A Long Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away . . .

[toobfreak]

Since Biden took over the subject matter here has gone awful. The Never-Trumpers are in their throws desperate to pick something to blame him for and while there are tons of wrong things going on in the world, the Bidenista are scurrying trying to cover the fact that Joe has caused them all! So the topic content here has SUCKED for weeks. With that in mind, I thought I'd offer something a bit more ethereal:

Here are some recent outer space shots taken by a student of mine. For the most part, I think all have been taken either with a 5" refractor or an 8" folded lens-mirror catadioptric on an equatorial tracking platform whose guidance is computer controlled. The imager is an advanced scientist researcher on the east coast who admits to me that shooting deep sky has now surpassed his own work in R&D for the military in personal satisfaction. He's invested more than a year painstakingly refining the mechanical precision of his mount to minimize guiding errors.

Some of these pictures are his raw work, others have been retouched / post-processed by me for further development to correct and show him how much better his shot would look if processed better. He is still learning. I'll note the state with each image.

This is one of his own reworks of the Whirlpool Galaxy near the Big Dipper. He was trying to get the color right. I think all I did here was rotate the image to reorient the galaxy as is commonly seen, with the secondary galaxy below being cannibalized beneath the primary galaxy. This was taken with the 5-inch.

 

[toobfreak]

This is a zoomed and cropped section of a monochrome version of the above shot, what they call luminescence channel, which I heavily reprocessed to show him the full extent of detail he captured above! He didn't think he had recorded so much detail.

 

[toobfreak]

This is a reprocess he just did of a shot he took last summer which I further pushed to enhance the color and detail. This may have been taken through a very fast 4" scope he has. They call this the North American Nebula.

 

[Crepitus]

Since Biden took over the subject matter here has gone awful. The Never-Trumpers are in their throws desperate to pick something to blame him for and while there are tons of wrong things going on in the world, the Bidenista are scurrying trying to cover the fact that Joe has caused them all! So the topic content here has SUCKED for weeks. With that in mind, I thought I'd offer something a bit more ethereal:

Here are some recent outer space shots taken by a student of mine. For the most part, I think all have been taken either with a 5" refractor or an 8" folded lens-mirror catadioptric on an equatorial tracking platform whose guidance is computer controlled. The imager is an advanced scientist researcher on the east coast who admits to me that shooting deep sky has now surpassed his own work in R&D for the military in personal satisfaction. He's invested more than a year painstakingly refining the mechanical precision of his mount to minimize guiding errors.

Some of these pictures are his raw work, others have been retouched / post-processed by me for further development to correct and show him how much better his shot would look if processed better. He is still learning. I'll note the state with each image.

View attachment 483868

This is one of his own reworks of the Whirlpool Galaxy near the Big Dipper. He was trying to get the color right. I think all I did here was rotate the image to reorient the galaxy as is commonly seen, with the secondary galaxy below being cannibalized beneath the primary galaxy. This was taken with the 5-inch.

I'm.curious what president Joe has caused and why it made you post pictures of galaxies.

 

[Turtlesoup]

A combination of the two (cropping and color) would make a great picture. I think.

 

[toobfreak]

This is a pretty recent shot he took of the "Crab" Nebula, a supernova remnant that blew up long ago in Taurus the Bull.

 

[Turtlesoup]

View attachment 483874


This is a reprocess he just did of a shot he took last summer which I further pushed to enhance the color and detail. This may have been taken through a very fast 4" scope he has. They call this the North American Nebula.

Gorgeous

 

[toobfreak]

Another galaxy photo taken near the Big Dipper.

 

[Disir]

These are beautiful.

 

[miketx]

Those are really cool. Whenever I see pics like these I always wonder what it would look like ff you were there.

 

[miketx]

Was the first one stopped down to 17 light years?

 

[deannalw]

Those are amazing, toobfreak!

I paint some. James is a great amateur photographer. Nature amazes... there are times I look at one of our pink and orange sunsets, or a cloud filled sky... I think, if I'd of seen a picture of this I'd think it was fake as hell.

 

[toobfreak]

Here is another photo, originally a TIFF, I had to convert it to a jpeg to display here. It was actually a mistake galaxy, somehow the imager input the wrong designation and aimed the scope at this galaxy by mistake. It represents three hours of work. Oh well, it is still an edge on, a rather curious galaxy at about the same distance as the intended one (around 15 million light years) and what's curious about this galaxy is the near total absence of dark matter in the area.

Of more interest to me was the satellite galaxy he captured toward the lower right with only about 1/80th the light output, it is a PGC galaxy, a lenticular at about magnitude 15.3. I was able to zoom in on it to see what the sensor chip captured, which suggests a broken or disturbed galaxy, possibly taking on another galaxy or changing to become a spiral.

 

[toobfreak]

Here are a couple pictures he sent, one showing the 4" scope, the other the 5" scope on his main mount.

He images with a one shot color CMOS camera (expressly made for astro imaging), which means it sees and records all the colors at the same time (many do not). And here are a few earlier versions of the above photos as he originally shot them before he learned to rework the data for a better rendition.

M1 again. Note in this version, it looks all green.

An earlier version of the North Am Nebula which lacked the color saturation.

 

[Baron Von Murderpaws]

I'm not choosy at this point..........I just want off this crazy effing planet!!!

 

[miketx]

I'm not choosy at this point..........I just want off this crazy effing planet!!!

There's only two ways off, the stairway to heaven or the highway Minneapolis.

 

[JLW]

Other than the gratuitous shot at our great president, good thread. The photos are very nicely done. Impressive.

 

[toobfreak]

Other than the gratuitous shot at our great president, good thread. The photos are very nicely done. Impressive.

Yeah I know John, Biden is one of America's great presidents, Trump sucked rotten eggs, and this is a good thread yet you can't find it in your heart to give me even one like for it.




No surprises there.

 

[JLW]

Other than the gratuitous shot at our great president, good thread. The photos are very nicely done. Impressive.

Yeah I know John, Biden is one of America's great presidents, Trump sucked rotten eggs, and this is a good thread yet you can't find it in your heart to give me even one like for it.




No surprises there.

I didn’t think about it, but you are right. So I have corrected my oversight.

 

[toobfreak]

I have corrected my oversight.

Here is one last picture then, a photo of the Orion Nebula he took last winter I believe, and below, the rework of it I did for him at the jpeg level to bring out additional details plus some added artistic interpretation which the guy still has a bit of trouble with I think because he is just not used to embellishing data. But he is learning quickly.