Astronomy

[cucubits]

Since this came up in the hobbies thread, let's go into a bit more details here. Maybe there are others interested as well or just curious about what can be done with the current amateur technology. I'll do my best not to ramble on too long and I'll post pictures too.

Intro:

While I've been interested in this topic for a long time, I got somewhat more serious (as many others) at the beginning of the pandemic with Comet Neowise. I started devouring youtube videos, joined an astronomy forum and I fell head first into the rabbit hole. I couldn't stop reading and learning about this and it was completely mindblowing to me how much hidden detail can be extracted from even the most light polluted cities.

There are many directions one can take in this hobby:

- visual astronomy: sort of old school IMO, where you have eye pieces and just look through a telescope. This is not really doable unless under some really dark skies. From the city, everything is washed out and very hard to see even on the bigger telescopes.

- astrophotography: this is my chosen path. It's incredible how much detail can be squeezed out by imaging for crazy long times. Essentially you expose the same spot of the sky for many hours by taking lots and lots of "sub-exposures" which are then combined in software, the noise is more or less discarded and only real signal is left. Deep sky objects like Nebulae, Galaxies, Clusters, Planetary Nebulae (supernova remnants) can be seen with great detail. Over many hours of exposure, you're essentially fishing for real data signal and even the faintest and rarest photons slowly add up and build the image.

Gear:

Gear is important but not critical at first. With the correct techniques, even a regular camera on a tripod can get unexpected results. On the other end of the mentioned rabbit hole, there's the more expensive telescopes with extremely precise glass, a mount which counters the rotation of the earth with incredible accuracy. Most often this mount is the most expensive piece of equipment out of everything else. The accuracy needed really is borderline unimaginable. For example, when imaging at an average "zoom" level, it needs to point the telescope in a fixed spot in the sky with an error of under 1 arcsecond. One arcsecond is 1/3600 of 1 degree. This is the equivalent of the width of a human hair at 10 meters away. Or  the diameter of a coin at 2 miles.

For now I won't go into too much details but things get complicated fast here. The choice of the telescope type is important according to desired targets, then there are specialized astronomy cameras which are much more sensitive than regular "earth" cameras 🙂 Power requirements, control software, cabling, specialized filters, optical correctors, spacers, focusers. Additionally, besides the main imaging telescope, most setups have a 2nd small telescope piggybacking on the main one with the sole purpose to guide it. What this means is that small telescope, with a separate camera looks at the star positions around the target and tracks the motion of the mount. Through dedicated software it sends very small correction pulses to the mount to have it track very precisely. This is how we reach that accuracy explained above.

As expected, capturing the data is only part of the whole process. It can take many hours in all sorts of imaging software to bring out the details and stack the captured images. (big range from free to photoshop to dedicated astrophotograpy options)

There are so many things that can and do go wrong so when starting out, inevitably there will be more troubleshooting nights than actual imaging time. It's part of the fun for me 🙂

But when things do work, and you find the target, start imaging and start seeing those invisible details, it all makes sense and the satisfaction is amazing.

 

If you made it this far, let's go through some actual results. Currently I use 2 telescopes. One "smaller" 80mm refractor (385mm focal length) for deep sky objects and a big one (8 inch diameter) that I designed and 3D printed (1000mm focal length) to use on planets and the moon.

 

This is the small one imaging away on a random night next to our apt complex:

The big one, testing after I put it together. I still can't believe what details we're getting on the moon with it:

 

The great conjunction, Jupiter and Saturn:

 

The rest of the images are all with the smaller telescope. Total exposure times range from 1 - 7 hours per image.

M13 The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. Pretty amazing to see hundreds of thousands of stars clumped up so close:

NGC2244 Rosette Nebula. Made up of clouds of Hydrogen Alfa and dust. The hydrogen Alfa particles emit this deep red light (around 656nm):

M16 Eagle Nebula. This one should look familiar. The Pillars of Creation. It's the most famous Hubble image. I still can't believe I got to see it with my tiny telescope.

M27 Dumbbell Nebula. This is a so called planetary nebula, created by the death of a star which pushes out incredible amounts of material. In the center there is a white dwarf.

NGC7000 North America Nebula:

Lastly, also incredible to me, I've actually captured some surface details on Mars. There are much better images out there but I did not expect to see something like this with my gear:

 

[Sandy Bridge]

That's pretty impressive!  I'll admit that as someone who hasn't done any astronomy I skipped ahead to the photos, and then went off to the text. But some of those pictures, especially the ones of the stars, look like they could be professional.

