TriffiD took a picture

Wow. Very impressive pictures TriffiD. I didn't think those nebulas and galaxies can be visible from down the earth surface - aren't most of those phenomena in a spectrum
of light which isn't visible by human eyes? And aren't there far too many distortions due to all the light emitting from the surface such as street lights or atmospheric magnetic fields?
How do you manage to locate and focus those phenomena and how many mm is the focal distance of your zoom lens? And doesn't the continuing earth rotation falsify the results due
to the fact that you use bulb exposure? My brother and me managed to focus the moon with his telescope only with a lot of effort just tonight and that alone took us about 5 minutes Laughing

not to talk about galaxies and nebulas being millions of lightyears away...

more pictures please! and maybe some pics of your equipment as well? how much did you pay for that thing? keep on with the good work.

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Deimos: His name means dread, and he was a fearsome son of Bull & Dirty the fearful gods of war. He always attended his gay fathers on the battlefield, along with his compadres.

	d3im0s wrote:
	Wow. Very impressive pictures TriffiD.

Thank you very much.
Almost all questions you ask are the key problems when doing astrophotography.
The spectrum of light (or rather radiation) at which you can do astronomy is indeed much broader than that you can detect with your eyes. Many objects look completely different in the ultraviolet or infrared light and some are indeed only "visible" by looking at them with a radio telescope. But most objects do show in the plain visible light. The problem with your eyes is only that your pupil is note wide enough to collect enough light.
Normal DSLR-Cameras do not show the very red end of the interesting light-range, because they have a filter, that blocks that light to avoid normal pics to look all red. I let the manufacturer remove that filter.

And yes: one of the biggest problems is to get out the light that is man-made. A good, dark sky is, as I already said, the best you can hope for, but if you don't have that, there are broad- and narrowband-filters, that block out the typical streetlight frequency and lets through nebulae-specific frequencies. With some filters, you can take quite decent pics even from the heart of Hannover. But having a dark sky is best. Here at my place, I'd give my sky a 7 out of 10 if I avoid the northwestern sky. Magnetic fields are 100% uncritical. Magnetism does not affect light.

This is my equipment:

It has a main mirror of 10'' (254mm) and 2000mm focal length.
As you can see, this is highly computerized and one of the cables (actually three) lead to my notebook where I run software to control all this. So when the weather is good, I take a set of printed star-maps and decide which object(s) I want to try that night (you can also do that on the computer). Then I set everything up and align the scope to northern celestial pole. I use a polarscope that is built into the mount. You can see that little black eyepiece right in the centre of the picture and the hole in the mount above the counterweights. Then I tell the computer to slew the scope to a bright star. It will most likely not hit the star dead centre. So I use a gamepad to centre that star and tell the computer to correct the calculation. I try a second star (close to the object I want to observe) and repeat the procedure. After that I let it slew to the object and normally it is in the center.
Now for focusing: On the last star that I use for calibration, I use the liveview of my camera to get that one roughly into focus. Then I take a photo 10 to 15 sec. exposure, open it on the notebook and zoom in on a star. if it is out of focus, I use the focuser on the scope to correct that and take a testpic again... and again... - it is a real pain in the ass and takes as long as setting the hole thing up. After having found the focus, I lock the focuser and slew to the target.
But as you mentioned quite correctly, the earth does not stop to rotate. Because I carefully aligned the mount, I can tell it, to move at the exact same rate. Unfortunately that is not enough. Ever so slight errors in the alignment and mecanical, periodical errors in the mount that cannot be helped, make it necessary to use a thing called Autoguider when you want to use exposures over 3 to 4 minutes. The black piece in front of my camera to approx. where you can see the silver knob of the focuser, is a so called OAG (Off Axis Guider). Inside is a tiny prism, that takes a little light and leads it to a second, smaller camera - the autoguider - (Mine looks exactly like this, but on the pic above it is right behind the main camera) and that thing is connected to the pc and the mount. What I do is, I pick out a not too bright star that is in the field of view of the autoguider and let the software detect any motion of that star. If it moves, the mount gets a command to correct that axis. Works like a charm (can fail - I show you my latest pic later - there you can see).

