Category Archives: Astroimaging

    Solar Transit of Mercury Video

     

    Click Here for YouTube Video

    • Telescope: Stellarvue SVA130T-IS with Baader solar filter
    • Mount: Losmandy G-11 with Gemini 2 controller
    • Autoguiding: No
    • Optical Configuration: 0.72 x 910 mm (f/5)
    • Digital Zoom: Cropped sensor for 5X magnification. Total magnification = 120X
    • Camera: Canon 60Da
    • Camera Control: Backyard EOS, Planetary Capture
    • Video Loops: 45, 100-frame videos; ~ 20 fps @ 1-min. intervals
    • Shutter Speed: 1/3200 s
    • ISO: 100
    • Calibration: None (no darks, no flats, no biases)
    • Lucky-Imaging Processing: AutoStakkert 2 and RegiStax 6
    • Post-Processing & Frame Alignment: Photoshop CC
    • Video Rendering: iMovie
    • Imaging Location: Los Angeles, Calif.

    When the Sun rose in Los Angeles, Calif. on November 11, the 2019 solar transit of Mercury was already well underway. And by the time the Sun cleared my house and the neighbor’s trees, there was less than an hour left to go. Miraculously, the thick marine layer of clouds that had threatened to scrub the photo shoot altogether had also evaporated. Better late than never. It was game on! The next transit of Mercury visible from North America wouldn’t be until 2049!

    I had decided to shoot a time-lapse using Lucky Imaging to combat the effects of air turbulence at the high magnification needed to resolve the planet, which was only 10 arcseconds wide during the transit. Ten arcseconds is how wide a soccer ball would appear at a distance of almost 3 miles. Mercury is a tiny planet.

    Each image for the time-lapse was first shot as a raw 100-frame AVI video at about 20 fps and a shutter speed of 1/3200 s. I shot 45 raw videos at 1-min. intervals. The sharpest 8 frames from each raw video were then stacked into a single TIFF image with AutoStakkert 2 and sharpened further using Wavelets in Registax 6. Each of the 45 sharpened images was processed and aligned in Photoshop CC. The final time-lapse was rendered from the 45 processed images using iMovie.

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    Supervisual Photography

    Visual Eclipse
    Supervisual Eclipse
    Visual Image
    Supervisual Image
     

     

    One of the greatest challenges of photographing the cosmos — and one of its greatest rewards — is to image objects that are difficult or impossible to see with just our eyes. Most astronomical objects are too dim, too far away, or too bright for us to visualize or photograph easily; and to meet these challenges, astronomers and imaging scientists have developed sophisticated techniques and technologies that extend photography well beyond the normal limits of human vision. This kind of photography I call supervisual photography.

    To illustrate the power of supervisual photography, the slider above displays two of my images of the 2017 solar eclipse. The Visual Image closely resembles how the eclipse appeared to the eye during totality, while the Supervisual Image reveals details of the lunar surface and the solar corona that were present during totality but were far too dim to see. It’s important to note that the colors are natural and nothing was added or altered to create this extraordinary photo. Supervisual imaging techniques were applied during imaging and processing to tease out these existing features.

    Supervisual imaging methods can also help bring to light deep-sky objects that are too dim to see at all. Such images can take hours or days to shoot before processing them. The resulting photos, however, are well worth the effort, revealing a kaleidoscope of colorful stars and vibrant, neon-like nebulae more breathtaking than anything that could be gleaned by the human eye through even the largest of telescopes.

    Supervisual photography captures the jaw-dropping subtleties of the world that exists beyond our vision, a spectacular world that we otherwise could never see to appreciate.

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    The Lagoon Nebula in H-Alpha

    The Lagoon Nebula

    This image of the Lagoon Nebula was shot from Los Angeles with a DSLR in H-alpha light.

    Click for High-Quality Prints

    • Telescope: Stellarvue SVA130T-IS
    • Mount: Losmandy G-11 with Gemini 2 controller
    • Autoguiding: Yes
    • Optical Configuration: 0.72x field flattener & reducer (f/5)
    • Filter: 12-nm narrowband H-alpha
    • Camera: Canon 60Da
    • Light Frames: 32, 5-min. exposures
    • Calibration: 36 darks, 100 biases, 30 flats
    • Exposure Time: 160 min. (32 x 5 min.)
    • ISO: 800
    • Pre-Processing: PixInsight
    • Processing: Photoshop CC
    • Imaging Location: Los Angeles, Calif.

