Galileo's Camera

Disclaimer: I didn't do anything other than clicking a few buttons to get this photo. But this is the kind of photo you can get by using SLOOH's remote telescopes. M42 - Orion Nebula. 3x5min via SLOOH Chile Two (17") telescope Following through my hunt for telescope-as-a-service offerings, my next evaluation was SLOOH. Originally started back in 2002, SLOOH's telescopes became available to the public in 2004. SLOOH currently operates two sites, Chile and Canary Islands and has a total of 8 telescopes. SLOOH is not just a remote telescope or telescope-as-a-service offering. It also has a community set up where remote operators, astronomers, SLOOH staff can discuss various aspects of astrophotography as well as astronomy. SLOOH does not have a free access like the MicroObservatory. It's minimum plan starts at 50 USD per annum and you basically piggyback on missions that are set up by others and extract the same photos they take. They offer a 100 USD per annum and a 3...

For 2 years now, I've been postponing the decision to buy a telescope. My reluctance was based on two things; the nearly 1500 USD cost that I would be spending on it and the really sketchy weather that we have in Sri Lanka which makes it very difficult to get clear skies. The more I read and researched about how the amazing photos like the following are taken, the more I realised that my casual approach of just grabbing the telescope and going somewhere to do astrophotography isn't going to work. It's going to need some proper preparation. Photos like these require hours of shooting and at least a good one hour of prep work.

My last attempt at photographing Saturn was posted on an FB group and one of the members quickly pointed out that me shooting at a high ISO shouldn't necessarily give that bad of an image. After experimenting with a few different stackings, I got some interesting results. 100 frames In my previous attempt (pictured above), I stacked only 100 frames of a total of nearly 5000 frames. The reason that I didn't stack more is because I was worried that it'd average out too much that the finer details such as the Cassini Divide will not appear. It seems like what happened was exactly that; if you stacked a higher number of frames, the stacking process will cause the grains to somewhat be smoothed out. Today evening I spent experimenting with different stacking sizes to see what the results would turn out to be. 10 frames 50 frames 100 frames 200 frames 1000 frames 2000 frames 4500 frames As the number of frames stacked increase, the graininess ...

Since it is the monsoon season again, I've been thinking of writing something about astrophotography rather than actually engaging in it. Coincidentally, one of my friends sent in an article based on some scholarly work where the team was working on combining deep space photos that are general public to create more detailed photos which are comparable with the ones that are taken from the most cutting edge telescopes. This is infact, what we all do as amateur astrophotographers. However the challenge for combining images from a large number of sources lies in the fact that you don't know what conditions they were shot under and whether all of them are of comparable quality.In this research, the team managed to set up a system where it queries for popular image search services for a given object, runs the images through a 'space locationing' software to get the accurate corrdinates, stacks them and enhances the image. The researchers claim that due to the sheer number o...

I was going to wait till I get a good shot of Mercury before I posted this. But it is unlikely that I would be able to do stargazing in the next few weeks, so decided to put up what I managed to capture yesterday and today. Venus - 25th Jan 2014 Mars - 26th Jan 2014 Jupiter - 26th Jan 2014 Saturn - 26th Jan 2014 All the images were taken using Canon 550D's Movie Crop mode, exporting the file as a avi in Canon ZoomBrowser and then stacking them all on Registax. I guess I still have a lot to learn about wavelet processing! All the images above are comparable in their apparent sizes except for Venus. Venus looks like 50% of the width and height pictured above (yes even then, Venus looks larger than Jupiter because it is very close to Earth these days). I am quite ecstatic about the whole shoot because I managed to capture all the planets barring Mercury and to a reasonable detail. I didn't expect the GRS on Jupiter or the Cassini Divide on Saturn or the featu...

If you are a owner of a camera which has more than 10x zoom (better yet if you have a DSLR and a zoom lens longer than 100mm), you have a good chance of catching Jupiter with its moon on photo today. Jupiter is closest to Earth today. This means it passes roughly around 628 million km from Earth compared to the 928 million km when it's farthest from the Earth. Naturally the closer approach allows you to resolve the details of the planet much better. If you are a Sri Lankan, Jupiter rises from the east pretty much as soon as the sun sets and passes you over head around 20 minutes past mid night. Look towards the east (almost direct east, not north east, or south east) and try to find the brightest object you can see. That is Jupiter. Since a lot of people can recognise the constellation Orion, that also is a good starting point. Draw a line from the top star of the Orion's Belt through his shoulder and that line passes close to Jupiter. Jupiter it self is very bright, s...

Moon and Venus - 06th Dec 2013 This was the view from my balcony when I returned home today, and that is what prompted me to take the next photo. The photo above, is very unlikely to be what you think it is. No it's not the Moon. It is in fact the planet Venus. Sometimes called the twin sister of Earth, Venus is the closest planet to Earth and also the closest in size. Due to the similar size and density, gravity on Venus is also pretty similar to that of Earth. But the similarities end there. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% Carbon Dioxide and is 92 times denser than that of Earth. The surface temperature of Venus is thought to be about 462 C. Due to the close proximity to Earth, Venus displays very prominent phases. In fact Venus and Mercury are the only two planets that display a full range of phases like the Moon. Contrary to intuition, Venus appears the brightest when the phase is a crescent as opposed to full. Venus is right now in its brightest peak. It will...

