Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[bruha]

And some with green filter...

 

[DennisN]

(I plan moon images too but unfortunately getting quite low horizont already after sunset...)

Yes, horizontally it was pretty low. But I couldn't resist it.

 

[bruha]

Hi, here is next sunspots from today -it looks as original spost gets little brother.. (on first white image)

 

[Devin-M]

Eagle Nebula - Pillars of Creation - 5700 light years
5 Stacked Shots x 5 minutes (25 minutes) @ 600mm focal f/9 6400iso (cropped) - RGB thru 6nm Hydrogen Alpha Filter converted to monochrome - Moonlit Bortle 6

Center (RA, Dec):	(274.592, -13.919)
Center (RA, hms):	18h 18m 22.134s
Center (Dec, dms):	-13° 55' 07.635"
Size:	2.07 x 1.38 deg
Radius:	1.246 deg

 

[bruha]

Hi, this is just for ... Sunset from highest Andros island (Greece) point (994m).

 

[DennisN]

I saw two interesting videos about black holes recently:

How To See A Black Hole
- A documentary about the Event Horizon Telescope project team which gave us the first image of a black hole. It was very fascinating to see the incredible planning that had to be done to synchronize all the telescopes all over the world, including waiting for good weather.

The Warped Side of the Universe: Kip Thorne at Cardiff University
Professor Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. In this talk he discusses "My Romance with the Warped Side of the Universe: from Black Holes and Wormholes to Time Travel and Gravitational Waves".

 

[bruha]

Hello, I send today sunspots white and green-it seems groowing comparing my last shots.

 

[DennisN]

Another giant photo of the Milky Way...

"Accomplished astrophotographer Bartosz Wojczyński has created a gigantic 2.2 gigapixel photo of the Milky Way that he was able to capture in just one night, which is an astounding achievement given that a similar 1.7 gigapixel photo took another photographer 12 years to complete. "

The article also contains photos of the two telescopes used dually.

Article: Massive 2.2 Gigapixel Photo of the Milky Way Was Taken in Just 4.5 Hours (PetaPixel)

A zoomable version of the photo is here.

 

[berkeman]

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/astronomy-photography-intl-scli-scn/index.html

 

[DennisN]

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/astronomy-photography-intl-scli-scn/index.html

Amazing photos! When I saw the second photo I immediately recognized the castle since I've been there.
It's Château de Chambord which is a beautiful, majestic castle.

Regarding photographing the Milky Way I have not yet tried doing this myself due to city/region light pollution. But I have planned to take a short trip this summer or autumn to a quite nearby place (a beach by the ocean) which is classed as Bortle 2 (typical truly dark site), so hopefully I will get some nice shots then. And maybe I'll try to do a timelapse. We'll see.

 

[Borg]

I think that at least half of those have been on NASA's APOD.

 

[DennisN]

Light Pollution Map

@davenn , @Andy Resnick , @collinsmark , @bruha, @chemisttree , @Drakkith , @Devin-M and others doing observations/astrophotography:

I don't think I've shared this link here for some reason.
It's an interactive worldwide map showing light pollution which can help to locate nearby good spots for nighttime observation/astrophotography.

Light Pollution Map: http://www.lightpollutionmap.info

Some of you may already know about the map, but I wanted to share it, since I recently used the map to locate a Bortle 3 site (quite nearby) and also a Bortle 2 site (on the small Danish island Bornholm, which is pretty close to me, and available via ferry from Sweden).

Edit: The map is scrollable, zoomable and clickable. If you click with the left mouse button on a location you get coordinates, altitude, brightness info and Bortle class.

 

[davenn]

I don't think I've shared this link here for some reason.
It's an interactive worldwide map showing light pollution which can help to locate nearby good spots for nighttime observation/astrophotography.

hey mate,

I have used another one for a number of years
http://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#4/-18.52/-211.90

it looks very similar in it's layout, but the huge advantage is that it continuously scrolls and doesn't stop at the dateline just
east of NZ

 

[bruha]

Hello, it is my next sun image attempt by SV EBONY eyepiece camera with green filter..unfortunately I am not able with software (SharpCap 3.1) zoom for whole sun body...

Have beautiful nights ...