Thats about it. Easy, right? Rolling Eyes

Besides: 5 Minutes to get in focus (moon, planets or deepsky - all the same) is very fast. It takes me 15 minutes and more.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

fookin amazing...itz not shawshank redemption..but still...interesting stuff Very Happy

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	Blueberry wrote:
	yeah, quote me harder, bitch

This is actually quite a step backwards for me. My guiding failed (you can see the stars look like eggs) and I had to throw most of the images away. But even the rest had no decent colour-information in it and I have no idea why. I probably messed up with a new stacking-software, I used. I'll try that one again when the weather gets better and the moon leaves the sky again in mid-april.
But anyhow: I present you my (quite bad) M51. Actually this is two galaxies. The obvious spiral-galaxy and his unfortunate little companion to the north. Unfortunate, because the big one is ripping the smaller one apart. In the last few million years the smaller one was sucked right though the big one al least two times. The fuzzy part around the smaller one is actually clouds of stars that are ejected out of it by the immense tidal forces.
I tell you more about it as soon as I learned how to take better pictures and you can actually see what I mean.

This is only 16 images â 4 minutes each and 6 images â 10 minutes.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

I replaced the image. It's a little better, now - still not good.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

Me again!

I wouldn't bother you with this one, because I could only collect 8 images at 4 minutes each (I planned 50) before it started to get cloudy, which is not enough to get a less noisy and brighter image, but this contains something special which I wanted to show you.
The Galaxy is called M101 (alias the "real" Pinwheel Galaxy) and is about 27 Million lightyears away from here.
On September 24th 2011 a Supernova (called SN 2011fe) in a very early stadium was discovered in this galaxy. A Supernova is the explosion of a Star for quite a number of reasons. In this case, a small white dwarf-star drew gas from a closeby companion. The gain of mass at a certain stage leads to a gravitational collapse and it goes off in an explosion.
By the 28th of that month, the star became as bright as the centre of the galaxy. This single star was then setting free more energy, then all of the other stars in that Galaxy together. And there are Billions of them.
After that he dims out relatively quickly, but it is still visible. It is blue, now. I marked it for you to look at it in awe and get very exited. Rolling Eyes

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

Wow, so it seems like your telescope is highly computerized and equipped with a whole load of software and harware based functions to compensate the mentioned issues.
Very "abstract" work though since you can only see the results taken by pictures and nothing actually through your own eyes. But I didn't expect anything else.
Those pictures are - still - very impressive, I pretty much like the one of M51. I've shown it to several persons in my family already saying: "see, that's a fellow
of mine and look what pictures he has taken with that monster of a telescope...looks nice humm?!"

Is it possible to take pictures of more "earth near" objects as well (e.g. Jupiter) or is this thing specialized on deep space pictures?

How much did you pay for that thing all together? ...Looks like you've invested the countervalue of a compact car Laughing

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Deimos: His name means dread, and he was a fearsome son of Bull & Dirty the fearful gods of war. He always attended his gay fathers on the battlefield, along with his compadres.

The telescope itself is built for photography, but if I had a few more eyepieces and stuff, I could of course watch things directly though the telescope, but I find deep sky objects not so interesting, when they are only fuzzy black and white blobs, basically. I will buy some additional eyepieces, in time, but right now, I'd rather get some more stuff that helps me with the photography. And I need about a ton of them like more filters, a motor-focuser, reducer-lense and and and...

It is absolutely possible to take pictures of the planets or the moon and the sun. Since they are all much brighter than the deep sky objects, it is easier to get a decent image of them. But right now I do not have the right accessories to do that right. For best results you do not take DSLR pictures but you use a (slightly modified) webcam to take a video of the planet. Then you go and split that video up into its single frames and stack only the best frames. I will try that with the video-function of my DSLR, but a webcam would be much better. Also I need to get a barlow-lens to double the focal length of the scope. But that - again - is too expensive right now. I plan to get everything needed by summer, because in summer the skies don't get dark enough to go for the deep sky. Around July, Planets is the only thing you can do without problems.
As soon as I find a webcam (Phillips Toucam was best, afaik, but they don't manufacture that anymore) I can modify, we will start a google hangout and I'll show you around the webcam-visible sky a little, deimos. Very Happy

Although this year this will mainly be Saturn, the Moon and a few double-stars, maybe.

