NGC7000 - Then and Now

Back in the mid '90's, when I was in college, was the first time I was active in the hobby of amateur astronomy. Active, in the sense that I actually owned a telescope and spent late nights in the dark getting chewed on by mosquitoes or freezing my butt off trying to observe the details of some fuzzy blob in the sky.

Fiscal responsibility at the time forced me to sell my equipment and drop out of being "active" in the hobby. I never lost the interest, just the means to seriously pursue astronomy. I never got out of the habit of looking up every time I walked outside at night, or spending some time in the wee hours of a balmy August morning looking for Perseid meteors, or jumping into the car and speeding to a nearby dark site with the report of an auroral display.

Fifteen or so years later, and I found myself in the position to be able to once again become active in amateur astronomy and took advantage of the opportunity.

Photography has always been an interest of mine and photographing astronomical objects and other sky-based phenomena was a natural extension of that interest, considering my involvement in astronomy. My first serious attempt at astrophotography, that is, outside of simple star trails was the North American/Pelican Nebula complex in Cygnus.

The image at left is the results of this attempt. Keep in mind that this image was taken at a time before digital cameras and cooled CCDs were widely available at the amateur level. Those that were affordable, anyway. This image, then was taken using conventional film. Specialized, scientific film that had been hypersensitized by baking it in an hydrogen atmosphere for about 24 hours. This made the film, which was originally 25 ASA, about 400 ASA and almost impervious to reciprocity failure. The film, Kodak Technical Pan 2415, was one of the most popular black & white film emulsions available to amateur astronomers due to this and it's incredibly small grain. The image reproduction shown here suffers from .jpg compression and the fact that I can't find the original scan. I will have to have the negative scanned again in the near future before it degrades too much.

The instrument used for this versionw as a Celestron 5.5" Schmidt Camera which worked at f/1.5 or about 200mm focal length. This camera was piggybacked on my fork-mounted Meade 8" LX200, and the mount was hand-guided by me using an illuminated reticle eyepice. The image consists of a single 30 minute exposure taken through a Kodak Wratten #93 filter gel filter (to isolate the hydrogen alpha wavelengths) and developed by myself in Kodak Dektol.

Jump forward 15 or so years to last night, August 28, 2010.

Astrophotograhy equipment has made leaps and bounds in the intervening years. Last night's efforts are show here to the right. This one was taken using a Canon 300mm f/4 EF-L lens attached to an SBIG ST8300M CCD camera through a Baader 12nm h-Alpha filter. It is the result of twenty 5-minute exposures which were guided with a TMB80SS refractor and an Orion Starshoot Autoguider. I literally set everything up, framed the image and found a guide star, then pressed a button and watched a movie while the camera an computer did all the work.

Things have certainly changed in the intervening years.

The images were stacked and combined in Deep Sky Stacker and post-processed using Photoshop CS4. Minimal changes were made using Levels and Curves. No other processing was done at this time.

I'm not saying that either method is better than the other. Back then, amateurs certainly achieved some very fine results with the equipment available. Indeed, there are still some purists who prefer to work with film, saying that continuous tone images are superior to digital. In some respects, they're right. Digital images can only be enlarged so much before the size of the pixels becomes ungainly and makes the image look blocky. Although film images may be able to be enlarged more, they are still limited to the grain size of the emulsion. Tech Pan is gone ... discontinued by Kodak a few years ago, and even other films are starting to get hard to find. Most film developing has be either be done by the photographer or taken to a lab that sends it to a larger lab.

I think digital has come to a point where pixel size is small enough and the sensors large enough to allow amateurs to create images that rival professional images that were being made back when I took that first photo of NGC7000. The process may not be nearly as hands on as it used to be, but, is that necessarily a bad thing?

Messier 31, An Experiment

Messier 31, the Andromeda Galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. It is also, I believe, the farthest object from Earth that can be seen with the naked eye. This time of year, if you look to the East North-East you will see the constellation of Andromeda. From even a slightly dark site, you can see a smudge of light which is M-31. With a modest pair of binoculars, you can see M-31 stretch across the whole field, as well as its companions M-32 and M-110.

You would think that it being such a bright object, it would be easy to get a photograph of M-31, and you would be right. Getting a good photograph of it is another story. First off, it's huge compared to other astronomical objects. The photo below was taken at a relatively short focal length of 685mm, and it still fills the frame. Not only is it huge, it's got a very large dynamic range. Which means if you get the fine details of the spiral arms, you tend to completely overexpose the core. Expose for the core and details are hard to bring out. Getting a good photograph of M-31 is all about balancing the exposures between the core and outer arms.

