The Astronomy hobby thread
 

For years, or more rather decades, I've been into the visual aspect of Astronomy. I've had many telescopes ranging in size from 3.5" to 16". I've recently taken an interest in Astrophotography and purchased a decent equatorial mount to give it a go.

My current telescopes are great for visual use but I'm finding out they are not quite up snuff for photography. They will work for now as I learn all the intricacies of the hobby.

My Fujifilm X-Pro 1 camera does ok but it will be replaced with a dedicated AP camera in the future.

Anyway, I know there are others here on Pelican that enjoy the hobby as well. I thought we could use this thread to share photos, ideas, stories, etc.

This image of the Orion Nebula (M42) and the Running Man was taken with a Skywatcher 120 ED telescope sitting on a Losmandy G-11 mount. This is a stack of 20 images with exposures ranging from 60 seconds to 10 minutes.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506439150.jpg

Im lucky enough to have a very nice planetarium at work, staffed by one of the Star Gazers. Although they are more about naked eye observation

I don't need to stare into the universe to feel insignificant.

That's an awesome picture, well done.

How do you guide?
Oh, $4000 in gear is PLENTY capable!

This was shot through an 80mm short tube refractor, Nikon F body, Fugi 800ASA film (can't remember the specifics...). Piggybacked on a friends Meade 12" SCT used for tracking (visually correcting, about once every 20 seconds or so). Maybe a 10 minute exposure? I took a cellphone picture of the framed picture on my shelf, so obviously there is some degradation...http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506439793.jpg

I will say, once you get into the...40+ inch range...nothing else compares. Of course, once you get into the 100+ inch range, nothing else compares either... :D

Eric, that's your stack? Very nice! I have always had alignment issues so tracking is always a mess . I have a Celestron GEM and a relatively small OTA (102mm refract) but stacking should deliver a decent exposure. I need more practice and a much better CCD.

Oh, it's FRIGHTENING the equipment that amateurs have these days. I was doing stuff back when the first real 1Kx1K CCDs were coming out (we used an FLI, I think was the brand), but most were still doing film work, maybe with the SBIG autoguider hanging off the side. Now, you have full remote observatories with research grade filters and guiders...

Beyond my research, I worked at the Skywatcher's Inn, which at the time was a bed and breakfast with several telescopes, where guests could take part in anything from a few hours of casual eyepiece observing with my as a night sky guide, to a 6 hour CCD session using our 20" Mak Cass in a dome.

I was really into the hobby for several years. The local astronomy club was great. They had many guys willing to help me learn. It was weird to go to a "star party" and it was just so dark I could not see the people I was talking to. It was funny to go to a meeting at the local planetarium and actually see the people I had talked to for hours.

One of the guys pointed out once it was a great hobby if you were an adulterer. Just head out with the telescope on a clear night and tell the wife "Honey I will be home at dawn" we all laughed and then he said he was more interested in finding all the Messier objects than finding a girlfriend. We all agreed we were nerds.

That was back in the stone ages before digital photography. It was a real pain to "hyper" the film, and try to get the sensitivity up to more than ISO 400. Now with digital it is so easy to set it for ISO 6400 or more and still get great detail.

Yepper, I used Deep Sky Stacker to register and stack the images, brought the final into Lightroom for a few tweaks and then Photoshop for the clean up.
I also used a Polemaster CCD camera to polar align the mount. It really helps get it nailed down pretty good.

Nice! This was my first guided capture. I used a QHYCCD autoguider and planetary cam with a tiny guidescope. All hooked up with PHD2 guiding.

Here's another from last weekend. This is M45, The Pleiades.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506447178.jpg

absolutely awesome sauce!

a buddy's father in law is an astronomy nut and has shared some neat stuff with us. perhaps the coolest for those without equipment was the ability to watch satellites cross the sky around dusk with the naked eye.

oh and there is an app (forgot the name) that tracks satellites and tells you where they are.

curious are there mounts that could do the job for less $$$$?

Like I said, it's frightening what you can produce these days with amateur stuff. That M45 image shows the Merope nebula better than most I've seen from people who have done it for years.

One note, go back and reprocess Orion a bit. The Running Man nebula should be more blue white, like Merope. I know that a full color CCD in a SLR camera can be hard to deal with (they all have color bias, depends on the chip maker), whereas 4 color filter work with a B&W camera is truer.
The bluer nebula is behind the stellar cluster, and is reflecting the blue/white color that the young hot stars are emitting. The red nebula is Hydrogen, and is actually fluorescing from the energy of the stars within. So, see if you can get the two nebula to be two distinct colors, I'm concerned that you pushed the reds a bit too far trying to get good color out of M42.