I'm not really into astronomy myself, beyond a one-off night of visual astronomy a few years ago, and seeing the fruits of a friend's efforts during a total solar eclipse a few years ago, with a regular single-lens reflex camera.  I learned about astrophotography a few months ago from a friend whose boyfriend does it, but it's more impressive seeing the pictures on my desktop here than on her phone.  But he goes out into the country for the astrophotography; from your telescope pictures it looks like you aren't really out in the middle of nowhere?  There look to be so many street lights in the background, I wouldn't have thought you could get that good of photographs!

You've also reminded me that there's an observatory up the road from my new dwelling that I haven't checked out yet, but it looks like they have near-weekly public programs.  That would make for a fun change of pace on a Friday night.

[cucubits]

Thank you for the kind words!

Yes, imaging from the middle of a light polluted city full of street lights is no fun and borderline not worth the effort. What I mean is to combat light pollution to get the same amount of useful data, from the city you must expose for much much longer than from a darker location. To get an idea, imaging for 10 hours from the city can give similar results to just 1 hour from a dark location. Usually it's worth a few hours drive to get better data but it's not always doable. For one image, I usually take my whole setup and image from our apt complex for 1-3 hours per evening for a few days. Since it's an apartment complex and not a private backyard, I can't leave the telescope out, I have to sit close by. Way too expensive to lose sight for even a little bit.

Gear does help: the telescope is fully automated. Once I prepare everything I just start the sequence and it does everything by itself:

• it finds the target on its own
• compares and confirms pointing accuracy with a sort of digital star chart
• communicates with the mount to start that very accurate tracking I mentioned
• focuses on its own (this is way more complex than regular cameras as even a few degrees of temperature change will expand/contract the glass and telescope body enough to need refocusing)
• cools the main camera (yes, astro cameras have built in peltier coolers on the sensor. Shooting at very low temps, keeps a type of noise down)
• starts taking the pictures

Another very important piece of gear are filters. Many of those images showing the colorful gas and dust clouds would not be possible from the city without these. They are highly specialized (and expensive) filters which cut out almost all unwanted wavelengths of light while leaving to pass only a very tiny section. By very tiny I mean around 5-10nm only gets through from the whole spectrum.

[serpro69]

The pictures are really impressive. I often put space-related pictures as a screen wallpaper, and your North America Nebula or Rosette Nebula could easily qualify for that :) 

[cucubits]

I'd happily supply full resolution images of either of those. Original ones are from an APS-C size sensor so 6248x4176. You'd be able to crop to your aspect ratio.

The Rosette is actually still work in progress, I'm still learning a lot about the post-processing and planning on re-doing it.

[serpro69]

2 hours ago, cucubits said:

I'd happily supply full resolution images of either of those. Original ones are from an APS-C size sensor so 6248x4176. You'd be able to crop to your aspect ratio.

The Rosette is actually still work in progress, I'm still learning a lot about the post-processing and planning on re-doing it.

Please do once you feel they're in the "shape" that you like, would be very nice :) I usually prefer real-life photos to "digital wallpapers" on my desktop if I have a choice :)

[Eban]

I'm one of those weirdos that would love to take a one way trip to Mars 

 

 

 

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/seeing-things-on-mars-a-history-of-martian-illusions/ss-AATtxlY?li=BB122uej#image=1

[Custom90gt]

@cucubits - any guestimates how much money you have into those setups?  I would love to get into it, but until I'm done with residency it seems like a pipe dream.

[serpro69]

25 minutes ago, Custom90gt said:

@cucubits - any guestimates how much money you have into those setups?  I would love to get into it, but until I'm done with residency it seems like a pipe dream.

Would also be interested to know the approx price of an "entrance ticket"  I'm pretty sure with this kind of a hobby, the sky is the limit (no pun intended) and there are always extra things to buy. But what would be a "minimal viable setup" to start with astrophotography? 

[cucubits]

26 minutes ago, Custom90gt said:

@cucubits - any guestimates how much money you have into those setups?  I would love to get into it, but until I'm done with residency it seems like a pipe dream.

It doesn't have to be a pipe dream and you most certainly don't need to jump straight into the expensive end. I started with just a simple mirrorless camera with a zoom lens and a very inexpensive star tracker mount. Sure, the target selection and end result quality will be up to a point proportional to the gear but you really can start out with a small investment.

