Why I love Video Astronomy

I live in a small town in Indiana (pop. 30,000 on my side of the river; the community across the river is around 70,000) 65 miles from anywhere, and surrounded by corn and soybean fields. Seeing conditions can be challenging, with big temperature swings between summer and winter. The dominant pattern for seeing is usually very transparent and very unsteady in winter and steady and hazy in summer. Add to that a lot of brightly lit car lots across the river, and you get much more light scatter than you would expect for a community of this size. My town is working with the Dark Skies people to improve lighting, and there is a definite improvement. However, our neighboring town is still swamping the skies with light.

Visual observing of DSOs is very challenging in these conditions, and that is where imaging comes in. Electronic imagers allow you to subtract out much of the light pollution and to see faint objects and detail with small apertures that would be impossible for the eye to see, even with large scopes.

The issue is that such images usually require high quality telescope mounts, long exposures, and long post-processing routines.

But there is a solution--video astronomy. Astronomical video cameras offer unparalleled sensitivity at the cost of resolution (the bigger the pixels, the more sensitive they are). But if you want to see DSOs in "real time," it's a great solution.  Some people modify low-light security cameras for this purpose, but my favorite cameras are hand-made by a Canadian company--Mallincam. They are a work of love and Rock Mallin, the founder owner of the company, is a true genius, using novel circuitry and exotic materials like aerogel to produce cameras that set the standard for 21st century video imaging.

Here's a result I obtained last night of the Whirlpool using a 6 inch Ritchey Chretien scope with .5x focal reducer and a Mallincam Xterminator II camera. This is a live stack of 4 x 15-second integrations at gain 0 (not shown, but 10-second integrations worked well, too). I have seen imagers use gain to get similar images with 2-second integrations (!), but I wanted to keep noise down. Skies were Mag. 2 and very hazy--just a few of the brighter stars visible, with passing clouds.

If you want to see DSOs in close to real-time and are frustrated by poor sky conditions, video astronomy is worth a look!

Jupiter 5-16-2017

The 125mm MAK came through again last night with some fine images of Jupiter showing a decent amount of detail for such a small instrument!

Cropped Image of Jupiter

The spot like object just above the center of the disk is a blue festoon, and others can be seen in the same belt. Just below it, in the brown belt, a string of white ovals can be seen.  Below is the uncropped image for reference:

Uncropped Image of Jupiter

The image is a stack of 350/500 avi frames, stacked and wavelet processed in Registax 6. Color correction was performed in Nebulosity 4.

The Joys of Astrometry.net

Some readers of this blog will notice that from time to time, I use Astrometry.net to annotate images. This is a tremendous web resource. You can upload your astroimages, and the website will generate a fully-labeled image identifying objects in the imaged field. This can be very useful if you're not sure what you imaged, but it can also bring out "hidden gems" in any image you upload.

A little while back, I uploaded an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101).  I uploaded it today, and here is the annotated image:

There are no fewer than NINE other galaxies in this image--pretty amazing!

But the fun does not stop there. As you might have seen in my other post earlier today, you can enhance the image by combining your data with the image, or you can combine your data with that from professional sky surveys. Here's the results of those operations:

M101 enhanced with other data uploaded to astrometry.net

M101 with Galex overlay

M101 with SDSS data

The bottom line: uploading your images to astrometry.net can be an eye-opening experience and a great way to pass cloudy nights!

The Sombrero Galaxy

Summer-like weather is here again in Indiana. The nights are warm (it was 72 degrees when I took this image), but the summer haze layer is starting to appear. Skies were 2nd or 3rd magnitude and seeing was rather poor (but a little better than during my last imaging session). This is a stack of 10 x 25 second images taken with the 14 inch with the DS16C and 2x focal reducer. The focal reducer is not a good match for this configuration and there was significant vignetting, so this image is cropped. The software was also glitching and kept crashing when I attempted autocapture--hence I was able to get only a few images.

