actually interested in following me on this trip, I have added a Subscribe feature. Each blog entry would be emailed to you. There is a box just under the adds to the right to enter an email address. Blogspot is Google, so they no doubt would add this to the lost of things they already know about you...but then, they probably already know you're looking at this anyway.

For the two blogs that I subscribe to, I just use it as a sign that a new entry was made, rather than read it in the email. It will be rare that I make more than 3-4 posts per week here.

M104 The Sombrero Galaxy

While testing repairs to my scope, AND trying the new lightbox, I spent several hours last night gathering photons. Most will take time to process, but I wanted the toss this quick-and-dirty shot up here...it's M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, and note just above it, my first asteroid capture! While the stars are shaped more like potatoes than circles in all the subs, the dot in question showed no elongation in any one sub (about 25 overall.) So it traveled roughly 8' of arc in the period these subs were taken, roughly 30 minutes.

(I am still shooting 30 second exposures, but some are totally useless while the drive motor moves from one tooth to the next, and there is some time lost while each picture is written to the oh-so-slow compact flash card. It's a ten year old camera; it's not speedy. In an hour's shooting, I expect to get 40 exposures, ten of which I will toss out.)

There was some good news last night as well; that neighbor with the floods came out and yelled at her chihuahuas for a while around midnight-then shut the lights off! I was even able to see this galaxy visually, if only just; it's been many years since that was possible.

This image will only improve with some additional subs and some more careful post-processing; I only had time for roughly 25 usable subs. The next time I can shoot it, I plan on trying to enlarge the view. So far, I have been only using prime focus camera placement, which puts the camera right in the focusing tube. This gives the image about 20x magnification. That is not much, but this sort of scope is not intended for high magnification-it's simply a light bucket for wide-field views. Positive Projection placement puts the camera "downstream" enough to allow the insertion of magnifying eyepieces. It's much trickier getting everything aligned well, and the extra glass is a source of distortion. Also, a magnified image will be dimmer-the same number of photons will be spread over a larger section of the CMOS "film". But, at an apparent diameter of about 8 arcminutes (the full Moon is about 30 arcminutes accross) this galaxy only takes up a tiny part of the field of view-in fact, only about 300 pixels. A full frame at prime focus is about 45 x 60 arcminutes (60 arcminutes =1 degree.) I think that if i can get a solid setup with 100x magnification, I should be able to get the longer exposure needed, and that would make the target cover well over 1000 pixels.

The Sombrero Galaxy is one of the most beautiful in the sky, and one of the most stunning photos from the Spitzer space telescope is of M104, in infrared. It's almost impossible to believe it's a real object, but it's utterly mind-bending. Here is a link to it. What look like dark cold clouds of dust visually are actually hotbeds of star formation, and they create the incredibly well-defined ring around the galaxy. Worth looking at, even though it certainly will make my efforts look pretty silly!

As for those potatoes...Partly, that is due to stacking more of my subs than I normally would, since I had very few. So there were some frames that i would usually toss out. Focus is also a component; the tempurature seemed to have dropped during the 20 minutes between focusing and starting the exposures (during which reference frames are being taken.) To some degree, collimation is also to blame, although it is-so far-as good as I can get the repaired scope to perform. I need to do more work on the secondary mirror spider especially, and I think the mirror holder itself has a lot of room for improving the original design. (Mind, those spud-shaped stars were much worse when I started back in January.)

In this shot of my scope, the flat black areas show the section that was dented; the black is primer over the bits of exposed metal left after rolling the metal in the tube. The focuser was stove into the main tube at roughly 30 degrees, while the spotter scope mount was bent to the side about the same amount. The only unrecoverable part was the spotter scope holder. It just turned into a chance to learn more about the construction and subtleties of setup; I think with even a little more work it should be better than before. And I suppose it helped having been a brass instrument repairman...that at least saved the cost of a new tube, and all the parts to adapt my optics to it since this tube is between the sizes offered by all the DIY scope-building suppliers.

I'm trying to get in the habit of shooting a quick snapshot of the camera and scope with each session, so that future sets of the same target can be shot with the same camera angle. As a side note, you can see there has been some rain this winter, for a change...there is some water damage to the house to repair once everything dries out. (One of the rainy days a couple of weeks back, we received over 6" in a day! It's been cloudy ever since; I was happy for the humid lousy seeing last night, because it was at least clear.)

Today or tomorrow I should be able to post some pictures showing why the lightbox was worth the effort, with another picture of the Leo Triplets, M65, M66 and NGC 3628. The improvement is not incremental; it's a giant leap forward.

floodlights...

I highly shortened this entry-it was a sad and pitiful complaint about light pollution.