I would say the mount is the most important. If you can get a good, reliable one from the start, it'll help a lot along the way.

One you progress away from a regular camera and get start looking for an actual telescope, it cat get a bit tricky. You would need to choose the telescope smartly according to your sky conditions and more importantly for what sort of targets you'll be looking at. If you want to image galaxies or planets as opposed to nebuale, you'll choose the telescope accordingly.

 

I'll post some videos and channels which helped me a lot along the way.

This is a great video answering these exact questions and shows real results from all price levels. Nico's videos were actually the ones that helped me get into all this from the start with zero prior knowledge. He's very thorough and helpful. He's even replying to emails with extra help if needed.

 

A few more channels on the topic which I follow and I have to admit watched every single video:

https://www.youtube.com/c/Astrobiscuit  He's genuinely funny and informative in all his videos. Not too many, very well produced.

https://www.youtube.com/c/CuivTheLazyGeek   Cuiv is awesome. He's a french dude living in Tokyo, plagued by light pollution and has lots and lots of content. You can learn from him a great deal on post processing and about the control software NINA.

https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanODonnell   Dylan is more on the funny/sarcastic end. I absolutely love his attitude and his content.

 

There are many others out there but this is my top three. They really just work hard to spread the knowledge, without pushing sponsors and products like many others do.

 

Having said all this, in hopes that my wife doesn't find this thread, this is my deep-sky setup (the small telescope used for nebulae):

Telescope - 80mm aperture Altair Astro EDT-R. Not sure, I think it was about $700

Field flattener (sort of an optical corrector needed to get good stars across the whole image): $200

Mount - Rainbow Astro RST-135, $3800

Main camera - ZWO 2600MC, $2000

Guide camera - ZWO 462MC, $300

Guide mini telescope - $250

Motorized Focuser - $200

Filters: $500

Strudy tripod: $300

Additionally you would need either a laptop with a control software, connected to a good USB hub which goes to all the parts from the telescope or a purpose built mini PC connected permanently to the gear and you remote connect to that.

 

 

 

 

 

[ssj92]

Here's some of my pics. Ignore the "milky way" one. I somehow added the wrong pic a long time ago and never noticed. 

My current gear:

Celestron C11 on Celestron CGEM DX Mount

Nikon 600mm F4E Lens

ASI120MC for Planets

Nikon D500/D700/D800/D850 for DSO 

 

Gear used in pics:

Celestron C11

Celestron C9.25

Celestron C6 Newtonian 

Orion ED80 CF

ASI120MC

Canon T2i 

Nikon D800 

Celestrn CGEM DX Mount

Celestron Advanced VX Mount

 

Unfortunately my CGEM DX mount is having issues right now. The firmware flashed failed and right now one of the motor firmware is corrupted. Trying to see if there's any chips on the board I can flash with programmer or if I need whole new board. 

[cucubits]

9 hours ago, ssj92 said:

Here's some of my pics.

Very nice results.

Your picture of the sun reminded me of my never-ending fails of my attempts to catch an ISS transit. I've been out a few times very very close but it didn't work out so far. Once clouds rolled in and covered the sun literally a few seconds before the pass and another more painful attempt was messed up due to equipment failure... I had the capture running, I actually saw the ISS on the live preview in FireCapture but I had a bad cable and it dropped frames which of course included the pass too.

One day, I'll get it one day 🙂

[ryan]

hahaheh you got a laugh out of me because those are such wonderful pictures, makes hubble look like space junk. cucubits those are seriously impressive and coin worthy. and iv'e seen hundreds of thousands of astronomy pictures since I was 12.

[Samir]

Unreal photography in this thread.  It's one thing to see these type of images on documentaries and online, but it's a whole different level to know the person that took these and how they did it and their own personal reaction.  Fantastic stuff!

[cucubits]

Astrophotographers hate the moon almost as much as we hate cloudy nights. The full moon completely disrupts the signal to noise ratio of the very faint deep sky targets where we need all the help we can get to acquire good data.

 

Having said that, sometimes, there really isn't anything to do about the situation so we might as well adapt.

 

With no chance to image anything else and a couple clear nights I decided to try a little project on the moon. It's a high resolution mosaic, made up of 6 individual images which in turn are made up of a few hundred very short images of sections of the moon. Essentially we shoot videos at high frame rates and through software we select and stack only the best frames where the atmosphere was most stable and the images were sharp. This way we get very detailed images of the moon (and the rest of our planets for that matter).