The Sombrero seems to be a giant elliptical galaxy that we see almost edge-on. The extremely bright nucleus is clearly visible, but the large halo is lost in skyglow. As in all galaxies, the Sombrero has a central Black Hole (in this case, with the mass of  one billion suns, which was discovered in the 1990s.

Here's the image annotated from Astrometry.net

And here are two more pictures--an image enhanced by astrometry.net and the Galax data overlay:

Proclus May 6, 2017

Situated on the edge of Mare Crisium, the crater Proclus is the brightest object in this image.

Proclus is a relatively young crater, roughly pentagonal in shape. The crater's ray system extends for almost 600 km, but it clearly shows asymetry with a blank area to the southwest, which suggests that the object that created the crater impacted at an oblique angle. The craters Yerkes and Lick are also visible, but they can been seen more clearly when nearer to the terminator.

This zoomed-in image shows the pentagonal shape of the crater (to me, it looks more like a hexagon!):

Jupiter Comparison--125 MAK vs 14 inch ACF

Given how good the conditions were yesterday, I decided to fire up the 14 inch with the DS2.3+ so I could compare Jupiter images from the 125 MAK and the 14.

Unfortunately, the conditions were nowhere near as good as yesterday. It was very hard to achieve focus in the "choppy" atmosphere and the final image, even with processing, is very much inferior to the MAK image.  Here's the comparison:

Jupiter with 14 inch ACF--Poor Seeing

Jupiter with 125 MAK--Good Seeing

The moral is, seeing is everything! 

Copernicus, May 6, 2017

Last night's excellent seeing made for some great lunar images! I'll be posting them over the next few days, highlighting some the "tourist spots" on our nearest neighbor.

First up--the crater Copernicus.

At 93 km wide and almost 4 km deep, Copernicus is a major feature, with rays (the "splash" around the crater), spreading out over 800 km into the relatively smooth Mare material that surrounds it. The terracing on the inner walls of the crater is clearly visible in this image (there are 3 terraces, extending about 30 km). The crater has three central peaks about 1.2 km high.

This image was taken with the 125 mm MAK  and 2x Barlow and the MC DS2.3+ camera. 150 avi frames stacked and processed in Registax 6.

Click on this image for a larger, more detailed view.

Jupiter May 6, 2017

After a cool and windy day, the evening gave us some of the best seeing in months here in Indiana. I couldn't resist the opportunity to dig out the 125MAK OTA (a first-generation ETX) and to take some images of the Moon and Jupiter using the Mallincam DS2.3+. With the GRS in the center of the disk for much of the evening, Jupiter promised some interesting images. The results were better than I could have expected. Seeing was superb--long, slow ripples as opposed to the rapid "choppy water" fluctuations we normally get here. The detail is excellent for such a small aperture. This image is a stack of around 100 avi frames processed and stacked in Registax 6. The final image is cropped.

Below is the image before cropping:

Three of the Galilean Moons are visible, and the next pic enhanced to show them better:

Furthest out on the left of the planet is Ganymede; Io is closer to Jupiter in this image. The moon to the right is Europa.

The Sun 4/24/17

A few spots visible today in this shot of ARs 2653 and 2651. Taken with PST-DS and MC DS2.3+.

The Pinwheel Galaxy April 23, 2017

These images of the Pinwheel in Ursa Major were taken as a test of the DS16C imager in hazy skies with consequent moderate light pollution. I took some suboptimal darks (I made the mistake of taking them at the same exposure setting as the camera was set to for imaging, whereas the current recommendation is to take darks at 2x exposure). The result is significant color noise that produces a diagonal "sleet" on the image as a result of stacking. I turned down saturation (about 90 x 60s frames were stacked here) and that helped a little. I'm going to take some more exposures as soon as we get clear skies and experiment on getting images as noise free as possible while exploiting the imager's gain control to keep exposures as short as possible. This a cropped image taken with the 8 inch f/4 newt.