New hobby -- or a new excuse to curse the weather at least. Closeup of Jupiter along with Io, Europa & Ganymede Others won't thumbnail or embed, hrm. Anyway, it's an overview of Orion. 27 3 second exposures stacked in software to remove noise and clean up background details. Plus a bunch of other stuff - special frames designed to take a picture of the noise the camera has naturally, or the noise it starts generating at the end of the session -- all to cleanup the noisy stuff and bring out the couple photons of light captured from distant stars. Two versions of the Orion image attached, one has been marked up nicely by Astrometry.net to show where the stars and nebula are.
Yep! Closeup I did of Orion the other day. From this full sized image. Nothing new since then, though. Lousy weather for it. Hoping it clears in the next week or so. This is all just from my house, too - if we get a good forecast soon I may go out in the country some for better skies.
New image of Orion. Kinda interesting, this one... Trying out iTelescope (free trial account, I can't even afford their entry level plan yet). They have observatories in Australia, Spain, New Mexico and California, full of high end telescopes, trackers, cameras, etc. So, captured this on a 12.5" scope fitted with all sorts of crazy high end scientific filters and equipment. I saw a similarly equipped scope sell for $30k. To get the crazy light sensitivity these cameras have, they only capture B&W. It has automatic RGB filters that can be swapped in. So for this session I scheduled a couple 2 minute shots with each color filter. Unfortunately.. I miscalculated (a few things, but we'll get to that). I only captured four images - 2 red, 2 green - before another user's reservation came up and booted me out of the system. Oops.. So this is slightly faked. I put the red & green channels in Photoshop, then copied each of those into a pair of blue channels, and gave each of them 50% of the blue. Basically, ballparking the missing information from the two channels I did get. Also.. All that blown out stuff in the center is because the middle of the nebula is much brighter than the edges. The 2 minute exposures were great for the edges - the nebulosity, they call it. Taking a few shorter exposures would have given me more detail in the center, which I would have to combined in Photoshop to get a better overall view. Anyway.. I had fun, even if the entire process was a trainwreck and nearly failed. Plus this was the success... We won't talk about the ~$50k scope in Spain that I crashed last night. Oh yeah, @Sandbag - This one's from your home country, though opposite coast. Siding Spring Observatory in NSW.
