Astronomy and Cosmology.

[Benchwayze]

To the original poster. If you are making a telescope or an observatory you wiĺl probably have the three volumes of ATM. You should find all you need to help build your 'man cave' for astronomy. Even in an out of date edition of ATM. There's also YouTube of course.

HTH

Just reminded me...
On a high shelf in my shop I have a 6 inch (150mm dia. ) one-inch thick, plate glass Newtonian mirror, part polished. It needs to be taken back to fine grind. It is in a wooden box, screwed down and is easily accessible to a fit person! I would sooner see it find an appropriate home. I don't know what it would cost to buy these days, but not cheap I would think. So it is FTAGH, if you don't mind climbing on a step ladder to get it down.

Let me know.

John

 

[Benchwayze]

I bought myself a pair of 70mm binoculars, in time for the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. Result? Cloudy right through the window of missed opportunity. And now it's snowing a hoolie here! .
.

John

 

[Benchwayze]

We are all part of the Universe itself. We chose to come here and experience humanity for ourselves. When we 'die' we just go back to the Universe. Whatever we do, we must first love ourselves, before we can love anyone else. What ever we want out of life we must ask the Universe for, and as long as you tell yourself that you are living in the feeling of a 'wish fulfilled', then what you ask for will come your way! That's a way of saying whatever you see in the 'real' world, couldn't have existed, without first being 'imagined', or thought of, and your perception of the 'real world' is particular to you, because everything you see is from your subconscious, and is just you, pushed out. It's your unique perception becoming your reality! !

Does that sound ridiculous? No more so than the stories you find in the Holy Bible...

What to call the Universe? God I suppose. The rest of my post is a point of view; and no I haven't flipped. Nor is it necessarily my POV!

How's that for a can of worms?

John

 

[Jacob]

We are all part of the Universe itself. We chose to come here and experience humanity for ourselves. When we 'die' we just go back to the Universe. Whatever we do, we must first love ourselves, before we can love anyone else. What ever we want out of life we must ask the Universe for, and as long as you tell yourself that you are living in the feeling of a 'wish fulfilled', then what you ask for will come your way! That's a way of saying whatever you see in the 'real' world, couldn't have existed, without first being 'imagined', or thought of, and your perception of the 'real world' is particular to you, because everything you see is from your subconscious, and is just you, pushed out. It's your unique perception becoming your reality! !

Does that sound ridiculous? No more so than the stories you find in the Holy Bible...

What to call the Universe? God I suppose. The rest of my post is a point of view; and no I haven't flipped. Nor is it necessarily my POV!

How's that for a can of worms?

John

I can't remember choosing to come here but I'll choose to stay if that's on offer!

 

[Benchwayze]

Those pictures are incredible - the universe is so beautiful and that's just the stuff we can see. I do often wonder what else is out there, and how far away it might be.

Fully agree Bill.

I once wooed a girl by showing her where in the sky, her birth-sign was. (in the 1950s) This only works if the girl doesn't already know! In which case you have to be able to tell her other facts about her particular sign! Like that it takes 65 years for the light from Aldebaran (Tauri Alpha) to reach Earth. Those facts really wowed her, especially when I showed her what I called my 'Cuddling Star'; (Sirius. ) I was a bit of a crafty dog you know!

John

 

[Benchwayze]

I can't remember choosing to come here but I'll choose to stay if that's on offer!

I can't remember being born either Jacob. But don't worry, apparently you get another choice if you want to come back; courtesy of the Universe.

I just got fed up with spam from the Law of Attraction believers, that I decided to find out more about it. So again, I haven't flipped. I just find it no more 'out there' than any other unfounded belief!

John

 

[sploo]

Starflyer's excellent images are what I aspire to be able to reproduce. I've done a bit of astro shooting with a small mount (Skywatcher Star Adventurer and a DSLR) but plan to build a tracking mount for a "proper" telescope. One day anyway!

It's the scale that astounds me; you get a long exposure shot at what (in normal camera terms) would be considered a super-telephoto focal length, and the galaxy you're after only takes up a small bit of the frame. Zoom in, and you realise there are even more distant galaxies (as tiny smudges).

 

[gregmcateer]

My main hobby (obsession) is taking photos of the night sky, from both my heavily light polluted garden or occasionally from darker skies when I go off camping.

One of the reasons for me joining this forum is that I intend to build my own roll off roof observatory next year and I'll need plenty of help and advice.

There's a few of my pics here if anyone's interested. I'm aware that people get a glazed look in their eyes when I start talking about my images though

Love your photos. I assume the sun one is time lapse with a satellite passing it. How long between images?

 

[raffo]

The amazing thing is (in my opinion) it will all collapse again to a pinhead and start again, how many big bangs have there been so far, could be 1 or an infinate number

Not likely, they think the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. So no Big Crunch.

 

[raffo]

As far as I can see (and if anybody knows better, then please correct), guesswork only comes into it once you get beyond a thing called the "Event Horizon" of a black hole.

