![]() |
#1
|
||||
|
||||
Yep, I did. I got 10 minutes on the TSU observatory, Title - Tarleton State University because the weather was horrible and the "real astronomers" didn't even bother opening the dome due to an American football stadium putting off horrible amounts of light pollution and an even cover of altocirrus clouds.
The main goals I wished to acomplish were to take 1-sec UV, IR, Visible, Blue, Red filters of the Alpha Centauri system, and 50-sec UV, IR, Visible, Blue, Red filters of M 51, better known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Unfortunately, Alpha Centauri was below the viewable horizon, so no searching for Pandora. However, I did get a somewhat-cloudy look at M-51. ![]() The raw camera data was very dim and had an average min-max range of 60 out of 255: ![]() (Unfiltered grayscale sensor used as example) It turns out that GIMP loads .fits images just fine. So I fired up gimp and got to work compositing all the wavelengths together and tweaking, tweaking, and tweaking some more. The end results, after about 4 hours of work were really, really good considering the conditions plus the telescope needing realignment: ![]() (Image released under public domain) I also have the original .fits files and the .xcf if anyone wants them. And for comparison, the Hubble mosaic image of the same galaxy: ![]() The Hubble is much, much more sensitive, (0-6 magnitude is the range of the human eye, TSU is +20, Hubble is +30) and doesn't have to deal with late-night football games overexposing its images or clouds, as well as having a CCD of twice the resolution (4096x4096 instead of 2048x2048) and a much, much narrower FOV. That said, this is one of the coolest things I've ever done, and imho, I got some pretty d**n good results. ![]() Last edited by Sight Unseen; 07-02-2011 at 10:08 AM. |
#5
|
||||
|
||||
Way cool.
You lucky swine. - Mikko
__________________
Mikko Wilson Juneau, Alaska, USA +1 (907) 321-8387 - mikkowilson@hotmail.com - www.mikkowilson.com ![]() |
#8
|
||||
|
||||
Very cool ma tsmukan. That was quite a rare opportunity you had. Wish I could do that here. *ponders* I wonder if Yerkes lets people do this?
![]()
__________________
![]() The Dreamer's Manifesto Mike Malloy, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." - Inception "Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy **** we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." - Tyler Durden |
#9
|
||||
|
||||
That is one fantastic exposure considering the poor conditions you were under
![]() I can't wait for the day I use an observatory-class telescope ![]() |
#10
|
||||
|
||||
You could just read the linked spec sheet...
![]() ![]() Also, I really need to redo that image, the color is really, really shifted toward blue, I may have gotten the 450nm and 800nm image files mixed up. ![]() Also, another reason for the horrible noise is that this is a 1:1 pixel map of the CCD's pixels, most of the really pretty images are taken in mosaic fashion, which you can layer images like shingles on a roof to make the noise magically disappear and also get really huge, detailed images. This is done with really sophisticated software and takes months just to capture all the images, and another week to piece them together. I just hurriedly went through the filter wheel and took exposures with as many filters as possible before my time was up, dumped it all to my flash drive, and later stayed up all night working with it in GIMP. Last edited by Sight Unseen; 07-07-2011 at 08:54 AM. |
#11
|
||||
|
||||
That's quite impressive
![]() The most interesting thing I ever used was an electron microscope (a TEM, can't remember the resolution but it was small (small resolution == better, for the non-technical)) which is the opposite in scale ![]()
__________________
... |
![]() |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|