A lightbox for "flat" reference frames

While waiting for the rain to end , I built a light box for taking "flats". The flat frames are reference frames, used by various processing programs to correct for vignetting, uneven exposure, and flaws in the light path such as dust and dirt on the sensor chip. Nothing too fancy here; the idea is to have a reasonable white light source, diffused enough to provide even lighting. I used an LED lamp with four fixtures and some Dollar Tree foam.

The lights shine into baffles in the top corners of the box, then through two sheets of 1/8" white plexiglass. The lowest layers of foam board are cut out to fit over the end of my scope, which is aimed vertically while shooting these reference frames.

 I used sticky-back aluminum duct tape (real duct tape, not cloth "duck" tape-that's another story!) to line the top of the box.

This is MUCH quicker than correcting vignetting problems in PhotoShop, and does a pretty good job of fixing problems caused by stuff on the sensor in the camera. Since I shoot at prime focus, using a Newtonian scope means that my CMOS chip is actually exposed to open air during exposures; it's going to be getting dirty, period.






Now, once the rain stops...I'll know if my tube repairs were worth the effort, or if all my stars will be shaped like potatoes. I have my fingers crossed, and hard-there isn't much more I can do with my own skills to repair this tube, I'm afraid.

Scope damaged

An accident has led to the main tube on my scope being buckled. It seems beyond my skills to repair, and I cannot find a replacement tube. In fact, replacement tubes seem to be like hen's teeth for name-brand scopes, and this is not in that category. I had many fine nights of observing with this old thing, but it's day finally arrived.

Given that my field of work has been massively affected by changes in the economy the last few years, a replacement is not in the cards. So, for now, Game Over.I'll be trying repairs, but don't have a lot of hope.

Update-the essentials of repairing the tube have been carried out...I have some doubts, as it does not want to collimate. I'll keep fooling with it. But thank goodness for tuba repair tools...The ultimate answer will be whether it can see stars as round or oval; too many clouds tonight to test it.  

 Additional update-all damage was repairable.

Moon's Perihelion

The moon was at its closest to the Earth in nearly two decades last night...and we received over 6 inches of rain in the last 24 hours-more than in some entire years that I have lived in this house. I saw areas flooded today larger than anything I have ever seen before. My neighborhood has lost a serious number of trees; it looks entirely different now. It was an incredible day, but the damage is insignificant compared to any coastal town in northwest Japan right now. Perspective.

Pictures of pretty lights in the sky will resume once the sky becomes visible again...

The next steps

Over the last two months, I've come close to what I am capable of as far as improving my existing scope and mount. It was a terribly inexpensive 8" Newtonian. The mount was a German equatorial mount, essentially a copy of the Celestron EQ-4 (which in turn was a copy of the ever-present CS-5 of yore). The tripod was just a bit of comedy; no one could have meant it to be actually used...right now, it has all sorts of stuff bolted to it for bracing. I had to add additional bracing from the scope rail to the counterweight post to try and settle down the wobblies as well. Many of the worn or badly made parts I have either remade myself or found in a local store's junk pile; I have about $7 invested in replacement parts now! The scope itself seems to want daily collimation; I'm considering adding bracing to the tube itself since I suspect it's actually deflecting under the combined weight of the primary and a camera. It's VERY thin sheet metal rolled into a tube. My eyes are open for someone with a higher-quality 8" Newtonian who perhaps has broken their primary mirror...

The whole thing is very Rube Goldberg, but without spending a lot of money, it's as good as can be expected. As I mentioned in the very first post, there's no budget for this right now. Plus, I've gotten a mildy perverse pleasure from getting by without fancy hardware and computer Go-To systems. But trust me, if I had them, this old stuff would be in the trash heap ;)

The remaining improvements on the list are
*bracing the tube, as mentioned
*building a flats box, so flats can be shot at the same time the lights and other reference frames are collected
*finding a motor for the declination axis (it's hand-turned now)
*seeing if more play can be removed from the RA drive (as is now, 40 seconds out of each 3 minute window is ruined as the drive moves from one tooth the the next. That's 2-3 out of every 7 30-second shots. That's as good as I can get it.)
*obtaining enough heavy black fabric and a way to hang it to create a "dome" around my viewing area.
*Building a better tripod or stand. I may just need to sink a pole into some concrete, but I want to be able to take the scope to dark sites as well.

