Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[Devin-M]

Here's the histogram stretched grayscale images from the 3 different bands...

F770W:

F1000W:

F1500W:

Composite:

 

[Devin-M]

I made this bi-color one of the core of NGC 628 "Phantom Galaxy" from JWST MIRI Instrument FITs files from the MAST Portal: ( https://mast.stsci.edu/portal/Mashup/Clients/Mast/Portal.html )

Files Used:
1552s (26min!) single exposure through F1130W filter
1609s (26min!) single exposure through F2100W filter

Full Sensor:

100% Crop:

FITS Files:

Visible light image of the same object:

 

[DennisN]

I made this bi-color one of the core of NGC 628 "Phantom Galaxy" from JWST MIRI Instrument FITs files from the MAST Portal

Very nice!

 

[Oldman too]

Some images just beg to be posted, no matter what their source. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/zeta-ophiuchi-a-star-with-a-complicated-past is one example of such an image.

And a couple of detail screen shots.

 

[bruha]

Hello, here is again some sunspots from saturday.-original and highlighted...

 

[Andy Resnick]

Veil Nebula in Cygnus @ 400/4, full frame, 13 hour integration time, stacked in AstroPixel Processor

The nebula is easier to see when the stars are removed:

Definitely pleased with how this has been coming along, this has been a challenge since I combined images taken since 2014 (!), well before I standardized the photography part of the process. 200% crops give you an idea of the image quality (no noise reduction has been applied... yet):

Sheesh... 8 years to create this image?!

 

[Andy Resnick]

Also in the constellation Cygnus- the North American Nebula and Pelican Nebula- another image I have been working on for several years, so far I have acquired 15.5 hours:

This one is (approximately) a 2 x 3 mosaic of full frame images using my 400mm lens. What makes this (and another mosaic in Cygnus, covering the Crescent nebula (NGC 6888), Butterfly nebula (IC 1318), and Tulip nebula (Sh2-101)) tricky to assemble is controlling and correcting lens vignetting/falloff, which is significant at the f/# I image at.

 

[Andy Resnick]

No new pics, just some (new) news: it finally happened.

I filled up my external hard drive w/ just astrophotographs: 8 TB (!). And just before we leave for vacation... What do y'all use for 'archival' storage?

The story of my 2nd exterrnal hard drive (14 TB, for the same price...) is interesting to think about- I placed the order (Amazon) and the drive appeared at my doorstep 5.5 hours later- less time than it would take me to get it myself. Something sort-of wondrous and vaguely disturbing at the same time...

 

[DennisN]

What do y'all use for 'archival' storage?

I also use extra hard drives. It's the most cost-effective way for large amounts of data (at least that I know of; I did a calculation comparing DVDs, Bluray disks and hard drives some years ago).

My disks are pretty small. I've got two 3 TB disks and two external 6 TB disks. I keep at least two copies of data on different disks (data: e.g. photos and other things I consider important).

 

[bruha]

Hello, I attach Saturn (lower right) and Jupiter from last Saturday (at full Moon night) , orig. and Gimp adjusted.
Lot of succes

 

[collinsmark]

Saturn, 2022-08-16 06:38.5 UT. Imaged from my back patio in San Diego. It was couple of days after Saturn's opposition.

I think it came out pretty well. But honestly, I was holding out for a little better. The weather and weather forecasts played me like a fiddle.

My telescope's declination motor encoder had been broken, keeping from imaging Saturn on its opposition day proper. But I replaced the encoder, right around the night of opposition! (Details in an upcoming thread of its own.) After that it was just a matter of waiting for a night of good seeing around midnight*, as Saturn crossed the meridian.

*(That's 1 o'clock midnight now; not 12 o'clock. Midnight used to occur at 12 AM. But in the US, since the adoption of Daylight Saving Time [and now all year long], midnight and noon now occur at 1 AM and 1 PM respectively, on average within your local time zone. As an amateur astronomer, I'm a little peeved that 12 AM no longer represents roughly the middle of the night anymore, and 12 PM no longer represents the middle of day. By getting rid of the switching between daylight saving and standard time we had a chance to fix this. But we chose the wrong one!)

Anyway, back to Saturn. Saturn was less than a day after opposition, and I had just fixed my telescope. The forecast was amazing. "Excellent" seeing, zero cloud cover, and perfect transparency, every night at midnight for days! This was confirmed by three separate sources that displayed atmospheric "seeing" in their forecasts.
But every night it was the same story: The night started out totally clear with average to above average seeing. But then at about 11 PM (about 2 hours before midnight), the clouds rolled in and the sky turned to complete overcast. Then, almost after-the-fact, the forecasts would update showing clouds for the night, but only for that night.