I bought the telescope, mount, the cameras (DSLR and guidingcam) and a few dozens of accessories like basic filters, adaptors and stuff like that for about 5,500 €. Talking of astrophotography, that is not much and I only went for the things that were absolutely necessary for what I personally want to do with it. So for the moment I'm happy, but broke like hell.
I, for example, only run this on freeware, to save costs. Works fine. The only thing I am really missing so fking badly on that front is a 16 bit capable Photoshop with its layer functionality. You cannot get older versions like CS3 or 4 for a good price and upgrade on them and the full version of CS5 is about 800 € - clearly out of reach.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

The weather is finally getting better after more than 6 weeks of clouds at night or bloody full moon.
But still: After only 6 exposures of this session, the sky shut down. 30 exposures would have been better and I thought that this would be another train wreck but after all I think the result is quite pretty.

So this is M13:

This is the brightest globular cluster that we have. It consists of about 300,000 stars and is about 25,000 lightyears away from us. Globular clusters swarm round Galaxies and orbit the galactic centre but they are normally not in the galactic disc like all other stars but above or below it. This one is quite close to us, but there are some that are actually so far away that they are almost halfway to our galactic neighbours.

It would have been better to take more pictures to get better colours but you can already see the nicely contrasting blue and reddish stars that make this cluster.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

wow, this looks really cool. again.

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Yep, many bright spots indeed.
Wink

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http://www.cardomain.com/ride/3332770
C4 Corvette, love her till my death.

	Bionic Commando wrote:
	Yep, many bright spots indeed.

Actually, that is exactly what I think, when I see pictures of clusters. Globular clusters are ok (although I am not really thrilled by them neither), but I find it hard to understand when people sometimes get exited about their photos of open clusters with sometimes less than 100 stars, randomly scattered all over the place.
But hey, I'm glad that you liked it, Blue.

The next pic is already in the making - I collected 2 1/2 h of light last night and plan to do the same tonight. This time I chose a proper nebula. It looks quite good already, but this time I'll go all the way. That might be the last object, I take on till mid august because the so called "white nights" are coming up. The sun does not drop far enough below the horizon to let it become dark enough to take deep-sky photos.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

Finally I managed to take a picture that almost satisfies me. This is, why I bought all this stuff:

That is NGC 6888 aka the "crescent nebula" in the cygnus-area.
The nebula is ejected by the bright star in its middle. That star belongs to the class of so-called Wolf-Rayet-Stars that eject their outer atmosphere, leaving only the stars core, that will eventually turn into a supernova in a few million years. You can see the red, dusty shockwave-front of this star-fart, that compresses the dust that covers the whole cygnus-area but you also can see a second greenish white layer of oxygen from the stars atmosphere, of which I am especially proud.
The nebula lies 5000 lightyears away towards the plane of our galaxy, which is the reason for all those stars in the photo.

I took 82 exposures of 300 seconds each in three nights from dusk (midnight) to dawn (3:15) and maybe I will add some more light tonight, so I am totally exhausted. So enjoy or I'll kill you with a toothpick. Twisted Evil

Edit 28.08.2012: I added two more nights of imaging and replaced the picture. So this is a total of 150 images of 5 minute exposures. More than 12 1/2 hours.

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page

Last edited by TriffiD on Tue Aug 28, 2012 12:20 am; edited 4 times in total

that fart might have killed a whole civilisation 5000 years ago. u got a interesting hobby

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	Blueberry wrote:
	yeah, quote me harder, bitch

	Splinx wrote:
	that fart might have killed a whole civilisation 5000 years ago.

Yes, even Spliffy would have been green with envy. But no need for pitty: It is more than unlikely that there was anyone there at that time. Firstly WR-Stars are normally in close double star systems which is not good for life and even more important: Like all big stars, they only hang around for a few million years - too short for life.
So no alien was harmed in the making of this photo! Very Happy

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Finally online: TriffiD's Astronomy Page