 

[bruha]

Hello, today I again noticed one sunspot..( but as I look on images now, I am not sure about different spot positions reason... )

 

[bruha]

Hello, this one is probably better (cor. by Affinity photo instead Gimp... )

 

[bruha]

Hello, I attach some night images from little outside Prague by SV EBONY eyepiece camera:
Deneb, Jupiter,higher exp. Jupiter with some moons and Saturn .I was trying as well Nort America nebula near Deneb but no succes (although Deneb was quite bright and I think this Nebula with 4 ap. magnitude should be imaginable...)

 

[bruha]

Still one image from N.A.nebula supposed area...

 

[bruha]

Hello,
last days I was trying first JUp/Sat. images with new scope (Newton 1000 x 200 mm) and SV Ebony eyepiece Camera while I use: BF-blue filter SV Ebony UHC, Y, Y2-light-dark yellow filter, event. without+JUp. overexp. with moons.
Lot of succes

 

[DennisN]

Flying on Mars (with sound in the second video).

First Video of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight, Includes Takeoff and Landing (NASA JPL)
In this video captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover, the agency's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took the first powered, controlled flight on another planet on April 19, 2021.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight (NASA JPL)
On April 30, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover made history as the first spacecraft to record sounds from another spacecraft on another planet. During Ingenuity’s fourth flight, a microphone included with the SuperCam instrument aboard Perseverance captured the humming sound of the blades and the din of wind.

 

[Keith_McClary]

The argument for switching off lights at night

 

[bruha]

:) Genéve, I suppose

 

[chemisttree]

The argument for switching off lights at night

Yeah but with the right filter...

 

[Andy Resnick]

North America Nebula (NGC 7000), Pelican Nebula (IC 5067), and IC 5068 emission nebulae:

Nikon D810 + 400/2.8 lens, about 2 hrs @ ISO 64.

 

[bruha]

Hello, it is beautiful image :) , recently I was trying as well to capture N.A. Nebulae (with SV Ebony eyepiece camera ) but with no succes. I attach my image evaluated by Astrometry.net- it resulting that I was really misplaced .-somewhere near Sadir.. ha ha

 

[bruha]

Hello, I still attach combined (overexp with moons+standard) Jupiter image.

 

[Devin-M]

Sun… Smoke filter courtesy Dixie Fire in Northern California. iPhone 11.

 

[bruha]

 

[Devin-M]

 

[Devin-M]

24mm, f/2.8, 400iso, 117sec, full frame sensor, single shot, bortle 2, shasta county, northern california, usa

https://www.speakev.com/attachments/bb7abeb1-f8a3-4ad0-975f-2109406abff3-jpeg.147788/

 

[Andy Resnick]

Veil nebula, just barely fits into the frame @ 400/2.8, 5 hrs:

And the same image after removing the bright stars and renormalizing:

 

[Andy Resnick]

NGC 6819 (in Cygnus), 1.5 hrs integration @ ISO 64 w/ 400/2.8 lens. Full frame:

and a 200% crop of the central region:

 

[Devin-M]

https://www.speakev.com/attachments/img-0939-gif.147805/

 

[DennisN]

A nice report on CBS 60 Minutes about the Ingenuity helicopter and the search for life on Mars, including short interviews with some engineers and scientists:

Perseverance rover, Ingenuity helicopter, and the search for ancient life on Mars (CBS 60 Minutes)
"Anderson Cooper reports on the nerve-wracking Mars landing of the rover Perseverance, the painstaking process of launching the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, and the extraordinary images the two have already sent back to Earth."

 

[Keith_McClary]

A nice report on CBS 60 Minutes about the Ingenuity helicopter and the search for life on Mars, including short interviews with some engineers and scientists:

Perseverance rover, Ingenuity helicopter, and the search for ancient life on Mars (CBS 60 Minutes)
"Anderson Cooper reports on the nerve-wracking Mars landing of the rover Perseverance, the painstaking process of launching the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, and the extraordinary images the two have already sent back to Earth."

"Video unavailable
The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

 

[berkeman]

The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

Yeah, it appears that @DennisN is a number of time zones ahead of us.

 

[collinsmark]

Here's a portrait of my telescope attempting to image Saturn, a night or two ago, in spite of the neighborhood lights. (Image of Saturn to come -- more on that below.)

