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Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers

Posted by timothy on from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.

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."

5 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Cool project and all... by kale77in · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but the article is rather light on quotes from actual, stunned astronomers.

    1. Re:Cool project and all... by Trapezium+Artist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer), and I'm not stunned. Sorry. Nice work for a back-garden job, but any comparison with Hubble or any of our 4, 8, 10m class telescopes is utterly specious.

      What's he and many other (admittedly very dedicated) amateurs are benefitting from is the enormous improvement in detectors (in this case, CCDs) over the past 20-odd years, plus the not-unrelated improvement in computer processing power to align, stack, and mosaic digital images. Obviously, professional astronomers have access to all that in spades, as well as much larger telescopes / telescopes above the atmosphere as well.

      So yes, superficially similar and impressive coming from an amateur with limited resources, but to compare this with Hubble is completely lame-brained. Indeed, the cynic in me notes that TFA is puffing a book of his images: what a coincidence. A sidebar link takes you to a similar article in 2008 about another amateur who's "seeing the beginning of the Universe" from his shed: surprise, surprise, that article also puffs a book of his pictures. Of course, the article's in the Torygraph, which delights in celebrating a fifty years out of date vision of Britain populated by toffs, proles, and eccentric back garden amateur boffins, so hardly unexpected.

      Going back to the point about better detectors, however, it's interesting to note that although we've built bigger and bigger telescopes over the past twenty years (as well as developing adaptive optics, space telescopes, broader wavelength coverage, etc.), the main gain we've experienced in terms of scientific performance has come from the vastly improved detectors. Problem is, we're now pretty close to detecting every photon that falls on the detectors and we can build detector arrays that almost fill the available focal plane.

      To go further in ground-based astronomy then, we need much (much) larger telescopes, such as the E-ELT, TMT, and GMT. With their much larger collecting area and higher spatial resolution, you can expect truly fabulous things in the next ten years. From space, it's JWST, of course ...

  2. Stunning? by Sperbels · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  3. Pretty pics, but not research grade by petes_PoV · · Score: 4, Insightful
    What NASA releases for general consumption are highly filtered, highly photoshopped images that are promoted for their vivid colours and "cosmic" impressions. That's not what Hubble is used for. If that was all it did then yes, this guy (and the thousands of others around the world like him) could fill the media with colourful images all day long.

    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
  4. You're joking, right? by cyn1c77 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.