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.