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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."

6 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Hubble? I don't think so by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
       

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    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Hubble? I don't think so by wierdling · · Score: 5, Informative

      As someone who processes Hubble data for viewing (I am working on one right now), pretty much every image you see like the ones he show are "enhanced". They are taken through (generally) 3 narrow band filters for nebulae, and 3 wide band for galaxies. If you check his images, he even shows what filters he used.
      And NASA isn't the only group putting out viewable Hubble images. The ESA publishes quite a few (which get published through the Hubble Heritage site). Check out www.spacetelescope.org. The lovely full view of Orion was done by them.

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  2. 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 Sulphur · · Score: 5, Funny

      How many astronomers were stunned to make these pictures. Was it done humanely?

    2. 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 ...

  3. Re:Stunning by Kentari · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...