I feel like I've gotten the essentials of DeepSkyStacker down; there is no doubt a lot yet to learn there. As for the tube flex and reference shots-the "flat" shots are taken of scattered white light, and tell the software just what flaws my scope has (vignetting, dirt, etc.). Using flats in processing should even out the dark backgrounds, rather than leave a lighter circle in the center. (See this picture from below for an example-the galaxy just happened to be on the fringe of the light area.) My flat-frame correction has been failing to get the result I want; I now think it's because they are shot against the sky the next morning, with the scope out of the mount, resting on its tail. I want to shoot the flats at the same time the main pictures are taken to avoid any effects of the tube flexing; that is what a "flats box" is; simply a box with a white light and a diffuser in it. Collimating needs to be done with the scope mounted as well, and the weight of my camera in place somehow; if the extra weight is warping the tube, then my collimation problems are explained. (Collimation is the precise alignment of all the mirrors and lenses.)

I'm not sure if I'm going to get that set of 10 or 15 second subs of M42 I wanted; we have bad weather predicted, and time is running out for Orion in 2011...pity, since the bright objects are less affected by my local conditions.

M101; the last shot for now

Well, this is a stack of over 110 minutes of exposure...what is happening is that the ambient noise level is so high that no meaningful gain is found over a stack of 20 minutes. Right below the target are my neighbor's halogen yard lights, which they leave on all night (bright enough for me to read by, even with a fence, hill, and trees between us.) Without a dark sky or a light pollution filter, this is the limit of my skill and my scope. It's better than the previous stacks in this post, but not by a lot. I chose to give up some amount of starry glow in the arms to reduce the visual impact of the noise and darken the background a touch; there is more to be seen in the original, but it's awash is a sea of reddish pixellated goo.

A pollution filter is on the wish list, but finding a dark site will be much easier, not to mention cheaper.

More Moon...

Just what i said I wouldn't do...so I lied. Playing around with various eyepiece combos and the camera, and there wasn't anything else in the sky tonight other than clouds and a short view of Saturn. I shot a set of 15 second subs of M42 just after darkness, only to find that you can't assume your rig is aligned simply because it was the night before...it had been moved several inches by someone unknown, and the set is pretty useless...

These pictures are all clickable for larger sizes. I have decided that prime focus is the way to go; to much wobbliness and trouble with my cheaply made focuser, with all those extra pieces between it and the camera.

Here is the field of view I get with the camera in the prime focus; no extra fiddly bits and chunks of cheap glass in the way.

M65, a few more photons in the mix

Another 38 minutes were added to the previous stack...Given the problems with vignetting (caused by using a 1.25" t-mount adapter; a 2" adapter is in the works) and that I have been shooting the Triplets in a single frame (causing ALL targets to be in an unfavorable part of the frame), I've reached a point of diminishing returns-this is now nearly two hours exposure at ISO 800. The good side of it all is that enough of the dark dust lanes are visible to show the galaxy's orientation, with the left edge toward us, and to show-just a little-how that band of dust is illuminated by the core, toward the bottom of the image.

This is the end of this stack; I'm going to try and get each individual Leo galaxy in the center of it's own image from now on, and give up on the "three-for-the-price-of-one" approach. I think that might be a workable idea, in a darker sky and drier air, so when that opportunity presents I'll try again for a nice picture of all three, M65, M66, and NGC 3628.

Now, if there would only be enough early evening clarity later in the week, once the moon moves on, to get some subs of M46 (one of the more interesting open clusters in a scope, since it contains a lovely little planetary nebula-which was captured beautifully by my friend Scott lately!) and some 10 to 15 second subs of the Trapezium, before it's too late to think about Orion this year. Also, the southwest quadrant of my local sky is the least light-polluted, so perhaps those subs could even be done at slower speeds for a little less noise. I really may need to make a night time drive to the hills next weekend while the opportunity is still there. I'd like to get as much of those targets around 5-6 hours R.A. now, so that I can compare my progress to them next year when they come around again. For now, the goal is to keep tweaking my equipment and shooting technique, continue learning ways to bend DSS and PS to my will, and be ready for a few weeks of collecting poor lost photons from Virgo. Virgo is absolutely the galaxy-lover's Garden of Paradise, from huge Messier Catalog Spirals to backgrounds loaded with tantalizing little oblong flecks, at every level of resolution from backyard hacks like me to the spectacular Hubble Deep Field pictures. Virgo is where you look if you want to glimpse just what "infinity" really means...if those views don't make your head spin a little, you aren't using your head properly.

I mentioned Scott above; a wickedly gifted musician I am lucky enough to play with weekly. It was one of his recent stacks of M42 in Orion that made me decide I simply had to start down this path-too many decades spent wishing I could see more, only to find out that the tools are there now for me to actually do it. Thanks, Scott!