Composite image of Jupiter (16x1/80sec ISO400) and Galilean Moons (1x1/10sec ISO800) The photo is a composite image of a high exposure shot to bring up the Galilean moons and a stacked image of Jupiter. The image of Jupiter might be the best I've done so far. Jupiter 16x1/80 ISO 400 stacked on Registax

Given the current weather in the evenings, I didn't expect to do much of stargazing. But imagine my surprise when I woke up around 3:30 AM to one of the clearest skies I've seen in Colombo. Did a bit of pointing, and decided to shoot Jupiter. One of the things that I shot way back when I was using my Astromaster 114 EQ. Jupiter - two images shot through NexStar4SE and stacked on Registax. Although not too bad, it is not that great either (have a look at http://www.astronomyforum.net/astrophotography-forum/8031-astro-io-jupiter-6-29-08-a.html for a comparison). There seems to be focus issues still and I am not sure where exactly the problem is. Moving to the 4SE has proven a good option. Given that it tracks, I don't have to fiddle with the controllers every two minutes. And even without a barlow, I can take a reasonably sized planetary image where 114EQ was producing very small images. Here's an old photo for comparison: Jupiter - single shot through Astr...

You can see a very bright star in the evening skies these days. Have a look at the western skies, just after the sunset, you will see a very bright star. It is so bright, that you can see it just after the sun sets and the skies are still blue. This is not actually a star. It's the planet Venus. It is easy to identify as it is pretty much the most brightest object in the night sky (barring the moon) and appears only right before the sun rise or right after the sun set and stays on for about two hours. This made the ancients call it the Morning Star and the Evening Star. The Babylons understood that these two stars are in fact the same. Here's my very first attempt on capturing Venus: Venus - 50x1/800sec at ISO100 If you are wondering as to why it seems to be a partial disk, more like the Moon, it is for the exact reason. Just like the Moon, Venus has phases, but instead of just 28 days, the cycle lasts 584 days. And right now it is in a "halfway" through a p...

The very first constellation I learned to recognise was Orion. Perhaps it's fitting that the very first presentable deep space image I did was also related to it. The Orion Nebula (M42/NGC1976) The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye, but cannot see much details to fully appreciate the beauty of it. The nebula is essentially what makes up the second star of Orion's sword. A wider field view of Orion with the nebula visible as a large bright blob is shown below (copied from Wikipedia): Orion (from Wikipedia) The first photo shown was taken from a Canon 550D fixed to NexStar 4SE on prime focus. 32 frames of 2seconds stacked with 10 dark frames on Deep Sky Stacker and then readjusted on Photoshop. It is obviously far from perfect. I think you need about 100 shots to make a good composite image. But as a beginner's attempt, I think it is pretty good.

This year is what probably you should call the Year of Astronomy. We are going to have three lunar eclipses, two solar eclipses (and one of them being a hybrid solar eclipse; an eclipse that appears as a total eclipse to some areas and an annular eclipse to other areas), three comets and Saturn at the closest to Earth. If you live in the right location, you are in for a treat! Unfortunately for me, two of the comets ( comet PANSTAARS and comet Lemmon ) escaped viewing due to bad weather. And yes, I missed them when they became visible back in April again. The first astronomical event I was able to photograph was the partial lunar eclipse on the 25th April 2013. I'm quite glad that I travelled to a reasonably remote location to view this, but well, the clouds were still a bother. All is not lost though: Partial Lunar Eclipse - 25th April 2013 The montage above is not a true multi-exposure shot. It is mostly "photoshopped" and you can see the cloud cover in the...

Probably about an year or so back, I tried to capture Saturn. It didn't work out well because there was a collimation error in the telescope; Saturn turned out like two saucers placed face to face. Last week, when I visited a national park, I decided to try it once more, this time with the Samyang 500mm Mirror Lens. This also being around the time of the Saturn opposition (Saturn being on the opposite side of the Sun and being closest to Earth), I thought it would make a good target. Only two problems: Cloud cover and the Full Moon. Anyway, I did manage to capture a reasonably okish amateur shot of Saturn. I just wish I had my telescope with me. Saturn - Samyang Mirror Lens, Canon 550D with 800 ISO 1/50 shutter speed. I did try to take another shot with the 2x converter attached to the mirror lens, but it seems like the vibration of the shutter is too much for the whole apparatus. The photos taken with the converter turned out to be just elongated bright blobs of light. ...

