Astronomy

[cucubits]

1 minute ago, ryan said:

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

 

To be honest, with so many better pictures I keep seeing on astronomy forums, I haven't given this any thought. It would be a great idea as I get more consistent results... maybe sell prints?

[ryan]

dude, your pictures are really great. not good. great. sell them dude.

 

don't think its impossible but some people make money with their hobbies

[ryan]

Anyone else excited about JWST ? we will be able to see the universe 225ml years after big bang

[Eban]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-03/space-junk-rocket-hurdling-towards-to-moon/10087749

 

@cucubits

Get your camera ready...will strike on dark side but maybe some mushroom clouds 

[cucubits]

Here's my latest little project. This is the Jellyfish Nebula, also known as IC443, is the remnant of a supernova lying 5,000 light years from Earth

 

Some more interesting details about it: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/what-spawned-the-jellyfish-nebula.html

 

I'll post some links in a few days, I'm still tweaking the processing and haven't uploaded the full res image yet.

This is the first image I've taken from a dark location (close to Palo Duro canyon in Texas).

 

Total exposure time is a little over 5 hours.

 

 

 

 

Also, because visualizing the size reference is always interesting, here's the framing comparison on how large it would look in the sky, if it were visible to the naked eye:

 

[cucubits]

One more interesting upload, I find it always very cool to look at nebulae and supernova remnants with the stars removed. Brings out a lot of details and perspective:

 

[serpro69]

15 minutes ago, cucubits said:

Total exposure time is a little over 5 hours.

 

Darn it, 5 hours? So what do you usually do while waiting? :D

 

Very beautiful pictures, keep them coming.

The one with the starts filtered out looks very interesting indeed.

Will be waiting for the full-res :)

[cucubits]

27 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

Darn it, 5 hours? So what do you usually do while waiting? 😄

 

This time it was very cold outside so I didn't sit next to the telescope. It's doing almost everything on its own once set up so I mostly went inside and only came out from time to time to check it. Usually I sit next to it and read/browse on my phone. I am planning to build a 2nd rig with a separate smaller telescope on a manual mount just to browse the sky and look at things live while the other one is imaging.

[Eban]

@cucubits...just...WOW

[ryan]

woah. now thats making hubble sweat.

[ryan]

yeah i set my wallpaper to the moon pic, I honestly cant believe these images.....truely awe inspiring..

 

 

keep us posted more pics moar moar moar

[ryan]

what happened to this thread......great pics good convo...just died....more pictures ill try to take some astro pic with my s21 ultra it looks great according to the guy below

 

[Custom90gt]

1 hour ago, ryan said:

what happened to this thread......great pics good convo...just died....more pictures ill try to take some astro pic with my s21 ultra it looks great according to the guy below

 

 

Great link, totally going to watch more of his stuff.

[cucubits]

6 hours ago, ryan said:

what happened to this thread......great pics good convo...just died.

 

No no, still here, just that many planets need to align for good sessions 🙂

 

We didn't have the best weather lately and it's been pretty chaotic at work too. When it's this crazy, I usually don't feel like sitting outside at night...

 

On the other hand, it is getting slightly better, I did get a chance last week to get out of DFW area. Found a local dark site thanks to a friendly local astro club member and I spent a night there.

 

I'm still working on the main image but in the mean time I did get a nice Milky Way shot.

This is my first experiment with very basic gear. By basic I mean this is actually untracked, it's just a Sony a6000, with a 30mm prime lenses sitting on a simple tripod. To get so much detail we do need long exposures but since it's untracked, the individual shots must be very short. The formulas tell us with this combination, we can get max 3 second shots to avoid star trailing. The end result is a stack of about 800 shots of 3 seconds each. After about every 200 shots I would stop it, recenter roughly (got some reference stars in the live view so I could put it back almost where it was).

 

It's still quite early in the season for Milky Way shots, this section came up just above the tree line at about 3AM. In hindsight, I should've got a foreground shot as well, with the field included... would've made a nice combination.

 

[ryan]

very impressive brother.

 

I have some questions. I heard hubble and other telescopes capture images in black and white and then with postprocessing they add color...this in my mind was a fact and I also recall that in space you cannot see stars and that the reason we see stars is because the earths atomosphere acts like a giant magnifying glass...geeze but im seeing so many contradictions I feel out of touch. can you clear that up for me bro?

[Eban]

54 minutes ago, ryan said:

very impressive brother.

 

I have some questions. I heard hubble and other telescopes capture images in black and white and then with postprocessing they add color...this in my mind was a fact and I also recall that in space you cannot see stars and that the reason we see stars is because the earths atomosphere acts like a giant magnifying glass...geeze but im seeing so many contradictions I feel out of touch. can you clear that up for me bro?

 

Me too

 

Like the colours in nebula clouds are 'added in' later ?!?!?!

