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Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers
krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."
Absolutely stunning. NT
My God....it's full of stars.
Amazing!
Amazing, I would like to see some more details of his setup, particularly which telescope and CCD he used.
I personally have a 6" Dobsonian, but without an equatorial mount it's nearly impossible to replicate his results.
...go here for more pic of his setup. I can totally see where that £20k went. http://www.opticstar.com/Run/Astronomy/Astro-Editorial-Articles-General.asp?p=0_10_19_1_6_10
...it's full of stars.
Gorgeous pics, and nice work giving an orbital observatory a run for its money, partner.
They may resemble some of the aesthetics of Hubble, but not the resolution. Thus, the comparison is potentially misleading. The photos in the gallery are of relatively near or bright objects. It's more about careful timing, planning, and processing that brings out details of such objects. Major observatories often don't have the budget or motivation to spend the time to carefully process images of common astronomical objects.
One amateur reprocessed images from Soviet Venus landers and brought out some amazing detail, finding landscape features that weren't spotted before. It's simply the case that sometimes amateurs are simply motivated to spend the necessary time and attention to detail more so than "professionals", who normally have full in-boxes. Amateurs can decide to be as anal as they want. Call it open-source astronomy.
Table-ized A.I.
... but the article is rather light on quotes from actual, stunned astronomers.
£20,000? Was I the only one who thought this was NOT a small budget?
I know it's small in relation to a NASA budget but to compare it to "all of us" makes me wonder what the writer actually gets paid.
Yes, those are very nice pictures for an 8 inch scope. But stunning??? Did he do anything else besides getting a scope with good optics, a steady mount, and a high resolution CCD? Any special processing? What software? Did he have to stack a whole lot of images and toss out bad ones where the atmosphere messed the image up too much? Details! We need the gritty details!
NGC1499 is also known as the "California Nebula". Most of the other nebulas are identified by their colloquial name, so why did they skip California? Bloody Brits still pissed about 1776! ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
...if I was more interested in pictures of the shed?
Nah. Clearly photoshopped.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
The UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council is busily slashing funding to much of UK astronomy. I guess this article is great for the powers that be to point out the UK doesn't need to spend money to e.g. stay as a partner in the Gemini Observatory when they can get results comparable to Hubble for 20 grand!
Doesn't say what he uses on his computer, though, or how much time he needs to process a picture.
/.'d
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
You should see the pictures of his voluptuous neighbor. It took months of patience to get those, as well.
Nice images but hardly Hubble. There are other amateurs doing work that is just as good or better. Check out this guy http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002
However, none of them is worth a dam' for research use: where calibration is much more important that prettiness and resolution, low noise and even the spectrum of light used (not all light makes it through the atmosphere - esp. IR) are the sole reasons for spening all that money getting Hubble up there.
While I applaud the Telegraph for publicising this, it not what professional astronomers do - nor is it even close to what Hubble does to earn it's money.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm wondering what sort of more scientific data one could get from a setup like this. Not for actual science purposes, but for my or his own fun. Do the CCDs used have enough intensity granularity that one could detect the red and blue shift differences in spinning galaxies, for instance, and do some dark matter calculations for oneself?
Very good amateur pics, but sorry, just another amateur here. It looks like an act of propaganda for non-initiated. check for instance: http://www.licha.de/astro_gallery_top.php or http://www.darkskyimages.com/categories.php
The basic implication from this article is that real scientists are idiots who waste money building expensive toys when a regular person with a modest budget can get the same results. (Similar to endless homemade electric car articles about how a guy in his garage made something better than a Prius.) These photos are wonderful, but not like those from the Hubble. Also, there is a notable lack of quotes from "stunned" astronomers as others have pointed out. Shah is a talented amateur who spent $32000 on his advanced hobby. How many of us have spent that much on a hobby? [Nevermind...] He IS an astronomer. The photos were not taken with a "garden shed" but with $32k of equipment. I have no problem with Shah, but this is borderline anti-scientist propaganda. And no I am not paranoid! Wait, I just had to turn around to see if that scary splicer from BioShock was standing behind me.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Those pictures are awesome.
What a load of whiney tossers there are on Slashdot. Yes, I already knew that's what the majority of readers were before I read this, and yes, I keep coming back and reading more of their drivel, so more fool me.
I know Hubble takes amazing photos. But you can't have a hubble in your back garden. I think it's amazing that you can get photos of stuff like that from your shed. It's quite inspiring.
Compare
http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/images/d2/ngc2237.jpg
http://www.astropix.co.uk/ps/pages/rosette%20rgb.htm
The guy's kit is impressive. I'd like his garden shed. But...
No, you've misunderstood. The astronomers weren't stunned to make the pictures, they were stunned BY the pictures.
Evidently Mr. Shah silk-screened his photos onto the blade of a cricket bat and used said instrument to whack a cluster of astronomers upside their noggins, whereupon, they saw stars!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
/obscure?
