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Astronomical Stargazer Thread


Panzermann

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Here's my latest image, the California nebula. Like the previous one I shared, the telescope used was my friends at his remote observatory. He's using a 100mm refractor (A stellarvue svq100). I did all of the processing on it.

 

 

get.jpg?insecure

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Your pictures make me want to take my spotting scope up to our cabin this summer and see how it can do. Its a 20-60x80 Konus on a Creedmore shooting tripod, will take a laptop with Stellarium so I have an idea where I'm looking.

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Your pictures make me want to take my spotting scope up to our cabin this summer and see how it can do. Its a 20-60x80 Konus on a Creedmore shooting tripod, will take a laptop with Stellarium so I have an idea where I'm looking.

 

I bet you can get some nice views of some of the larger/brighter objects.. especially if its dark out there. Most of the Messier objects should work. Stellarium is perfect. The smaller the magnitude, the brighter the object.

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Here's my latest image, the California nebula. Like the previous one I shared, the telescope used was my friends at his remote observatory. He's using a 100mm refractor (A stellarvue svq100). I did all of the processing on it.

 

 

get.jpg?insecure

 

No false color, I suppose.

 

Seeing these images, one feels so small...

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...but you're high density, and you're not freezing. Not such a bad trade-off.

 

Seems you are defining a Bottle Blond Bimbo there, dense and hot...

 

I prefer to think about immortal souls we do have.

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Here's my latest image, the California nebula. Like the previous one I shared, the telescope used was my friends at his remote observatory. He's using a 100mm refractor (A stellarvue svq100). I did all of the processing on it.

 

 

get.jpg?insecure

 

No false color, I suppose.

 

Seeing these images, one feels so small...

 

 

It is false color. The California nebula is an "emission nebula", so narrow band filters were used. They capture the light emitted by ionized Hydrogen (Ha), Oxygen (Oiii) and Sulfur (Sii). On the visual spectrum, both Ha and Sii are red while Oiii is a bluish green.. making it difficult to produce a true RGB image. A common practice is to map Sii to red, Ha to green and Oiii to blue which is what I've done here. It's also known as the "Hubble" palette since many Hubble images use the same color mapping.

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Here's my latest image, the California nebula. Like the previous one I shared, the telescope used was my friends at his remote observatory. He's using a 100mm refractor (A stellarvue svq100). I did all of the processing on it.

 

 

get.jpg?insecure

 

No false color, I suppose.

 

Seeing these images, one feels so small...

 

 

It is false color. The California nebula is an "emission nebula", so narrow band filters were used. They capture the light emitted by ionized Hydrogen (Ha), Oxygen (Oiii) and Sulfur (Sii). On the visual spectrum, both Ha and Sii are red while Oiii is a bluish green.. making it difficult to produce a true RGB image. A common practice is to map Sii to red, Ha to green and Oiii to blue which is what I've done here. It's also known as the "Hubble" palette since many Hubble images use the same color mapping.

 

 

Thank you. I did not know these details.

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BUt imagine if they had found something directly contradicting the General Theory of Relativity. So, that's worth something. Plus, now that we have the means to observe such tiny, tiny objects at such long distances, it opens up the opportunity to observe other black holes such as Sagittarius A* (the heart of our Milkyway), and then possibly determine their properties with much greater confidence than ever before.

 

I remember that in my youth we were speculating if a planet-sized interferometer would be possible and how awesome it would be. I didn't expect to see it during my lifetime, but here we are. This isn't quite so awesome as the detection of gravity waves, but still pretty neat. Eventually we might set up observatories for both radio and gravity waves at the Lagrange points, massively increasing our ability to observe what's happening around us. It's idle, abstract knowledge today. But so was quantum physics in the 1920s and now we have lasers, digital cameras, computers.

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Yes, obviously you can't snap a photo from a radio wave interferometer. But it's an image nevertheless, and it's not artificially generated from an underlying computer model but actual observation data. At these distances, and given the rather diminuitive size of a black hole (combined with the brilliance of an accretion disk feeding a plasma jet several thousand times the length of the Kessel run) this is still an exceptional example of modern day measurement engineering.

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This is really cool:

 

https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/

 

It's a telescope array made mostly up from commercial parts (telephot lenses, commercial CCD's, mounting, etc...) If i had about 700 K dollar i could build a copy of it. But i could ofc not develop the software for it.

 

Anyway, it shows what a dedicated team can do on a limited budget. And they are doing groundbreaking astronomy: they find galaxies composed almost entierly from dark matter AND galaxies with almost no dark matter. They find ultra low surface brightness dwarf galaxies etc etc....

 

This opens a whole new field of astronomy, made possible by smartly assembling and programming comercial grade kit.... wonderful !!! (note that some of their discoveries were at first rejected by the wider astronomical community as "impossible" , but have been confirmed by other 100 times as expensive observatories now.)

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That is very cool. I would love to know exactly which telescopes and camera sensor they are using. I notice the scope covers say "Canon" so these may actually be large camera lenses instead of refractor telescopes. The Cameras are from SBIG, and they look to have tec cooling and integrated filter wheel.

 

I think some professional astronomers are just not aware of whats available to the public. The first time I showed a couple of astronomy professors (both out of UT Austin/McDonald) my first crude image of Orion (M42) they were blown away that a cheap telescope and a dslr could do that.

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I would love to know exactly which telescopes and camera sensor they are using. I notice the scope covers say "Canon" so these may actually be large camera lenses instead of refractor telescopes.

 

Per their website, 400mm tele lens with "Vanta black" interior coating (or some similarly light-absorbing black paint) to minimize light scattering within the optical channel.

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This is really cool:

 

https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/

 

It's a telescope array made mostly up from commercial parts (telephot lenses, commercial CCD's, mounting, etc...) If i had about 700 K dollar i could build a copy of it. But i could ofc not develop the software for it.

 

Anyway, it shows what a dedicated team can do on a limited budget. And they are doing groundbreaking astronomy: they find galaxies composed almost entierly from dark matter AND galaxies with almost no dark matter. They find ultra low surface brightness dwarf galaxies etc etc....

 

This opens a whole new field of astronomy, made possible by smartly assembling and programming comercial grade kit.... wonderful !!! (note that some of their discoveries were at first rejected by the wider astronomical community as "impossible" , but have been confirmed by other 100 times as expensive observatories now.)

Awesome!

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