Last Night's Astro Image

Believe it or not the accepted popular name for NGC281 is the 'pacman nebula'.

I had to share this one, I think its my best yet.

Neil

Wow, that's a great image Neil.

Astronomy is a nice hobby, just wish I had a holiday home in Chile.

Wow - bravo!

We were sitting in the spa pool last night looking at the Magellanic clouds. They are I think above the horizon most of the year here, but when they are low down you can't pick them out from the haze. If there is any cloud about it is hard to be sure what you are seeing, so you need a good clear night, preferably with no moon. The Southern Cross is pretty low on the horizon now.

Last winter (2015) we had lots of really clear frosty nights, Neil would have loved the conditions, but this year we had a lot more cloudy nights so it hasn't been so good. I have a friend who does a bit of astrophotography but he is up in Auckland where the city lights don't help much.

John in NZ

Thanks for the compliments!

This year has been incredibly cloudy compared to 2015. 1 November was my first session for 25 days!

On the plus side the nearby streetlights have been swtiched off making a huge difference. Half a mile down the road modern low-dispersion LP sodium (best possible for astronomers!) have been used so if our get replaced by hose I won't be too sad.

Neil

Complements++ from me too. That's a very impressive picture.

As to cloud cover I've been checking the night sky ever since Neil started tempting me to try and emulate his super images. Not one single clear night here in the last few weeks.

It's a good job I dithered in my armchair rather than rushing out and flashing the cash. I hate having new toys and not being able to play with them.

Dave

Neil,

What telescope are you using and what magnification eyepiece.

Colin

A Skywatcher 130P-DS with a x0.9 coma corrector, used at prime focus (so no eyepiece, it acts like a 580mm telephoto lens) with a Canon 450D DSLR.

Technical stuff - I had it on a tracking EQ3 mount with a steel tripod, after throwing away the really cloudy exposures I was left with 96 2-minute images and stacked the best 85% so this is about 2 3/45 hours of exposure. That said, the nebulas shows on just single exposures, I reckon 20 or 30 1-minute exposures would give a reasonable result.

Neil

And last night's image. Started imaging at 12:45 and was up until nearly five...

I know who you're looking for is that an antler ?

Wow!

That's a superb image of the Horsehead nebula !

Well done Neil !

Nice. I live in criccieth at the weekends . It's very clear Skye's down there compared to West Yorkshire. What would you recommend as a starter for viewing.

When you say five hours is that how long you were out or the picture exposure, sorry I know nothing about photography?

Brian

Thanks Folks,

@Bri, I took 100 two-minute exposures (3 hours 20 minutes total), then used a program call Deep Sky Stacker to choose the 60% best frames and add them all together (plus making some other key tweaks) then finished in Photoshop.

If I push it really hard its amazing what detail come out, but i confess I am being guided in what to find by some even more amazing images others have taken.

I really need a lot more data, then I will be able to stretch it to get more detail out without too much noise. Sadly cloud and a poorly balanced mount (actually too-well balanced, I had backlash issues) lost me a fair number of frames.

Neil

Omg that's a bit fancy. I was not aware you could layer them up..

Too much techy for me

Cheers

Bri

We're just watching last night's 'Sky at Night'
... I did a quick bit of multi-tasking and found this !!

**LINK**

http://charliehoey.com/threejs-demos/gaia_dr1.html

Prepare to be boggled [and do click the i button at top left]

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 09/01/2017 19:15:50

They are amazing pictures to be sure, and I have a question. Im sure I could google it but what are they? Planets, stars, big lumps of rock, could they possibly hold life? I guess a lot of gasses? How far away...very interesting stuff

.

Yes you could just google it ... or you could even [as I recommended] follow the link in the i button: which would lead you to this page. **LINK**

https://medium.com/@flimshaw/torrenting-the-galaxy-extracting-2-million-3d-stars-from-180gb-of-csvs-457ff70c0f93#.z5z3cg921

MichaelG.

Thanks Michael, I followed the links as you recommended but it took me to a page all about computer stuff which seems to explain the theory behind taking the pictures and not what is actually in them - maybe i missed something.

It may be easier to watch 'Sky at Night' on iPlayer ... but this should point you in the right direction:

[quote]

Gaia

The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite is currently twirling about 1.2 million kilometers beyond the moon. As it spins, it dutifully records the position of every point of light it sees. On September 14th, 2016, the first of many scheduled public releases of that data occurred, in the form of a press conference and about 5200 40MB gzipped CSV files. And that’s compressed CSVs, the total size of the data is 532GB, and over a billion rows, each one another sun.

[/quote]

MichaelG.

.

Edit: Note that there are two hyperlinks, in that brief quotation, to YouTube videos.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 09/01/2017 21:00:07