Thanks Mike, I noticed that color in the Running Man as well. It was much better in an earlier process session but Orion was not as good, lol. Lots to learn!

berettafan...yes, there are lots of choices in mounts all of varying quality and cost.

I'd really like to get into this. I looked into it briefly a few years ago, but got discouraged due to local light pollution, overwhelming product info, and general ignorance. Can someone dumb it down a bit to give a general idea of what you would need to purchase to do deep space photography?

Type of telescope, software, mount, CCI (which is, I believe the way the images are captured), etc.

Astronomy was a hobby of mine when I was in college and had no money, but it was a different kind of astronomy. Many civilizations saw the stars as mythical beings and made up stories about them. My hobby was identifying the constellations and learning the various stories told about them (Orion and Sirius, The Hydra and the Crab, etc). It was cheap and entertaining, no equipment needed. It's hard to find a dark sky around here any more.

The app is called Stellarium, its free and awesome.
On a related note I have a Meade etx 90mm that I use, and it has a port for astro photography,
is this a good starter scope and what sort of camera would be a good starting point. I have a 13 yo whose is interested and it would be great to get her going.

The biggest reason I sorta lost interest was the light pollution. I have to drive for about an hour and a half to get to a good dark spot. It is the club site and it is secure and dark.

We were in Northern AZ last weekend. Almost eerily dark up there still. Love being up where you and see the Milky Way with the naked eye. :)

I lived astronomy as a kid back in the late 60's going so far as to grind my own mirror and hand built tube and clock drive equitorial mount with dreams of building my own cold camera. After finishing the first mirror, I had visions of grinding a 12" cassegrain mirror set but couldn't afford the blank. Never got around to doing any AP and by the time ccd's became affordable, I couldn't handle staying up late anymore. I have a 8" SCT in the closet that hasn't seen starlight in years and at this point would prefer a smaller aperture refractor for casual planetary observations in the city. Too much trouble to get to dark skies. Had dreams of getting a cabin in the back woods and building a robotic Ritchey-Chretien 20"er for remote AP and viewing. That would be the life.

I would love to see a dark sky the way the ancients saw it. A bright sky has almost nothing in it. The darker the sky the more spectacular it is. In a way, modern life has paved over both the earth and the sky.

I remember when I first started looking into it, there was some mount, I think it was a something EQ5 or something like that, that was about $1500-1600. Most folks said that was the best balance of cost and quality for AP.


Probably the easiest would be a scope on a tracking mount with a DSLR w a telephoto lens piggybacked.

Lots of AP these days is done with DSLRs, some is done with dedicated AP cameras. For long exposures with pinpoint stars especially at high magnification, you'll need a quality ($$$) tracking mount and a guide scope. Yeah, you strap 2 telescopes together, and use 2 "cameras". One camera is taking the photos, and the other is watching some star, and using a computer to keep that star stationary (pretty much all mounts will skew a bit while tracking which causes issues with long exposures, so you use the guide scope/camera to compensate for the skew).

The two sites below have some decent info about doing AP (astrophotography) on a budget.

BudgetAstro - Home
This one shows a couple of mounts that are in the $1200-1600 range, I think.
Beginner Equipment for Astrophotography

One of the things to remember is that the more magnified you want to go, the more money you'll need to spend on the gear. If you are using a DSLR for a wide angle shot of the milkyway, you don't need much equipment. If you want to zoom way in on some DSO (deep sky object), you'll need a better mount and tracking.

Also, the darker the skies the better, but some amount of LP (light pollution) can be dealt with.

A huge part of the process is the post processing that's often/usually done in photoshop.

I also have an ETX but it is the original model, I do have a "T" attachment but the drive no longer works. I use it for waaaay easy travel, moon watching and sun spot tracking. It is a great starter scope as it is stable and the optics are good.

AND higher mags require better seeing, ie clearer and drier sky. There are filters that can remove "some" LP but darker is always better.

There are places where you can. Really, to get pristine, you'd have to go back to cavemen times. If you were in/near a city back in medieval times, you'd have tons of smoke from fires and lamps to deal with, and the smoke from oil, coal and wood would probably have a huge impact.

Best sky ive ever seen was at Philmont in NM. In the middle of 200k pretty primitive acres. Nearest towns are 10-20mi away over mountains. No glow on the horizon. Was pretty amazing what you could see at night!