They can indeed be compared to HST pictures, as in, they are not as good.
They are pretty, an impressive achievement for an amateur using a 8" telescope, an inspiration to many, but the pictures not as detailed or scientifically interesting.
Sorry for duplicated post
Compare the referred author picture of NGC 6888 here to a professional job there. The former is still very impressive for an amateur, indeed this is the verbatim comment from the IAC site (where the professional picture was taken):
Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed.
As remarkable an accomplishment as these photos are, it would have been even more remarkable if he'd managed to take pictures of something other than the universe.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Silly hyperbole. “[A]nd the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.” Yes, you could also compare Honda Civics to Formula-1 Supercars. Both use ICE, burn fuel, have wheels, and may transport at least one person from point A to B.
Maybe they're all just seeing stars.
I'm sorry, but his pics just aren't that great compared to other amateur imagers.
Compare Peter Shah's image of M42 with Rob Gendler's. Or how about this even more stunning one captured by Tony and Daphne Hallas with a 6" refractor at the Winter Star Party.
IMHO, Peter Shah's self promotion is more impressive than his images.
The starbursts are aesthetically pleasing (stunning) but I suspect they would be detrimental to any scientific use of the images. Their presence is most likely the result of post processing that favors artistic appearance over scientific accuracy. IANAA but I doubt that the images have any scientific relevance.
a major difference here is that he is taking these in RGB, whereas the hubble pictures are usually shown to us in false color. (taken in other wavelengths for scientific purposes, like studying what the nebulae are composed of)
so really, from a strictly photographic perspective, yes, this guy's pictures are better, because they show what the thing *really* looks like.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
This amount would allow me to live for more than three years (apartment, food, electricity, phone, internet, car expenses).
You can click on all sizes above any image to see larger versions:
My tracked astro photos
My untracked astro photos
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I can't even come close to replicating these photographs myself, but there are even more incredible examples of amateurs doing amazing space photography with relatively simple equipment. There are a couple of these geniuses in the SF Bay Area. One I'm familiar with is Rogelio Bernal Andreo. He is a fixture at astro sites around the Bay, and his photographs are simply jaw dropping. I believe most of his magic happens on the back end in the digital processing. His set up easily packs into his car.
Check some of these out: http://blog.deepskycolors.com/nebulas.html
I am sorry to be negative, but this Slashdot post reads like it was written by someone with absolutely no experience in astronomy.
While the gentleman certainly takes high-quality pictures, he is solidly in the amateur category and no different from the thousands of other committed amateur astronomers that have a minimum of $20K in equipment to be able to observe and image the stars. There are amateurs who take much better pictures and have far more spectacular (and expensive) equipment out there.
Furthermore, it is absolutely ridiculous and insulting to compare his images to that of the Hubble Space Telescope. His telescope has a smaller aperature (8 inches versus 95 inches), his CCD resolution is much lower and has a much higher operating temperature. Furthermore, he has to contend with the effects of atmospheric distortion. Just because the object shapes and colors look similar to a layperson, his images achieve nowhere near the resolution and detail of the Hubble.
In order to gain more accurate photographs, they should put the Hubble Space Telescope in a garden shed and pour coffee on it.
Modern DSLR cameras have come a long way in the last three generations. Extremely high "pushed" ISOs, relatively low noise, combined with some really great lenses and just a little bit of software sophistication, and astro becomes very accessible.
If you add a tracking mount, which allows the camera to pivot on the tripod at the same rate the earth turns, keeping the camera pointed at the same subject for several minutes, you can use even lower-noise ISO ranges of the cameras and sharper f-stop ranges of the lenses. You can build yourself a "barn-door" mount for the cost of lumber, and a few bucks for screws and a clock drive (or a gear and a handle to turn it.) Or you can buy a premade tracking device like the Astrotrac I selected (because I'm too lazy to build a mount -- about a grand); or you can go nuts and buy a telescope mount that tracks (can cost ((up to many)) thousands.) Tracking really helps.
But, you don't have to go there. Just go outside, pop the camera on a tripod, use a lens you can set for f/2.8 or faster, crank the ISO up to 1600 or faster, and expose for 1...8 seconds (depending on how much magnification the lens provides... at 85mm, 4 seconds is good. At 400mm, about one second is all you can go before the starts begin to trail.) Personally, I like 85mm; it's enough mag where with a modern sensor (15mp for the 50D) you get a goodly amount of detail, but it's short enough that you get some exposure time.
So with this setup, shoot multiple shots, then align and "stack" them using pretty much any image processsing software that lets you rotate and translate, preferably to sub-pixel precision. The more images you stack, the better the result will be. The rule is, random noise reduces to the square root of the number of frames, so you can get a 4:1 noise reduction with only 16 shots. To get 10:1, you need a hundred. For impulse noise, like a satellite track, averaging gets you reduction of N:1 where N is the number of frames... BUT... if you use median instead of average, odds are excellent that impulse noise will disappear completely. I always try both, just to see which looks better.