There is a large part of me that can only see my own pictures in relation to those from real observatories, or even more belittling, Hubble. But on the other, hand, while these may not impress, I still am excited that I can pull these images out of the skies and equipment I have here and now, and I still remember college Astro classes where the supplied images actually had even less detail. I'm feeling an honest thrill from each set of exposures as it comes out of the computer; I can only imagine the excitement the great astronomers felt as they looked through the first of the large scopes in the 19th century and saw much of what I'm seeing now. And indeed, many of them were "gentleman scientists" with no more training, often far less, than we amateur telescopists have today. Each in our own way are struggling to make something of the limited number of photons we can get our grubby little hands on, while modern astronomy has moved off into areas we can't touch in our back yards.

Moon

What do you do when the moon spoils your night? Take a picture of it, I suppose...

Registax found my RAW images particularly distasteful, and simply would not align them. This is just a few frames, converted first to TIF, which it managed properly. If I planned on doing a lot more pictures of the Moon, I'd figure out what's going on. For me, however, the whole attraction of the camera is to reach what I can't see in the eyepiece, and no photo can capture the same sense that simply looking at the moon can. So there won't likely be a lot of Moon shots here in the long run.

M42 & M43, a different look

This is a single 30 second exposure at ISO 800 Of M42 from March 10th. Unfortunately, I had more issues with my mount, and most of this set ended up centered too poorly to add to any previous sets. Rather than just duplicate the shot from a couple of weeks ago, I made curves and levels adjustments to this set, producing one heavily underexposed and one heavily overexposed copy, then combined as an HDR set in PhotoShop.

And this is the surprising result-taken from about 50 30-second exposures (actually, 94 exposures-over 40 were thrown out due to tracking errors), in a polluted sky, with a telescope that was falling out of the mounting clamps...there is detail in there I would not have dreamed of catching. Every bit of detail is contained in the photo above; what stacking does is average out the noise while keeping the signal, allowing the image to be stretched without the noise going with it. I was especially pleased with all the dust lanes in M43 (the upper circular part of the nebula, at the top in this picture.) Of course, it's still a very noisy picture; there is no substitute for catching more photons. Click the image for a larger view. The saved TIFF file is better than this jpeg, but file size matters here...

M42 may be the most over-photographed thing in the sky, but there is just so much going on there, within the reach of small amateur scopes, that it's no wonder.

M44, The Beehive Cluster

Like most open clusters (not all, but most), M44 is probably more impressive in binoculars than with a scope. At any rate, here it is; it's a well0known Messier object, so grabbing a view of it is the law, right?

I've left most of the vignetting intact, rather than PhotoShop it out; I hope to fix the cause mechanically soon rather than rely on software. And it's a good demonstration of that warm fuzzy coma that Newts are known for, especially relatively fast ones (mine is f/5.) I am working on a PS action that will correct coma, as opposed to the fix for spherical aberrations that are built into it.  While similar, they are not the same thing...

Leo Triplets update

As mentioned, I got some better shots last night of these three...only about 20 minutes total. I took another 50 minutes on the 10th; once those are added to these existing subs, I expect to see some progress.

NGC 3628, improving with each step...

M66 (left) and M65. For their relative positions, see this post.

Late additions from March 9, M97 & M108

Again, I was having issues with wind and moisture, and shooting into the "Great Glare Of The North". Here are the last couple of items I shot, mostly to serve as baselines for future shots.

M97, The Owl Nebula, found near Beta Ursae Majoris, or in the bowl of the Big Dipper. It's a planetary nebula, formed when stars similar to ours die out; they are actually relatively common, but always beautiful to look at.

M108, a smallish (to me at least) galaxy between the Owl Nebula and Beta Ursae Majoris, the lower right star in the Big Dipper if you are viewing it "rightside up".













A month later, I reprocessed the shot these two items were cropped from. No more detail, but easier to see. This post shows the later version.

Galaxies in Ursa Major/Canes Venatici

The Big Dipper is simply loaded with galaxies...the two most famous are M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and M101, The Pinwheel Galaxy. From those two, starting at the Dipper's handle, one can take a galaxy-hopping tour of the sky in the North. Unfortunately, the North is where my local pollution is brightest, between Target and Home Depot's parking lot lights (thanks, guys) and a neighbor who uses halogen floods across my back fence, again all night.So, the same excuses, blah blah blah, but I really can't wait to shoot these guys from a dark site.

Here is my first attempt at M51, from March 5.

On March 9, I got some better shots, but it was very windy, especially up high. Note how that causes starts to twinkle, and causes time exposures to make blobs out of stars. In spite of that, the air was clear enough that I could start to pull a little natural color out of the noise.