I've been victim to an unusual assault of various hardware failures recently on both my telescope and my main computer. Maybe it's the heat. I don't know, but many things seem to be falling apart lately.

Many of the various hardware/computer failures are affecting my ability to process that Saturn image. I've got about 2 terabytes of data that I have to sift through and process. I'm still making progress, but it's going slowly.

 

[DennisN]

Here's a portrait of my telescope

What a beast!

Many of the various hardware/computer failures are affecting my ability to process that Saturn image. I've got about 2 terabytes of data that I have to sift through and process. I'm still making progress, but it's going slowly.

I hope your luck turns!

 

[Andy Resnick]

A portion of Cygnus, showing NGC 6871, Sharpless 101 (Tulip nebula) and Cygnus X-1: full frame @ 400/2.8, about 4 hours @ ISO 64

And a 1:1 crop of Sharpless 101 (barely visible at bottom) and Cygnus X-1 (w/arrow). I probably need another 20+ hours to really pull out the nebula and hopefully start to visualize the black hole's bow shock (https://www.astrobin.com/355681/B/)

 

[collinsmark]

Saturn reached opposition a couple of days ago. Now is a good time to observe it if you haven't already. Here is my photo/image, captured last Monday night:

Saturn at opposition, year 2021.

General comments:

The seeing conditions were not terrific, but they were at least "good." As a matter of fact, San Diego hadn't had good conditions for astronomy for about a month. So the fact that seeing conditions were "good" at Saturn's opposition was good enough for me. Also, Saturn was a little lower in the sky compared to last year (due to where the ecliptic lines up). [Edit: nevermind about the altitude.] All that, combined with hardware failures involving the telescope and computers processing the data, I'll call the image a success.

I'll keep trying in the coming weeks if I can find another night with good seeing.

Equipment:

Meade 10" LX200-ACF
Tele Vue 4x Powermate
ZWO Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC)
Astronomik RGB filters
ZWO filter wheel
ZWO ASI290 MM monochrome camera
Laptop connected to camera and telescope running FireCapture software.

Total exposure time: 36 minutes
Midpoint timestamp: 2021-08-03 0809.2 UT.

Processing:

SER video files were processed with Autostakkert! software. Nine, 4-minute contiguous videos were ultimately chosen, three with the Red filter, three with the Green filter, and three with the Blue filter, for a total exposure time of 36 minutes. (Note: if you're using this as a guide and you have a big telescope, 36 minutes is way too long to capture any non-banded weather detail on Saturn. I sacrificed the possibility of that [not that I could capture it anyway with my telescope] in order to get more data to increase the signal to noise ratio [SNR]).

The R, G, and B images were then individually sharpened using Registax.

The images were then combined into their respective color channels in Gimp, where final adjustments were made.

 

[DennisN]

(Milky Way animation)

Gorgeous animation!

I probably need another 20+ hours to really pull out the nebula and hopefully start to visualize the black hole's bow shock

That sounds cool, I wish you good luck!

Saturn reached opposition a couple of days ago. Now is a good time to observe it if you haven't already. Here is my photo/image, captured last Monday night

Very beautiful, and inspiring!

 

[DennisN]

Ultralazy astrophotography:

A couple of nights ago I had planned to photograph Jupiter and Saturn with my mirrorless camera attached to my cheap scope, but when I unpacked the T-mount adapter I could not fit it to the camera.
Somehow I had bought the wrong adapter, so I will get a new one.

As consolation, I very lazily photographed Saturn from indoors, through a window, using only my Sony A6000 camera and my vintage Tokina 400mm tele lens, to see if it worked.

It did!

But Saturn was very small of course, and the cropped photo below has a very low resolution.
But it was fun to see that it actually worked.
(I also had to edit out a window reflection of Saturn in the original photo )

Photo info: 1/100s shutter speed, ISO 1600, 11 stacked photos.

 

[collinsmark]

Here's another take on the Saturn at opposition, year 2021 image. It's from the same raw data as the image in my last post, but this time with more aggressive Registax wavelet sharpening. I think I like this one better.

I've also inserted a thumbnail, if you prefer to view the image that way.


As long as I'm posting, let me relate the hardware troubles I've had lately, and add a little commentary about lucky imaging techniques.

