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.