My telescope was in auto-tracking mode and the exposure time was 4 minutes with the default Pixel Camera app.
I am astonished by this photo! You can see freaking color! COLOR! I only tuned down the gamma a bit but that's all of the editing I've done. Here is another unedited photo with a 20mm eyepiece:
I was soooo surprised to see this coming out of the phone :D - damn so fucking cool! 1.3 thousand light years away, stars forming.....so beautiful....so mindblowing!
Now, operations are underway at #McMurdo station in #Antarctica for the launch of #GUSTO the 2nd. mission of the #NASA balloon campaign.
GUSTO stands for Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (ULDB for Ultralong-Duration Balloon) is a balloon-borne 0.9-meter far infrared reflector #telescope with a cryogenically-cooled camera, to map oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon lines in the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud.
SO got us a cool reflector telescope. I've only ever used kid-targeted refractors before so it's an adventure.
I'm gonna gripe that if your "beginners guide" uses the terms "Dec, or collimation" or any of a dozen other telescope specific terms without defining them, it's not a beginners guide!
The quick installation guide said things like "Attach to Dec screw" with no picture or further explanation. Gah!
When the MAVIS instrument ( https://mavis-ao.org/ ) is installed on this telescope in a few years' time we'll be installing splitters to divide each of these laser beams into two, increasing the total number to 8.
We just released a HUGE mosaic of the so-called Running Chicken #Nebula: 1.5 billion pixels full of young stars and glowing hydrogen gas. The mosaic comprises data acquired with the VLT Survey #Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile
In my recent #astrophotography marathon I tried M33 again, and as usual I was "meh".
What if I stacked 2 "meh" together?
I took 2 meh photos taken with the 16" #telescope that were already stacked, and stacked them. Not re-stack, but stack the stacked. Even though they had been built from different exposures and framing I used #ASTAP to stack the stacked together with no darks, flats, or biases since all that was done in the first stacking. It worked. #Astrodon
Achievement unlocked! The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope are on their way to #Chile 🇨🇱
The huge 39.3 m mirror of the telescope will comprise 798 of these hexagonal segments, plus 133 spares, as we'll eventually have to remove a couple of them every day to recoat them with a reflective layer.
Pretty interesting to see the changes in the sun from just a couple days ago. It's awfully easy to just grab 3 minutes of frames on the sun after a nighttime imaging session, so I'll keep them coming. I do need to figure out the proper orientation since my telescope is on an equatorial mount and rotated 90 degrees from that axis. I'll just keep it consistent so when I figure it out I can rotate the images.
Since I acquired the 16" #telescope I've been hankering to shoot the Orion #nebula. I finally was able to capture 36 minutes on the target two days ago and I was not disappointed. #astrophotography#Astrodon
A recent article in La Repubblica beautifully described ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope as "a gigantic egg, laid by who knows what mythological bird, on the highest peak" and it's a very accurate metaphor!
It's late, may as well post.
An attempt to move the 16" #telescope to the back of the house and a darker sky was too much for my back. So I'll stick to shooting to the east and setting targets like Messier 13 before it says goodbye.
Sky-Watcher 400P scope and ASI2400MC-P camera, 211x8s exposures. #astrophotography#Astrodon
This is what happens when dew forms on the 16" #telescope mirror. I don't have any dew mitigation yet and thought I could shoot just one more target. Nope. This is a minimally processed photo of Messier 77 and NGC 1055. From the location of the center of the circles it looks like the collimation is off!
Maybe this is how Van Gogh saw the world. #astrophotography#Astrodon
I just want to say that Jupiter is pretty stunning tonight. All four galilean moons visible although one of them (Io, I think) is right on the limb and without my sky guide I'm not sure if it's about to cross or is moving away.
Space telescopes with deformable mirrors may directly image exoplanets
Deformable mirrors have been envisioned as a key component in imaging Earth-like worlds with future space telescopes
The Crescent Nebula using the 16" Dobsonian #telescope. Only 453 of the 600 8-second exposures taken were good enough to stack for about an hour of total integration time. Lots of clouds lately, but the next clear night is next week and besides the near full moon the temps will be in the 20's. We'll see. #astrophotography#Astrodon
Discovery of the Amaterasu 240 EeV cosmic ray particle, named after the goddess of the sun in Japanese mythology, by the Telescope Array observatory in Utah. This mysterious event appears to have emerged from the Local Void. Intriguing!
The Big Numbers argument notes that our #galaxy, the #MilkyWay 🌌, has something like 400 billion #stars 🎇, and it’s just one of untold billions of galaxies in a #universe that might be infinite. Moreover, in the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered that #planets 🪐 of all shapes and sizes are common in the universe.
With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers 📊 in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, #telescope 🔭-constructing species.
The universe is not about us, and what happened on this planet over the past 4 billion years could happen elsewhere.