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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."

2 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 ...