    The Lagoon Nebula is one of the finest examples of a stellar nursery and one of only two nebulae visible to the naked eye. Located in Sagittarius, the nebula lies along the intersection between the galactic plane and the plane of our solar system (ecliptic plane), just a few degrees off a direct line of sight to our galactic center (Sgr A*).

    The Lagoon is a giant cloud of dust and gas about 100 ly wide, 50 ly high, and about 4,100 ly away. Peppered throughout its expanse are a number of smaller dark features called Bok globules, which astronomers believe to be stars in the making. These “protostars” consist of dense, light-absorbing balls of gas and dust collapsing under their own weight, a process that also created the open cluster of new stars (NGC 6530) that now makes the whole nebula glow. These new stars are only a few million years old, infants on a cosmological time scale.

    Ultraviolet light from NGC 6530 and other stars within the nebula causes the hydrogen gas to glow (fluoresce) in the red. A special narrowband filter placed over the camera sensor lets only this red light through and blocks everything else, which allows emission nebulae like the Lagoon to be photographed from light-polluted cities like Los Angeles.

    [For Brian — friend, physicist, outdoorsman. You are greatly missed.]

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    Star-Spangled Eagle

    Star-Spangled Eagle

    The Eagle Nebula spreads its wings among a kaleidoscope of glittering stars.

    Click for High-Quality Prints

    • Telescope: Stellarvue SVA130T-IS
    • Mount: Losmandy G-11 with Gemini 2 controller
    • Autoguiding: Yes
    • Optical Configuration: 1x 910 mm (f/7)
    • Camera: Canon 60Da
    • Light Frames: 24, 300-s subframes stacked (120 min.)
    • Calibration: None (no darks, no flats, no biases)
    • Exposure Time(s): 2 h or 120 min. (24 x 5 min.)
    • ISO: 800
    • Pre-processing & Processing: PixInsight
    • Post-Processing: Photoshop CC
    • Imaging Location: Sierra Nevada Mountains (Altitude: 8,600 ft)

    When photographing the cosmos, the path to accurate color reproduction often lies in the stars. This image of the Eagle Nebula reveals a broad range of star colors calibrated from their true color temperatures. Faithful depiction of star color ensures the color fidelity of other objects in the image, too.

    The deep red color of the Eagle Nebula originates from light emitted by singly ionized hydrogen gas (H-alpha). The vast clouds of gas and dust in nebulae make them effective stellar nurseries, where the stuff of the universe is transformed into gleaming new stars.

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    The Eagle, Take Two

    The Eagle Nebula
    Reprocessed image of the Eagle Nebula achieves better color rendition and higher detail.

    Click for High-Quality Prints

    • Telescope: Stellarvue SVA130T-IS
    • Mount: Losmandy G-11 with Gemini 2 controller
    • Autoguiding: Yes
    • Optical Configuration: 1x 910 mm (f/7)
    • Camera: Canon 60Da
    • Light Frames: 24, 300-s subframes stacked (120 min.)
    • Calibration: None (no darks, no flats, no biases)
    • Exposure Time(s): 2 h or 120 min. (24 x 5 min.)
    • ISO: 800
    • Pre-processing & Processing: PixInsight
    • Post-Processing: Photoshop CC
    • Imaging Location: Sierra Nevada Mountains (Altitude: 8,600 ft)

    Reprocessing image data of the Eagle Nebula (M16) that was shot last year has yielded better detail and higher color accuracy.

    Home to the famous “Pillars of Creation,” the Eagle Nebula in the constellation Serpens is a diffuse emission nebula about 7,000 light-years from us. The small dark region of gas and dust near the center of the nebula resembles the silhouette of an eagle, hence the name. This small area of the nebula also defines the so-called Pillars of Creation made famous by a composite high-resolution image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

    https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-goes-high-definition-to-revisit-iconic-pillars-of-creation

    The deep red color of the Eagle Nebula originates from light emitted by singly ionized hydrogen gas (H-alpha). The vast clouds of gas and dust in nebulae make them effective stellar nurseries, where the stuff of the universe is transformed into gleaming new stars.

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