Jupiter and Galilean Moons - From top to bottom: Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede I am not some one who is very sentimental, but I can't stop going back to the times that I was about 13-14 years old when I look at this picture. Back in around 1994-95 I constructed a telescope using nothing more than a lens of dad's old spectacles, an eye piece from a toy binocular and PVC tubes. It was a very crude construction but worked pretty well. If I could remember it had a magnification factor of about 20x. The first celestial object I pointed it at was the Moon and I was pretty overwhelmed to see the craters of the moon. That was the first time I saw them "for real". I am pretty sure I would've pointed it at a few other objects, probably at the Orion Nebula as well, but what I can distinctly remember is seeing the moons of Jupiter. For the past month or two, Jupiter has been high in the sky during the evenings and being quite a bright object, have been a goo...

I'm pretty sure quite a lot of us have seen moving stars. No these are not shooting stars, these are much slower and are reasonably bright. These are man-made satellites. Thanks to a tip-off from my dad (he's an avid reader of a local science magazine), I knew for a while that the International Space Station (ISS) is visible to naked eye just like a satellite. Only thing you need to know is where and when. Guess what? NASA has a whole service dedicated to spotting the station at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html . You can go to http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ to subscribe for an email alert service or use Station Sightings link (direct link at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html ) to get a list of dates and times when the ISS flyby will be visible above your city. After a bit of a wait, managed to capture it on my camera. Come to think of it, I think its been about 6-9 months since I first ...

Jupiter About a week and a half back, I was trying to capture the Geminids. Given the awful location I live, it was a complete no-joy. However, just scanning the skies, figured that Jupiter was actually visible and decided to have a shot at it. Photo above is a single shot of Jupiter with Canon 550D, prime-focus on a Celestron 114EQ with an exposure time of 1/20sec and ISO 100. Quite obviously, it is very far from what it should be. But its a start. I also have a series of 20 shots which could've been used for stacking, but unfortunately all of them seem to have gone out of focus. So yes, only this one shot is all I've got. I think it still might be a good one to end the year ;) P:S: Oh and btw, the stripes are real :)

As usual my sense of timing seems to be impeccable, I decided experiment with image stacking for deep space imagery when the monsoons are about to start. Ever since I made the decision, it's either been raining or completely overcast. I even had some difficulty in trying to do solar photography. Luck turned my side when I went on a trip to one of the national parks in SL, Wilpattu. The bungalow we stayed in was right in the middle of the jungle with absolutely no light pollution. My brother was the first to spot that the Milky Way was clearly visible overhead. He was trying to experiment with a set of long exposure shots while I was trying to get a series of comparatively shorter exposure shots for stacking. Milky Way across Cygnus (20 frames of 10sec exposure) The image above (Milky Way across Cygnus) was stacked on Deep Sky Stacker using 20 images each with 10sec exposure. The stacking was done with 10 dark frames and 10 bias. The image below captures Milky Way across Sco...

For about a month's time, I wasn't able to do anything interesting on astrophotography  owing to the bad weather. I started some experimentation on solar photography and well that is not going that well either. However, last week I managed to snap some decent pics of the moon. For the longest time I thought that lunar photos do not need stacking or wavelet enhancements. I mean moon is the second brightest object you can find in the sky. For the sake of experimenting, I tried stacking them and doing some wavelet processing on registax. The result is as follows: Moon - 10 frames stacked and processed with wavelets. I was quite surprised to see that this actually did made a difference. Compared to the usual blurred photos I get, these seem to do way better. For the sake of comparison, see the photos below: Non-stacked (prime focus) Stacked with wavelet processing (prime focus) So yeah it does seem to make a difference. I also wanted to see if this was something to do ...

After getting necessary film to cover the whole aperture of the lens, I decided to try out a few shots in the morning. Starting off with the highest shutter speed of 1/4000, I realised that even that gives a VERY bright picture (as opposed to the 1/80-1/40 shutter speed which gave a "reasonably ok" view yesterday). Now here's a bit of math. The "brightness" of the image is dependent on both the expose time and the aperture. The expose time has a linear effect (i.e. you expose for 2 seconds, you get twice more light than when you keep it open for 1 second). What sort of an effect does aperture have? Assuming aperture is measured as a diameter of the lens/opening (and that it is circular), the area that is open is given by pi*(d/2)^2 where d is the diameter of the aperture. The area it self has a linear effect on the brightness as well. I.e. you let twice as much as light in for the same period of time, you get an image that is bright twice as more. If the tw...

I noticed quite late that we are going to have another Venus - Solar transit in a few days and that is going to be the last Venus transit for almost a century. I have not done any serious solar viewing or photography before this. But the rarity of the event and the equipment I have now wants me to take a shot at it. It goes without saying that you need a solar filter. Over here in in SL, they are a bit too hard to come by. Previously when I was photographing and viewing the annular solar eclipse in 2010, I used a cut up x-ray film with my Canon S2IS (this method is debated). The problem this time is that I now have a Canon 550D, whose lenses have a much larger aperture and the original x-ray cut ups wouldn't work anymore. 1st attempt: Use a type of coloured cellophane that is available over here as a filter. A single sheet is way too thin so tried stacking up about 10-12 on each other. However it diffuses the light so much that it is barely of any use. 2nd attempt: Center the...