 

Full resolution: https://storage.googleapis.com/dso-browser.com/astrophotography/picture-3a809d30dc7b37545479cc13ea971605-original.png 

 

 

[Samir]

Exploring that high resolution photo was a real joy.  It's like holding the moon right in your hands and letting your senses explore it.  Unreal that this was made with just regular consumer equipment.

 

I thought about this thread when a certain idea hit me this morning in the shower as the water swirled down the drain in a spiral, a circle, similar to a tornado, or a black hole, similar to electrons that orbit a nucleus, or the planets the sun, or galaxies--and suddenly it hit me--what if the visible universe is simply part of another larger circular structure and the 'expanding universe' as we see it is simply because with the arc of our viewing angle, that's what it looks like, but in reality, it's just circulating and not expanding.  Then I was thinking how do you test this theory?  Well, the doppler shift in parts of the universe would be different than in others and would show us the 'arc' by which the universe is curved around something even beyond comprehension.

 

I let my mind wander in the shower.  Sometimes it comes up with nothing.  Other times it's stuff like this. 😁

[ryan]

it has a center and the red shift is relative the beginning. however since time did not exist before the big bang then we must have an infinite quantity of universes we just cant comprehend infinite as humans are a to b creatures

 

 

the impossiblitiy of god is just as unreasonable and likely as the existence of the universe(s) yet here we are thinking and typing.

[Eban]

On 2/15/2022 at 3:32 PM, Samir said:

Exploring that high resolution photo was a real joy.  It's like holding the moon right in your hands and letting your senses explore it.  Unreal that this was made with just regular consumer equipment.

 

I thought about this thread when a certain idea hit me this morning in the shower as the water swirled down the drain in a spiral, a circle, similar to a tornado, or a black hole, similar to electrons that orbit a nucleus, or the planets the sun, or galaxies--and suddenly it hit me--what if the visible universe is simply part of another larger circular structure and the 'expanding universe' as we see it is simply because with the arc of our viewing angle, that's what it looks like, but in reality, it's just circulating and not expanding.  Then I was thinking how do you test this theory?  Well, the doppler shift in parts of the universe would be different than in others and would show us the 'arc' by which the universe is curved around something even beyond comprehension.

 

I let my mind wander in the shower.  Sometimes it comes up with nothing.  Other times it's stuff like this. 😁

 

But which direction is it rotating?  ie in the southern hemisphere water goes down drain in the opposite direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force

[serpro69]

Such a beauty it's almost unbelievable. Thanks so much for the full-res @cucubits !

[ryan]

haha I used that moon pic as my wallpaper for a few days, really high resolution and great contrast. well done 🙂

[serpro69]

22 hours ago, ryan said:

haha I used that moon pic as my wallpaper for a few days

 

lol, really? :D

 

Spoiler

 

I really like how the light is reflecting on it. Looks almost as if it was populated.

[ryan]

yeah I was thinking that it looks like a long time ago their was cities on the moon

[ryan]

@cucubitsim saving all your pics and calling them my own so that people think im a pro at.at. least one thing, lol joking, but keep em coming ..don't give us a taste then disappear. please don't go. one more picture out of sympathy. I find it incredible how your pictures rival hubbles from a distance. like I thought your pictures were from NASA and but when I checked the links was I suprised. I might buy a telescope

[cucubits]

8 minutes ago, ryan said:

@cucubitsim saving all your pics and calling them my own so that people think im a pro at.at. least one thing, lol joking, but keep em coming ..don't give us a taste then disappear. please don't go. one more picture out of sympathy. I find it incredible how your pictures rival hubbles from a distance. like I thought your pictures were from NASA and but when I checked the links was I suprised. I might buy a telescope

 

Thanks for the kind words! It is a great hobby indeed and the difficulty in getting the final pictures makes it extra satisfying.

 

I will keep posting, hopefully over the next week I'll have some more fresh data to process. Planning a short weekend trip to a darker location. Very excited, been setting up the gear and testing over and over for the last few days.

 

 

[ryan]

um I hate to be the problem but do you realize you can sell this? i'd pay 10 bucks per picture and im on disability..

 

create a youtube channel and join patreon(just donate 20 pics per month). ill be your first. ill donate 30 bucks usd to your patreon and promote. for my hypnosis I have millions of views you could do the same.