I'll start with the "lucky imaging." Lucky imaging takes a stupid amount of data. And by "stupid," I don't mean dumb. I mean "mind numbing," as in lucky imaging takes a mind numbing, ridiculous, unholy, stupid amount of hard-drive space.

The idea behind lucky imaging is to gather data as fast as humanly possible (well, as fast as the camera and computer combination is capable of gathering it). Then later when processing, ignore some of the "bad" frames -- maybe half of the total -- and still have enough left over for the central limit theorem to do its thing when warping and stacking. And you'll find that some runs are simply better than others due to general atmospheric seeing conditions. So you'll want to take many runs, and then choose the best run.

As an example, for this Saturn image I imaged over two nights, taking between 5 and 7, 36 minute runs per night. I averaged over a terabyte of hard-drive space per night. All that data has to be processed, at least a little bit, in order to determine which runs are better than the other runs. But even after weeding out the bad runs, it still means that a given image starts out as hundreds of megabytes gigabytes of raw data.

It also means that if you're imaging multiple nights in a row, you need to get that data off the laptop's hard-drive (technically an SSD) from the first night, in order to make room for the second night, because that drive will fill up. Realize that you don't necessarily have the option to space out your imaging sessions, because the planets and the weather won't wait. Sometimes that data needs to be processed, or at least transferred, immediately.

And processing the data isn't instant. AtuoStakkert! is a great program, but it takes a while. It's good to have a fast desktop computer, if you can.

Getting back to my story, after packing up after the first night of imaging, I immediately plugged a hard-wired ethernet cable into my laptop to start transferring some of that data over to Clubber Lang (my main desktop computer). But it was taking a long time. Like a really long time. The transfer speeds were like one tenth the speed of even a wireless connection, and here my network equipment is wired and Gigabit speed capable. What the hell?

I spent much of that night and the next day (during daylight hours), processing as much as a could on the laptop (which wasn't that much), deleting the raw data once processed, and using a 256 GB USB flash drive to transfer the rest of the data to Clubber Lang. But remember: stupid amount of data. Each run took hours to write to the USB flash drive, and another 45 minutes for Clubber Lang to read it. A Stupid, unholy, godforsaken amount of data. I had to swap the USB drive back and forth about a good half-dozen times. And that coming night was the only decent weather forecast for the foreseeable future, so that data had to get off the laptop one way or another.

So I finally got the data off my laptop by evening, and fired up the telescope for the next night of imaging. But the telescope was frozen, and wouldn't respond to the hand controller key-presses. I suppose I could do all the control from the laptop, since that was connected to the telescope anyway, but I'm old-school like that and like to use the hand-controller. About a year ago, I noticed the hand-controller's cable was becoming a bit frayed, and I fortunately thought ahead and scrounged up a new RJ11 cord and kept it handy, just in case. That did the trick, thank goodness. (If you look at the picture of my telescope a few posts ago, you can see the old hand-controller cable on the table, to the lower right, behind the laptop.)

Then the telescope wouldn't acquire a GPS fix. I still don't know if that problem is temporary or permanent. It's not a showstopper though; I just punched in the time and my location manually. From there I was able to finish out the second night of imaging (the image of Saturn in this post is from that night).

----------------

Then comes the network debugging. Running some speed tests, I was able to narrow down the culprit to my desktop computer, Clubber Lang (the laptop and router were fine). The weird thing was, the hardware LEDs and even the drivers indicate that the network is working perfectly and at Gigabit speeds, and yet Clubber Lang's actual network speed is slow as molasses in January. As a debugging step, I also switched over to WiFi, and even the WiFi was slow. That lead me to the conclusion that it wasn't a bad connection, but rather something above the physical layer.

But both the WiFi and the Ethernet are controlled by the Intel Z390 chipset on the motherboard. Maybe that was it. I reinstalled the driver from my motherboard manufacturer (ASUS). No change. I installed another version of the driver directly from Intel. No change. I got on Amazon and rush-ordered a PCIe Network card because I was losing faith in the motherboard's networking capability.

I remembered I had a USB WiFi dongle that I was using for another computer. So I grabbed that and plugged it into Clubber Lang, heard the Windows USB enumeration tone, but then decided I should plug it into a different USB port and did so. But this time no Windows USB enumeration tone. Did I unplug the dongle when it was writing to its internal storage? Did I zap it some sort of electrostatic discharge? It's not clear. All I know for sure is I bricked the USB dongle then and there. 'Just my luck. That debugging step would have to wait until the new network card arrived.