This repeated every night for days on end. I felt like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy Van Pelt pulls it out from under me at the last moment. And I fell for the trick every time.

So this image is what I ended up with. It was captured over an hour before Saturn crossed the meridian for that night. Seeing was OK, maybe above average, but not "excellent." In short, it's not perfect, but it's the best I could get.

Equipment:
Meade 10" LX200-ACF fork-mounted atop an equatorial wedge
Explore Scientific 3x Focal Extender
ZWO Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC)
Astronomik RGB filter set
ZWO ASI290MM camera

Software:
FireCapture (for acquisition)
AutoStakkert! (for lucky-imaging processing)
RegiStax (for initial wavelet sharpening)
PixInsight (for RGB alignment, constrast & saturation adjustments)
(I considered using WinJUPOS for de-rotation, but decided against it in the end.)

Integration:
Exposure time for individual frames was set to between 10-12 milliseconds. Nine, 3-minute, uncompressed videos were taken, three videos for each color filter, alternating between RGB filters. That's 27 minutes total.
In the lucky imaging stacking, 70% of frames were kept.
In other words, the final image is a composite of around 100,000 individual images, each stretched and warped a little in an attempt to undue the deleterious effects of atmospheric seeing.

 

[DennisN]

Saturn, 2022-08-16 06:38.5 UT. Imaged from my back patio in San Diego. It was couple of days after Saturn's opposition.

Beautiful!

This repeated every night for days on end. I felt like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy Van Pelt pulls it out from under me at the last moment. And I fell for the trick every time.

We are at the cruel mercy of the heavens.

the final image is a composite of around 100,000 individual images

That's pretty wild!

 

[Maarten Havinga]

We are at the cruel mercy of the heavens.

To the contrary, would it have been as satisfying if the 1st night it all succeeded and that's it? Or would you call that cheap? Now you've achieved something which you know to be difficult. And worth the effort! :-)

This training in persisting on getting to know the truth, getting a right image and all, is essential in how people like the JWST team made their grand telescope.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Just got back from vacation at a Bottle 2-ish 3-ish site (home is Bortle 7 or 8) and we got lucky- 2 moonless and clear nights. Each night I had about an hour or so of good seeing (no haze, etc) and took about 1600 photos with my 105mm lens- I didn't have a tracking mount, so... yeah. I'm crunching those for a while, but I also took some images with my 15/2.8 and already put this together:

(75 5-s subs)

At 100%, it's not great- coma becomes distracting in the corners- but here's a 100% crop of the North America Nebula (NGC 7000): Deneb is the bright star.

Naked-eye viewing of the milky was was amazing, viewing through 8x42 binoculars was spectacular, really special occasion.

 

[DennisN]

Andromeda - unguided and "blind" as a bat

I've been waiting for a while to have a go at a deep sky object with my system camera, and a couple of nights ago I succeeded for the first time!

(previously I had just tried shooting the Pleiades with my smartphone in front of a cheap telescope two years ago).

I was tired of sitting still in the current heatwave, so I checked with Stellarium and saw that Andromeda was going to be way high up in the sky, and that I might be able to have a go at the Pleiades.

So I rode my bicycle in the warm night down to the beach and set up the gear.
The site was only Bortle 7 so I was very uncertain how it would go, but since Andromeda was very high up I wanted to give it a try.

I couldn't see the galaxy with my eyes, but I knew roughly where it should be, and I also used a smartphone app (SkEye) as an extra live guiding aid. I started taking test shots of the area, moving the camera slightly around between each shot.

And suddenly... I saw a small glowing orb with a dim spooky cloud around it on one of the photos.
"That has to be Andromeda!" I thought. It was a fantastic feeling.

So I attached the intervalometer to the camera and started shooting, re-centering on the orb after each 50th-100th photo (ca).

