Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Try this at home, kids!
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.
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!
Totally... but comparable to photos from Hubble? Sure, I guess "not as good as" is a comparison. Living here in Britain I can confirm getting pictures of the sky like that is no easy feat, and are definitely impressive... but there's no way you could achieve anything like Hubble's output, what a silly thing for them to say! I expected better from news outlets than that... haha jk.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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!
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
It's all a conspiracy to make conspiracy theorist sound overly paranoid, thus removing any credibility from true conspiracy theories.
I'll never forget taking a good friend of mine from England visiting Australia back to where I grew up. I was raised about 400 km west of Brisbane - essentially a whole lot of absolutely nothing. He just gawked at the night sky for about an hour. He'd never realised what was up there.
You can see so much that you see colours.
.
Indeed, as an astrophotographer I can say his images are high quality and I'm sure the comparison with Hubble is not his own. We know better than that... I use an even simpler setup (Losmandy GM-8, Canon 300mm f/2.8 Lens or 20cm Newtonian f/4.5 and modified Canon 20D camera) and even those images get compared to Hubble by people. That setup cost me less than 5k euros.
Hubble is about science, astrophotography as you get to see it is about "pretty pictures". We get as much sciene return as a casual wildlife photographer... By accident we may discover something (and we all dream of it...). Hubble press releases are "pretty pictures" as well; but usually distilled from valuable scientific data.
There are a lot of amateurs contributing to science, but you don't get too see much of them. Tom Boles for example has discovered over 120 supernova's (from Britain) and has been featured in the media (BBC). And he's picked a hot subject. Many others monitor asteroids, variable stars, faint comets and will never get noticed by a news channel...
His and astrophotographers' work is important though to popularize science. I myself got started by seeing images of the sky in books. Now I'm making them myself...
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.
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.
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.
That part isn't hard. As a former astronomer:
:-)
1) Take a dark frame. Lens on, potentially the same duration of your planned exposure. This captures all the non-responsive/stuck pixels on your camera, and captures any heat noise caused by the rest of the instrument.
2) Take the image.
3) Subtract #1 from #2.
There might be additional post-processing, but that depends on the quality of your setup, and how into it you are. Most astronomers that I know of use custom written scripts in IDL or MATLAB to do such processing, although there is a bit of a trickle to move to things like R and Python, due to their being more full-fledged programming environments.
When I was doing astronomy, we'd set our exposure up, then go play video games for a half hour. Ten minutes of dark-frame, ten minutes of exposure, couple seconds of automated transfer over the nextwork, a button push, and a minute or so of processing. Then we'd have to pause our game, and move to the next target.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
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.