There are dedicated programs out there than can stack and align for you, too. A little googling goes a long way.
The biggest challenge has little to do with the camera, and more to do with where you live. Light pollution, that is, the amount of light sourced from streetlights and so forth, competes with the dim deep space objects; so someone who lives east coast, say, NJ or in the metro area... not going to do very well. Where I live - rural Montana - it's not a problem at all. If you live in an urban area, it's the kind of thing you keep in mind for when you go cross country and have an opportunity to cross some desert (or most anywhere in Montana. :) Refer to a light pollution reference, watch the weather (which can really screw up your plans.... clouds.... I flipping despise clouds at night), and then it's all down to your timing.
Anyone who has a modern DSLR, I can't recommend this highly enough. It's fun.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
so really, from a strictly photographic perspective, yes, this guy's pictures are better, because they show what the thing *really* looks like.
Meh. True color would be relevant only if you were going to live out there and wanted your curtains to match ;-).
... space-operaish for instance ;-).
(Some of the explanations in the following are not directed to parent (who appears to already know this) but to anyone who's interested).
If you read some of the descriptions below his (quite fantastic!) pictures, you'll see something like this "using the HST palette" or "H-a, RGB" or "H-alpha, RGB". The first refers to the Hubble Space Telescope palette, which you can read about here - http://astroprofspage.com/archives/1500 (brilliantly written article understandable at the elementary school level - I recommend it to anyone interested in what false color processing is really all about). The H-alpha of course refers to the lowest energy line in the Hydrogen spectrum, which I would assume has been filtered out (or enhanced) during processing. A lot of false color processing is merely enhancing certain wavelengths over others because there's more interesting structure (and astrophysical processes) to be explored there and they would otherwise be swamped by high intensities of more 'boring' wavelengths (whose origins are well known - such as the H-alpha). Of course, sometimes you would do such processing for purely aesthetic reasons - to make a celestial scene look more
That's not "Flamebait". That's humor, exactly the kind of humor Brits like.
You can see and read his entire book online from the publishers site.
http://www.blurb.com/books/917436
Not really. A lot of his shots are HaRGB, that's *not* what the eyes see. Try some of Russell Croman's images:
http://www.rc-astro.com/
Peter's images are very good. Comparable to Hubble? No.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
I meant more so about "sky" resolution, not so much camera resolution. I should have clarified that. In other words, Hubble can resolve much smaller objects in terms of angles of the sky. I believe angles in "arc seconds" is the resolution unit used in astronomy.
Even if Hubble had a camera with only 50 pixels, it would still have good angular resolution. Hubble can (barely) resolve features on Pluto's face, for example. No amateur scope can come close because even if they had the best telescope, Earth's atmosphere blurs images too much. (Although corrective laser-to-atmosphere turbulence tracking systems may someday be within amateur reach.)
Table-ized A.I.
I believe you meant it as a joke, but it does bring up another issue. Sometimes professionals are hesitant to "play" with images too much because they can be accused of "distorting the data". Amateurs generally don't have that monkey on their back and can crank the tinkering knobs to the limit. If they make a mistake, they just take down the webpage and move on, whereas a professional scientist can be blacklisted forever.
Note that a professional scientist may still fiddle with stuff, but may be hesitant to release stuff to the public if they can't explain what the transformations are doing on a technical level.
Table-ized A.I.
Hello everybody, thanks for taking the time to have a look at my images, and i have to agree with a lot of you, there are many many other far better imagers than myself, Rob Gendler, Adam Block, Russell Crowman just to name a few. I am baffled as to why this has gotten so much press, im guessing its nothing more than media spin. Its embarrassing for my images to be compared to the HST.....i mean that is just a no brainer!!
im just a normal guy with a day job that enjoys Astronomy.....i dont pretend to know alot about the science i just get a lot of satisfaction doing what i do.
the only thing i hope is i inspire just a few!
best regards peter shah
I read this and thought, haven't I seen this before? But no, apparently The Telegraph published a similar story in 2008 about another gentleman, living in england, who has also taken some amazing space photographs from his "garden shed." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3526362/Amateur-astronomer-captures-dawn-of-the-universe-from-back-garden-observatory.html - interesting.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
It's really arts and crafts. Beautiful, and requiring lots of skill and patience. Probably not scientifically novel in any way, but certainly worthwhile.
...
I looked through his gallery, and although he certainly has done a good job, it's not really any better than the work of hundreds of other amateurs.
With modern SLRs, digital image stacking and a decent scope, a lot of people are doing this level of work. It takes some level of talent and a lot of patience, but it's nothing all that extraordinary.
It's CERTAINLY not up to the level of the current HST. None of those images show anything like the level of detail the Hubble has achieved.
..as mentioned above - using image stacking software can make the 'sum' of the images better than any of the component images involved.
There is a free stacking program here:
RegiStax
It works pretty well.