And here's the result after stacking and post-processing:

Camera and lens: Sony A6000, Chinon 135mm f/2.8 set at f/4
Settings: ISO 3200, 2s exposure, 404 light frames (2s x 404 = 13.5 min integration)
Software used: Sequator, Photoshop, Lightroom (fringe removal)

I also made a picture with labels to share with my friends:

I had another go at Andromeda with a different lens, a Tokina 200mm, and here's the result:

Note: Maybe I was a little too aggressive with the noise reduction here, the image seems to be a bit soft
Camera and lens: Sony A6000, Tokina 200mm f/3.5 set at f/5.6
Settings: ISO 3200, 1.6s exposure, 664 light frames (1.6s x 664 = 17.7 min integration)
Software used: Sequator, Photoshop, Lightroom (fringe removal)

And I also shot the Pleiades (which I could barely see with my own eyes), and this time I tried using my Sony zoom lens (Why? Because I felt like it ).
Anyway, here's the result:

Camera and lens: Sony A6000, Sony 55-210mm set at 210mm, f/7.1
Settings: ISO 2000, 1s exposure, 413 light frames (1s x 413 = 6.9 min integration)
Software used: Sequator, Photoshop, Lightroom (fringe removal)

While I was shooting Andromeda the second time I noticed the Moon was rising nicely to the left of me, so I paused the shoot and aimed at the Moon instead for a while:

Lens: Tokina 200mm f/3.5 set at f/5.6, two photos with different exposure times

I was very pleased with the night, and it was very exciting to process the photos and see the results!
Actually, I was extremely happy. It was a dream come true.

 

[DennisN]

A remastered blast from the past, with some marvellous photos:

‘Look closely and there’s a tear in Armstrong’s eye’: the Apollo space missions as you’ve never seen them before" (The Guardian)

"Nasa’s original moon mission photographs, kept locked in a freezer in Houston, are some of the most vital artefacts of human endeavour. Now, they have been remastered for a new century. Introduction by Tim Peake. Photographs restored by Andy Saunders"

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/science...issions-photographs-remastered-neil-armstrong

Example:

 

[Andy Resnick]

Think I'm ready to send this to a printer- The Veil Nebula, 18 hours (10s subs) @ 400/4, Nikon D810, Losmandy GM-8 mount:

It's a little easier to see with the stars suppressed:

Some 1:1 crops:

 

[Devin-M]

I came across this very impressive walkthrough of a remote observatory…

 

[ondrejbruha]

Cygnus region

This photo was taken in Czechia near to Prague (Bortle 4/5).
Gear: Sony A7 + Samyang 135/2 + STC Multispectra filter + SW Star Adventurer
Postproces: Stacked 250 photos in APP, adjust in PixInsight and Photoshop.

 

[Andy Resnick]

A couple of years ago, I was inspired by this photo. Since it was taken with a 300mm lens, the field of view of my 400mm is too small, so I have been working on a mosaic (400/4, Nikon D810, 10s subs, Losmandy GM-8 mount):

Here's a few details/zooms:

I think I need another year to really tighten it up, but so far, so good!

 

[Andy Resnick]

Since it's been cloudy lately, I've had a chance to catch up on the mosaics (like above) and one I'm putting together of the Milky Way using my 105mm lens. Here's a single field-of-view (FOV):

This is after stacking but before background subtraction; Nikon 105 @ f/2 on a D810, 1 s subs (no tracking mount!), total of about 30min integration. A few 1:1 crops-

I have 50 different FOVs that are getting assembled into a mosaic that spans the Milky Way from NGC 6271 to M11, a process that is slower, trickier, and more painful than I expected. Slow, steady progress...

 

[collinsmark]

The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543, Caldwell 6), captured from my back patio from late June to early August, 2022. It's a planetary nebula in the constellation Draco. It's the remains of a dying star that ejected squirts of matter at periodic intervals, and has been expanding ever since.

Here's a crop.

To be sure, there's more detail in the outer shell that I was unable to capture. I tried, but failed. I encountered a lot of problems when imaging The Cat's Eye Nebula. First and foremost was the weather. Just about every night from late June to early August was either completely overcast or very hazy. The nights I actually imaged were the nights where it was just hazy. And I was set up imaging for about 15 or 16 nights. Several nights it clouded over just after I got started and I came away with no data at all. Of the remaining 13 nights where I did acquire data, some nights it was just 10 minutes of good data, other nights no more than an hour or two before the overcast came in. And then there was my telescope's encoder failure that I talked about in another post.

It reminded me of the poem, Fog, by Carl Sandburg:

​

Fog​

​

The fog comes​

on little cat feet.​

​

It sits looking​

over harbor and city​

on silent haunches​

and then moves on.​

Except in my case, it stuck around every night.