Find someplace on the map where it's black and go there.

http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/files/...ollution_1.jpg

I live in Houston, 4th largest city in the US, a very big, sprawling metropolis. I think I'm currently in a red or white LP zone. I was in an Orange zone. My mom used to live in the middle of no where in the panhandle of FL, but she was still on the border of yellow and green zones. The difference between there and here was huge.

I was also in the Amazon forest and it's pretty dark there.

I'd still like to get out west into the desert somewhere some time.

First, an apology. Many of these pictures were taken with very early CCD technology, using small computers, and were then converted to low-res JPEG files because that's all we could handle back then (many of these are 1998-2004). So, they look like crap.

4 filter true color Eagle Nebula, "Pillars of Creation"
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481416.JPG

Spiral Galaxy M74
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481416.JPG

M27, planetary Nebula, true color
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481500.JPG

Orion Nebula, same as Eric's first picture, but a smaller field:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481500.jpg

Orion with a different telescope and camera
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481500.jpg

M31, Andromeda Galaxy. This is a 9x9 tiled mosaic that I built, IIRC there was something like 10 images per tile, plus flat field images and dark field images. So, something like 20 pictures per tile, 9 tiles, all slowly stitched together.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481723.JPG

North American Nebula. Another 9x9 timed mosaic, but this time with closer to 30-40 pictures per tile, since each tile had several filters to image through.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481723.JPG

NGC 4567/8, true color interacting galaxies:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481723.jpg

M8, true color Triffid Nebula
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506481723.JPG

I tended to over expose bright stars, because I was often using 20-40 inch telescopes. I preferred to blow out stars in return for fewer images. Technically, 1 10 minute image is cleaner (better signal to noise) than 10 one minute images stacked.

Now, the more obscure things...

Coma Galaxy cluster. We put a wide field prime focus camera on the 24 inch telescope which gave us a 1 degree field of view, so I could do big fields like this.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482157.JPG

Virsgo Galaxy Cluster
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482248.JPG

Cassiopeia A supernova remnant (we were searching for the progenitor neutron star)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482248.jpg

FY Aquila (Variable star, was thought at one time to be the progenitor star for a famous gamma ray burst in 1979). Turned out to be a Mira type star (it has a small localized nebula around it)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482248.JPG

Abell 39, a very faint planetary nebula, one of the most perfect spheres ever seen in space:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482248.gif

Wolf-Rayet 124
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482248.JPG

AND...the pure science stuff, which always is the ugliest imaging...

GRB020813 (I helped discover this one...)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482688.jpg

GRB030329
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482688.jpg

XTEJ1118. Either a black hole, a micro quasar, or a super-massive neutron star
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482714.JPG

Supernova 2002ap
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482714.JPG

Supernova 2000cb
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482714.JPG

GRB010222a
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1506482714.JPG

Keep posting your pics guys...awesome stuff! Thanks for sharing with those of us who've been "blinded by the light" our whole lives...

If I had access to Pazuzus toys I'd never be home.

my wife as a teen ground a 8'' f8 mirror for a Newtonian
she had the tube internal mounts and spider but not much else

some years later I found an older 8'' f7 Newtonian with a equatorial -clock drive
so used that to finish and mount her mirror and tube
her's was much better then the factory produced f7

when I was a kid dad had a german ww2 tripod binocular by leica artillery/range used
it was huge and heavy but had a crisp image

now we have a little 3.5'' folded mirror scope that sure is eazyer to lug around

That's almost a North Korea/South Korea division of light and dark along the I35 corridor. Amazing.

Great stuff, this is fun to see (Eric, those pics are spectacular!)
You fellas into the scene probably already know all about this, I heard about it for the first time about a month ago on the radio, but there are international guidelines for rating the darkness of a stargazing park:

International Dark Sky Parks

Interesting tidbit to blow your mind.

Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 - over 40 years ago - each had state of the art guidance and robotics systems.

Jim Bell states in his book The Interstellar Age, (2016) that :
each of their computers were less powerful than the current day, average, remote key fob..

Think about that - and sending the signals to the system millions and millions of miles away, to the end of the our planetary system and beyond. !!

Incredible stuff Mike, thanks!

Speaking of the Voyagers...
As Voyager 1 left Saturn behind to venture out into interstellar space, Carl Sagan (in 1990) asked the Voyager imaging team to turn Voyager's camera back toward earth. That image of the tiny Earth, barely visible through the rings of Saturn became the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" (less than 1 pixel in the image). Sagan was moved to write what I think is some of the best prose written in modern times: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there......on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of human conceits, than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot.......the only home we have ever known".