 

[ryan]

yeah I took alot of science in school as a kid and remember vividly that the colors are added afterwards..

as for stars yeah I heard space is just black no twinkling stars ect...just black..yet I see videos on youtube and they have stars in them and the perspective is from space.

 

 

my take on science 2022

 

I remember this from a book called genius

https://www.audible.com/pd/Genius-Audiobook/B004I6ZPK2

 

you might know what kinda of bird that is over there, yet you may not know a damn thing about it./

 

this came to mind because we as humans are great at lableing things..yet are understandings on things is non existant. world desperately needs another Newton. I pit all scientists and doctors in the same bowl. very good at remembering names, yet know nothing about anything in absolute truth terms.

[Custom90gt]

Interesting, this random article explains how color is added in later (hint it's not just a guess):

https://medium.com/techtalkers/photos-of-space-are-actually-black-and-white-heres-how-they-re-colored-d43561641ac3

[cucubits]

That article is partly accurate but they do make some assumptions and missed some key details.

 

All camera sensors are monochrome. This is true for every single type of digital camera whether for astro purposes or in your phones. Now, all these cameras do take color pictures by using tiny red, green and blue filters in front of the pixels of the camera sensor. This is called the Bayer Matrix or Bayer Filter. A usual standard is RGGB pattern which most cameras use, which works great for real life regular pictures. The problem comes when shooting space with these sensors, a lot of signal to noise is wasted because there's virtually no green color emitted from most of the deep sky objects we can image. Almost all nebulae are made up a deep red and blue colors. These are real colors, not made up to look nice. The red comes from ionized Hydrogen alpha particles making up most nebulae and the light blue comes from Oxygen-3 molecules making up huge clouds in these nebulae.

 

This is the reason why specialized astro cameras are monochrome (they're essentially regular sensors without the Bayer Filter). This means the photons reaching every single pixel are recorded as signal. Hubble's sensor is the same way.

 

From here the article above doesn't seem to explain very well how we get to the end results with those nice color pictures. The colors do not get added "later" via photoshop. These mono cameras always shoot with some sort of filter in front of them (just calling them short/medium/long wavelengths is very far from accurate). These are very specific filters which allow only very narrow band to pass which then gets recorded by the whole sensor (which we now know it doesn't have the RGB bayer filters).

 

This is why mono cameras are much much better for deep sky imaging. The 3 main filters used for nebulae are generally called SHO (Sulphur-2, Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-3). 

The transmission lines and actual colors from the spectrum for these filters are: 656nm for H-Alpha filter  (red), 672nm for S-II filter (a bit deeper red) and 500nm for OIII filter (light blue).

 

So once the camera gets a bunch of picture sets with each of these filters, then colors are assigned in post processing. When this combination is done, if they want accurate representation they do the RGB combination by assigning S and H to the Red channel and O to the blue channel. All the nebulae pictures you see which are mostly red and have some blue - these are accurate representations of what's actually there and what we could see if our eyes would be thousands of times more sensitive.

 

Now, most of those amazing Hubble pictures are nothing like I described above. Those are what they call "false color images" where they assign the S H O data to the RGB channels in a different ways (swap the order) when they combine the images. Some prefer these and they do show more color separation and details but in fact all those green/orange nebulae are not representing reality in any way.

 

My personal preference is to stick to reality. My astro camera is a color camera, it does have the RGB Bayer Matrix and for nebulae I use additional Hydrogen Alfa and Oxygen 3 filters. This allows me to get details in the dust/gas clouds but also keep accurate RGB star colors.

 

Speaking of star colors, yes, there are different color visible, even to the naked eye in a dark location. Some are very white, almost blue-ish (Sirius is an example) and some are visible yellow/orange-ish (Betelgeuse). The stars temperatures make these differences visible, some are way hotter than the others.

[cucubits]

Sorry about the long post, I do hope it makes some sense.

 

Here's another example, Nico has a good way of explaining how this works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVZXmxUmXyM

[ryan]

no i think you explained it perfectly....nice too learn something new

[ryan]

I took this with my S21 ULTRA using the JWST APP

 

[cucubits]

It really is mindblowing what JWST can do. Can't wait for them to publish images taken of more known targets or something I have shot to see so much close up details...

[ryan]

oh i know the detail is beyond what i imagined it would be....i had high expectations....now this is exciting...

[jaybee83]

3 hours ago, cucubits said:

It really is mindblowing what JWST can do. Can't wait for them to publish images taken of more known targets or something I have shot to see so much close up details...

mindblowing indeed....like the fact the FIRST exoplanet they focus on with JWST is a jupiter like hot beast with a superfast 3-day orbital period around its host star and guess what? they found friggin water, like....wth 😄

 

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-reveals-steamy-atmosphere-of-distant-planet-in-detail