This is simply an averaged stack of the previous two pictures-I can't wait to get some dark-sky shots and play around with these same software toys.

M63, The Sunflower Galaxy, is just a quick hop from M51, part of my favorite trail. Again, room for improvement all around. 23 minutes total exposure. March 5 again.

Back to the Dipper's handle is M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. March 5.

And last in this night of shooting was M100, a bit south in Virgo. This was on the list of  "spiral or curvilinear nebulae" to be seen to have a spiral form by Lord Rosse, published in 1850; as poor as this shot is, I still have a better view than most of history's great astronomers...

Galaxies in Leo

Shot on February 4, 2011. Roughly 43 minutes of total exposure, ISO 800. and as always, a lot of light noise to cope with.  That's M66 on the lower left, M65 on the lower right, and NGC 3628 at top, one of my favorite galaxies, due to the irregular shape and huge swath of dark dust.

I have a more recent set of exposures of these three, usually called the "Leo Triplets", so I'll post pictures of the individual galaxies later.

This is the area around Zeta Ori, the left star in Orion's Belt. Taken during the same light-drenched session that the first M42 picture was below. There was a TON of post processing here, i'm not sure it even qualifies as actual astrophotography any more, but nothing was added, composited, or moved.

That's the Flame Nebula at the top (NGC 2024) and the famous Horsehead Nebula at the left (Barnard 33, against the red backbround of IC 434.) That's NGC 20234 at center left. There is a lot to be redone in this picture, but Orion is leaving my night sky early now; next year.

M42 & M43, The Great Orion Nebula

One of the most famous objects in the sky; from most of the world, it can even be seen with the naked eye. Here's a series of my first efforts, then some examples of how the obvious problems were fixed.


First-February 9, 2011. I had taken the scope somewhere, and set up on the grass in someone's front yard, near a wicked floodlight. Boy, did it ruin everything-but it what really set the ball rolling for me; now I was committed to learning how to do post processing AND get better quality shots.

On February 21, I got some much better quality subs, and started getting the feeling that I might actually get the hang of this...

Then, of February 28, I shot a 22 minute set, and started really getting the hang of the post work. Shots like this are typically composites of several exposures; short for the bright central area, and progressively longer to the lower right. This was NOT done like that; it's simply 44 30-second exposures and some PhotoShop trickery.

M1 The Crab Nebula

Taken 2011-02-27, and one of the first sets taken with a camera (300D) mounted properly to my scope (8" Newt.) 28 30-second exposures, stacked and with dark frames subtracted. It was a typically bright night, and the scope still had not been thoroughly cleaned and colimated, and it shows. But, it meant I was finally getting into the game after many many years of wanting to, and the use of short exposures meant that I no longer was held back by a poorly-performing mount.

M57 The Ring Nebula, July 2007

This was taken some time in July 2007, using a Digital rebel, mounted on one of those spiffy clamps that supposedly allows you to mount an SLR to an eyepiece. There were issues with weight and stability and alignment and...

I had four exposures, of 5, 10, 26 and 30 seconds, recently stacked with DeepSkyTracker. But really, I can't wait to get back to this one and do it properly; it's one of my favorite planetaries.

Saturn/Moon conjunction, December 2001

This was taken with my first scope-a dime store variety Meade ETX-60. Lots of delicious GoTo choices, and absolutely no chance of seeing any of them with such a tiny piece of glass. Now I know...avoid dime store telescopes!

The picture was taken with a Sony Mavica digital camera, held up to the eyepiece. It was a minor miracle of timing to get Saturn, still partly occluded by the Moon's dark limn.

Starting a new hobby, by combining two others

I enjoyed stargazing for years, but over the last decade, the local light pollution became so bad that visual observing through the eyepiece became pointless. The equipment I own (a very cheap 8" Newtonian, with an even cheaper Equatorial mount) made photo exposures of even 60 seconds worthless, so I didn't pursue astrophotography. Then a few years ago, the mount and tripod were damaged by some bad weather-and there they sat, and I focused instead on regular photography.

Early in 2011, while doing a lot of cleaning and yard recovery, I decided to have a go at putting it all back together. With some work, the tripod was made stable enough to get by, and I had since learned about various software packages for stacking short digital exposures to get the effect of a long film exposure. This I had to try...

So this blog is to give myself a record of my progress, both as I continue to improve my equipment (there is no budget for new gear, so I have been gradually re-machining and rebuilding what I have) and as my processing skills improve. The early entries are pretty unexciting, especially in this day of Hubble images, but even these bad shots show more than what I was ever able to see visually; I still find this exciting. I hope over time that anyone looking will see a steady path of improvement in what I post.