I hadn't tried to photography M-31 with the CCD camera, so I just took a stab at the proper exposures. Still without a luminance filter, I had to substitute Hydrogen Alpha. This is a composite of twenty 2-minute exposures for each channel, hAlpha, red, blue and green. I blended the hAlpha and red images to bring out the red, star forming regions that can be seen in the outer arms. Also, the Ha and red were blended for the luminosity channel.

Date: August 7, 2010
Location: Sugar Grove Nature Center, Funk's Grove, Illinois
Telescope: AT106LE, AT2FF
Camera: SBIG ST8300M, FW5-8300
Filter: Baader hAlpha, RGB
Mount: Celestron CGE
Guider: Orion ST80, SSAG
20 X 120 seconds, each channel Ha,R,G,B
Individual channels stacked in Deeps Sky Stacker
Red channel blended with hAlpha for red and luminosity using Photoshop CS4

A Lagoon In Search of a Boat

Here's my latest attempt at an RGB image using a monochrome camera. This image is of Messier 8, or the Lagoon Nebula. This nebula is an icon of the summer southern Milky Way, visible to the naked eye as a hazy patch hanging just above the spout of the Sagittarius teapot. It's a favorite photographic target, but because of its location, or rather my location at 40 degrees north, it crosses the sky at seemingly the speed of light. Combine that with short summer nights, and it turns out to be a tougher object than one would think. Not to mention that my southwestern horizon is dominated by the giant light dome of a hopelessly overlit truck stop...:(

Anyway...

Object: Messier 8
Date: August 6, 2010
Location: Funks Grove, Illinois (40.5N, 89.0W)
Instrument: AT106 LE (106mm f/6, triplet)
Camera: SBIG ST8300M w/ FW-5 filter wheel
Filters: Baader Ha(7nm), R,G,B
Astro-Tech Field Flattener
Guider: Orion ST80 w/SSAG
Mount: Celestron CGE
Ha - 10 X 180 seconds
RGB - 4 X 180 seconds each channel
Channels stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
HaRRGB Combine done with Photoshop CS4 using Starizona Method 2

Click the thumbnail for a larger image:


[Update: I wanted to compare the two different HaRGB Methods that Starizona has. First thing I notice is that there are many more stars in the picture below compared to the first one. I also see now that I've got some egg-shaped stars on the right side of the image. Probably due to something in the imaging train not being square]

I Made A Butterfly!

Well, sort of.

Continuing from my previous post, I now had two Black Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio Polyxenes) chrysalises. I thought it might be neat to have a time-lapse of the butterflies emerging.

I had read it could be as soon as five days, but it ended up taking nine. The first chrysalis formed on 7/21, and when I woke up on 7/29 and noticed that it had turned more transparent, I knew there would soon be a new butterfly. It happened a lot quicker than I expected as I'd also read that it could be 24 hours after the chrysalis turned clear before the butterfly emerged. It was actually more like five hours or so.

The video is below. Not much happens for a while except the chrysalises moving a bit, but soon you can start to see some changes taking place in the lower one that indicates the butterfly is ready to emerge. Around the 8:08 time index, the butterfly actually emerges.

Don't blink!

Even though I was taking an exposure every 5 seconds, the butterfly pops out very quickly. If I had a clue how, I would make that portion of the video slo-mo, but alas, my video editing skills are non-existent.

I'm currently also raising a Monarch caterpillar, so hopefully I'll be able to get a video of that transformation, too.

Until then, click the link below for the video:

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Metamorphosis Before Your Eyes

[Update: Resized the image below so it isn't quite so ginormous]

Recently, I was tending to my garden and came across some caterpillars partaking of the tops of my carrots. They are Papilio Polyxenes, the Black or American Swallowtail Butterfly.

Here's one:

Just for kicks, I grabbed a couple and fed them for a few days and now they're starting to pupate. I watched this afternoon as the first one shed its skin and sealed itself up inside the shell. The second one has been hanging by that silk string for quite some time now. Assuming that it's still alive, it should be pupating within the next 24 hours or so.

On a lark, I decided to set up a cam to capture the metamorphosis in process. I've got YawCam running my Logitech QuickCam 9000, capturing an image every 60 seconds that I can then turn into a time lapse of the event. I've also got YawCam's HTTP function running so anyone can access an updating webcam. Take this linkto check out the cam. It will update every 10 seconds.

Enjoy!

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