It's not a complete failure though, the central region came out better than expected. And the neighborhood cat came by several times to hang out.

Equipment:
Meade 10" LX200-ACF fork-mounted on an equatorial wedge.
Baader 3.5-4 nm Ultra-narrowband filters.
Off-axis guider and guide camera.
ZWO ASI6200MM-Pro main camera.

Software:
Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy (N.I.N.A.)
PixInsight
Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (for mask generation)
Topaz Labs Denoise AI
Topaz Labs Sharpen AI

Integration:
Bortle class 7 (maybe 8) skies
All subframes binned 3×3
SII: 73×10 min = 12.17 hrs
Hα: 62×10 min = 10.33 hrs
Oiii: 82×10 min = 13.67 hrs
Total integration time: 36.17 hours.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Finished putting together the Milky Way mosaic (for now). Here's the whole thing (2% scale):

This fuses images I took in 2018, 2020, and 2022 (coincidentally equal time intervals) at the beach (very little light pollution). I believe the bright object near Sagittarius is Jupiter (in 2018). I am only able to acquire images for this under unusual circumstances (moonless, clear, little haze), so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get more data, so to speak. Even now, though, the center is imaged quite well- here's a crop at about 20%:

Color is good, contrast is excellent. Woot!

 

[Andy Resnick]

M27 @ 800mm f/8, DX format, 8s subs, 1.3h exposure (so far):

100% crop: it's still very noisy...

 

[Andy Resnick]

M27 @ 800mm f/8, DX format, 8s subs, 1.3h exposure (so far):

View attachment 314296

100% crop: it's still very noisy...
View attachment 314297

 

[DennisN]

Fascinating:

New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades (NASA)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddar...s-clearest-view-of-neptune-s-rings-in-decades

Example:

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

 

[collinsmark]

The Bat Nebula (NGC 6995, IC 1340), captured from my back patio in late August and early September, 2022. The very savory Bat Nebula is a small part of the Eastern Veil Nebula, which, together with Western Veil Nebula, and everything in between, form the Cygnus Loop, in the constellation Cygnus.

The Cygnus Loop is a supernova remnant that formed from a massive star exploding some 7000-8000 years ago (another source says 20,000 years ago). It lies about 1500 light-years away from Planet Earth (estimates vary; older estimates were around 2400 light-years, while a newer estimate is ~1470 light-years). That makes the bat around 12 light-years across, roughly. That's one sumptuous bat.

Equipment:
Meade 10" LX200-ACF fork-mounted on an equatorial wedge
Starlight Instruments FeatherTouch Crayford focuser modified for electronic focusing.
Baader 3.5-4 nm Ultra-Narrowband filter set.
Off-axis guider (OAG) with ZWO ASI174MM guide camera
ZWO ASI6200MM-Pro main camera.

When viewed visually (with a really, really fast telescope, allowing you to see colors) or when photographed with standard RGB colors, the Bat Nebula would have shades of both red and blue-green (cyan). Most of the red would come from both hydrogen and sulfur emissions, and the blue-green from oxygen emissions. Even when imagined in narrowband, it not uncommon to reproduce these color variations by mapping hydrogen (Hα) to the red channel, and mapping oxygen (Oiii) to both the blue and green channels, ignoring sulfur altogether. I took a different approach.

Software:
Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy (N.I.N.A.)
PixInsight.
Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (for minor touch-ups)

Instead, I gathered narrowband data in all three Sulfur (SII), Hydrogen (Hα), and Oxygen (Oiii) spectral bands, and mapped the data to RGB using the standard Hubble palette, where SII maps to red, Hα to green, and Oiii to blue, making a false color, SHO image. Using data from all three color wavelengths provides a whole gamut of new RGB colors and succulent flavors.

Integration:
Bortle class 7 (maybe 8) skies.
All subframes binned 3×3.
SII: 58×10 min = 9.67 hrs
Hα: 78×10 min = 13.00 hrs
Oiii: 77×10 min = 12.83 hrs
Total integration time: 35.5 hours

And just remember, like I always say, no matter how adorable, scrumptious, and cuddly the bat may look, please do not eat the bat.

 

[Devin-M]

Andromeda Galaxy, 300mm focal length f/4.5, 2 min * 60 exposures (2hrs):

 

[Devin-M]

Stars removed:

 

[bruha]

Hi, its beautiful ... can I ask what is this two small bright objects? (second image is left/righ turned isn it..)
Lot of succes :)