A couple of months ago Clubber Lang had an SSD failure. I didn't lose any important data, but I did have to do a fresh install of Windows 10. Maybe that had something to do with it, and I just haven't noticed the slow network until now (The network still worked, it was just slow). But I had already gone through Windows 10 network settings with a fine-toothed comb, and didn't see anything suspicious. But I figured I should re-install Windows 10 again, and see if that helps. So I did, (keeping my apps and files though). Still no change.

A couple days later the PCIe network card arrived, so I installed that. Once again, no change. Even with the new network card, everything was still slow. So the problem had to be either Windows or something running on top of Windows.

So I went through every program that I installed (recall I had to reinstall everything a couple of months ago) and came across a program called "GameFirst V" It's a program that ASUS packages with it's motherboard, right along side the chipset driver and motherboard tools. I had installed it a couple months ago, when doing the fresh Windows 10 install, without giving it any thought. After a little research I found it has something to do with networking, so I uninstalled it and Voila! Glory be, my network was fast again!

But good god, ASUS, really?! Apparently the sole purpose of this program is to cripple the networking capability of any non-gaming application that runs on the computer, even if you're not gaming. And that's its default behavior. And when installed, the program starts automatically on startup. Are you freaking kidding me?! Gaaah! I'm pulling my hair out as I write this.

So if you've read this far, and you're looking for some sort of moral to the story, it's to be careful what programs you install, even if they come with your motherboard.

(Oh, I forgot to mention, a Display Port cable is on the fritz too. I ordered a new one along with the PCIe network card.)

Summary of recent casualties:

• 2 TB NVMe SSD
• Telescope's hand-controller cord
• Telescope's GPS functionality (maybe; this is still uncertain.)
• USB WiFi dongle
• Display Port cable
• My sanity
• Hair

Newfound benefits:

• I now have a spare network adapter card, just in case.

 

[DennisN]

And processing the data isn't instant. AtuoStakkert! is a great program, but it takes a while. It's good to have a fast desktop computer, if you can.

I just wanted to let you know there's a software called PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor), if you didn't know about it. It's a preprocessor (cropping etc.) that can be used to prepare the images/movies for stacking in e.g. AutoStakkert.

I'm actually going to buy a new computer soon (with a SSD harddrive), since my current, old computer has started to feel a bit sluggish.

 

[collinsmark]

By the way, purely by chance I stumbled across was seems to be cosmic ray artifact in one of the frames of Saturn's raw data (it's just in the one frame). I'm guessing it's a muon formed from a cosmic ray interaction in the upper atmosphere. At least I think it is; I'm not sure. I'm not sure what path it would take to get to the sensor. There's a lot of mirrors and glass that the light passes through. I'm guessing muons might take a different path. Could it be terrestrial based (maybe from some nearby rocks or something)?

I'm lead to believe these sorts of things are not too terribly unusual in astrophotography. But, then again, I'm not sure. Has anybody else caught a cosmic ray, or cosmic ray decay product, or maybe some other decay product in one of their subs?

 

[Keith_McClary]

not too terribly unusual in astrophotography.

Cosmic Ray App is a new iOS application that allows users to detect cosmic rays from outer space with nothing but their phone/tablet. The application works by detecting lit pixels in the phone’s camera when no light is entering. ... Each night should net you one image of about the quality of the ones shown here.

 

[davenn]

24mm, f/2.8, 400iso, 117sec, full frame sensor, single shot, bortle 2, shasta county, northern california, usa

https://www.speakev.com/attachments/bb7abeb1-f8a3-4ad0-975f-2109406abff3-jpeg.147788/

You captured the "Kiwi"
did you know that ?

Edit: ...I have to assume you know what a kiwi is ? Dave

 

[Devin-M]

I have to assume you know what a kiwi is ?

 

[Devin-M]

I suspect there’s at least 2 geostationary satellites visible in this animation (in addition to several low Earth orbit satellites).

https://www.speakev.com/attachments/img-0939-gif.147805/

 

[Devin-M]

perhaps there’s 3…