This is several years old, but for some reason it really makes me happy.
Falling with style indeed!
And as a contrast on the theme… This makes me laugh… but not in a happy way.
(Sound required as there isn’t really a picture.)
Ouch.
(Really blow your mind and play them both at the same time!!!)
The other night R once again caused me to be awake at 2AM. It was pretty clear, so I again went comet hunting. My loss of sleep is your gain.
This time I was better prepared. I mounted the camera on the telescope and hand guided some shots. The camera was set up with the 70-200mm f/2.8 and the 1.8x teleconverter. These are full frame shots post stacking (9×10 second exposures at ISO 3200) and level adjustment. The big bright blob is the massively overexposed Capella shining through the horizon haze. Capella was barely above the local horizon thanks to Stone Quarry Hill. I forgot to note how many of the exposures were actually used, some were tossed because my guiding was poor. My guess is 5-7 of the images were ultimately stacked.
At one point a cloud obstructed the view, so I swung the telescope up a bit and took a look at the Andromeda Galaxy. I took about 14 shots and kept 7: so 7×10 second exposure. I have to confess I’m rather happy with how this shot turned out. You can see the small satellite galaxy clearly and the dust lanes are visible, exposing the spiral.
I’m getting the hang of the stacking software, and I figured out why my saturation was getting wrecked. I’ll be doing my level adjustments in Photoshop from now on. I’m certainly not going to win any prizes for either of these shots, but the M31 represents a personal best on this target… and only about a minute worth of total exposure time. With a bit more tracking practice… a reticle for my eyepiece… an actual sidereal drive… a telescope I can actually shoot through…
Mmmm…. upgrades.
I used a program called DeepSkyStacker to create stacked versions of the images I took this morning. I’m still a novice at this, but the reduced noise is certainly worth the effort.
The first is a series of six five-second exposures at ISO 800. I didn’t get a dark frame,[1] so the hot pixels on the CCD are apparent as little series of colored dots. The noise is also pretty significant.
The second is a series of six five-second exposures at ISO3200. Each of these individual frames had the same quality of the shot I posted this morning. For these I did have a dark frame, so the noise is significantly reduced. I played with the exposure settings of the resulting image a bit, but that’s the part I don’t have quite figured out. This software was considerably easier to use than the software I previously used (Registack or something like that) and had much better documentation (hmmm… related properties perhaps??).
One thing I noticed is that both stacking processes seemed to wash out the color significantly. I’m not sure if this was the stacking or my exposure adjustments afterward. Looking forward to some nice deep sky pics later this summer… but for now… I need sleep… badly.
R didn’t want to sleep last night, so when I found myself awake at 2AM I decided I’d take a shot at the new comet in town, C/2009 R1 McNaught. The comet is low in the north eastern sky currently, so I walked out onto the street in front of our house to see it. It took me two return trips to the computer to check the finder map before I was sure I’d spotted it. In the end (once I was certain where to look), it was quite easy to see with the binoculars, but I couldn’t pick it up naked eye. This morning, you could easily find Mirphak (brightest star in Perseus), slide down to delta Per (bright star in the images) and the comet was just below and to the left. It’s moving westward (towards the sun) so it will be a bit further down and to the left tomorrow.
The coma is so bright and small in binoculars that in the high-haze I was looking through last night it was indistinguishable from a star. The camera tells more though. This is a single shot somewhat enhanced for contrast, but at 3200 ISO it doesn’t tolerate much brightening. I have multiple pictures, so when I get a chance to do some image work I’ll stack them for some noise cancellation.
The coma is quite visibly green in this 5 second exposure and the ion tail can be seen stretching off at 1 o’clock. I couldn’t get to my ‘scope without waking the whole house, so I was limited to short untracked exposures. In the inverse, the tail is somewhat easier to pick up.
As a bonus, while I was getting the camera setup at 2:45AM I had a brilliant ISS flyby. I was pretty sure that’s what it was because it was so bright it left a corona in the sky (again the high haze). Checking up on it, I confirmed the pass with a listed magnitude of -3.0.[1] Wow.
I also had a short bright meteor which left a visible trail for a few seconds in the sky. I guess you just have to go outside and look up.
Optics Picture of the Day brings us this beautiful video of a circumzenithal arc that appears periodically as the high altitude clouds float by.
Have I mentioned lately how awesome the ISS is? Oh, and how you can see it from your very own personal backyard?
Oh yeah. You. Go look. Now.
PS: The fact that K’s computer is typing everything backwards isn’t making this easy to write. ?naem I tahw eeS
After a fantastic week of visible ISS passes for the east coast, we’ll be cooling our jets for a while. If you’re desparate to get a glimpse in the next few days and you have ideal horizon conditions, you might be able to catch a glimpse. The station won’t get much above 20 degrees or so from my viewing area, but yours might be a bit better.
To hold you over until later in the week, here is a image I took 7:30PM on the 15th. The station is moving from right to left in this view to the south. This is a 49 second exposure, so you can get a sense of how quickly the station is moving. Unfortunately I was about 30 seconds late starting the exposure so we don’t get a full pass. You can see from the image that the station is VERY bright. Consider how easy Orion is to pick out, and that star in the lower left is Sirius, magnitude -1.47 (the brightest star in the night sky). When you realize that the stars are essentially stationary, there are 49 seconds worth of photons burned into that spot, yet the space station is moving! You can also see the relative yellow-ish color of the reflected sunlight compared to the bright blue of Sirius.
Enjoy.
In the last week or so I have discovered that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know how easy the ISS is to see!
If you didn’t know, or you knew but just haven’t bothered, why not!?
If I told you you could just step into your backyard and witness one of the most complex technical achievements of mankind… wouldn’t you do it!?
If you’re along the east coast of North America, the viewing conditions are almost ideal right now and tonight you can see the shuttle and ISS playing tag overhead! Many nights have two visible passes, one just after sundown, and one an orbit later (about 90 minutes). The space station is easy to see because it’s in a relatively low orbit and because it’s HUGE. After this week’s shuttle mission it will be bigger yet. There will be no debating that it is the brightest thing in the sky except for the Sun and Moon.[1]
Want to see it? Great! For a simple set of information on where (and more importantly WHEN) to look, I recommend SpaceWeather.
On the right hand side of their main website is a link for “Satellite Flybys“. Put in your zip code and Shazam! A convenient list of readily observable satellites, times and places appears.
Go! Look! You’ll be impressed that the brilliant yellow light is really a distant outpost of humanity in space. There are real people up there and who knows, maybe they’re looking at you too.
The optical tube assembly of my ‘scope is attached to the mount (and tripod) by a pair of clamps. Each clamp consists of two identical halves which bolt together on the sides forming a ring around the tube. A nice feature of this construction is that the bolt holes which are used to attach the clamps to the mount are mirrored on the top of the assembly.[1]
So on my way home from work today, I picked up a couple of bolts and built a fairly simple jig to mount my camera ‘piggy-back’ on my telescope. What’s nice about this is the ‘scope and camera are reasonably well aligned, and the scope can easily be used for guiding the camera. You may recall the suffering I went through a while back trying to actually mount my camera to the business end of the telescope. Instead, I can use the high-powered eye-piece for my scope and manually track the star with the scope.
Obviously this is still far from ideal, but I wanted to get a sense for the effectiveness before I invested in any actual hardware (beyond a few bucks at True Value).
So I mounted the 70x200mm and opened it all the way up. Here was one of my first four shots which got lucky with a meteor.
It’s actually amazing how many of my shots caught a random meteor, or satellite or other random bit of space junk moving somewhere in the frame.
Kicking the lens up to 200mm adds quite a bit of detail.
Then I re-framed to pick up the Horsehead and Flame Nebulas to the left end of Orion’s belt.
In this heavily enhanced version, you can just make out the namesake features above the noise… but you wouldn’t know that was a horse if I hadn’t told you.[2]
Then finally, a gratuitous Pleiades shot.[3]
Date: 07/12/2008