It's not guesswork, but simply that the laws of physics used in normal situations do not apply in these regions. Not because it's a different reality but simply because if you plug in the numbers you get infinities, and getting infinities tells you something is wrong with your formulas.

 

[doctor Bob]

Not likely, they think the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. So no Big Crunch.

Indeed but only at present, I suspect we will never know, man is a fraction of a nano second of existance in universe time. To understand even a tiny bit in that time scale is awesome. I suspect we are not the first planet of life and certainly not the last.

 

[raffo]

Indeed but only at present, I suspect we will never know, man is a fraction of a nano second of existance in universe time. To understand even a tiny bit in that time scale is awesome. I suspect we are not the first planet of life and certainly not the last.

I should also mention that recent studies put in doubt the conclusions of the accelerating universe. Apparently, the statistical confidence of the original studies is not as strong. Look up Subir Sarkar out of Oxford University (Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae).

 

[Starflyer]

I have done some very simple night photography, but with just a 400mm lens, so the moon is still very small. It always amazes me how fast the moon moves across the field of view. You have some amazing shots of craters on the moon (Clavius). Do you use the the mount to track for those? What magnification did you use and what length of exposure for those?

Everything is taken with the tracking mount otherwise it's hard work trying to keep even the moon in the FOV. The close-ups of the moon are taken with a Newtonian reflector with a focal length of 1200mm, with a 2x barlow lens attached that doubles that focal length, it's essentially acting as a 2.4m lens.

A high frame rate, very sensitive, video camera grabs a few dozen frames a second into a video file for a few minutes. A clever piece of software analyses the video searching for fleeting periods of least turbulence in the atmosphere. It grades every frame of the thousands taken by sharpness and stacks the best twenty or thirty percent. This results in a sharper image with less noise.

I'm very proud of the Clavius image by the way, check the comments on Flickr.

 

[Starflyer]

Amateur astronomer as well. Not as good as some of the earlier on here but these are some of mine.

Nice images Steve, M101 & M51?

 

[Andy Kev.]

Everything is taken with the tracking mount otherwise it's hard work trying to keep even the moon in the FOV. The close-ups of the moon are taken with a Newtonian reflector with a focal length of 1200mm, with a 2x barlow lens attached that doubles that focal length, it's essentially acting as a 2.4m lens.

A high frame rate, very sensitive, video camera grabs a few dozen frames a second into a video file for a few minutes. A clever piece of software analyses the video searching for fleeting periods of least turbulence in the atmosphere. It grades every frame of the thousands taken by sharpness and stacks the best twenty or thirty percent. This results in a sharper image with less noise.

I buy the odd astronomy magazine and when I read the astrophotography bits my mind glazes over because it looks like you have to be quite seriously competent with a computer in order to get the final images. Is that the case or is it more like a couple of clicks and the computer just gets on with it?

I think that it's quite remarkable that these days an amateur can produce pictures of galaxies such as yours which I suspect even the pros would not have been able to get as recently as 50 years ago.

 

[Sandyn]

A clever piece of software analyses the video searching for fleeting periods of least turbulence in the atmosphere

I thought you must have used something like that. The sharpness and contrast is amazing. There is some exceptionally clever software for image manipulation.

 

[Starflyer]

To the original poster. If you are making a telescope or an observatory you wiĺl probably have the three volumes of ATM. You should find all you need to help build your 'man cave' for astronomy. Even in an out of date edition of ATM. There's also YouTube of course.

HTH

Just reminded me...
On a high shelf in my shop I have a 6 inch (150mm dia. ) one-inch thick, plate glass Newtonian mirror, part polished. It needs to be taken back to fine grind. It is in a wooden box, screwed down and is easily accessible to a fit person! I would sooner see it find an appropriate home. I don't know what it would cost to buy these days, but not cheap I would think. So it is FTAGH, if you don't mind climbing on a step ladder to get it down.

Let me know.

John

Thanks for the kind offer John, but I don't have the patience to grind my own mirror. If you want to find a good home for it the forum I linked to has a good few members who grind their own.

 

[Bm101]

I think that it's quite remarkable that these days an amateur can produce pictures of galaxies such as yours which I suspect even the pros would not have been able to get as recently as 50 years ago.

What I find brain frazzling (despite computer enhancement) is that my Grandfather, a sailor, who rounded the horn, worked on factory ships after harpooning whales and came from a small farm in North Wales, would have looked up at stars in the southern hemisphere from South Georgia and rolled up his golden virginia tobacco and most likely had his mind blown by looking at the Milky Way from a ship in the middle of the southern ocean. Just 2 short generations later I'm 'talking' to people on the internet about it while looking at pictures of astral events that one man has taken from his back garden,
Seriously.
Time is slipping through my fingers faster than I can breathe here.

 

[Starflyer]

Love your photos. I assume the sun one is time lapse with a satellite passing it. How long between images?

It's a composite created from a video of the ISS passing in front of the sun, taken with a special solar scope, at 17fps it took 0.9s to travel across the disc.

 

[Starflyer]

I buy the odd astronomy magazine and when I read the astrophotography bits my mind glazes over because it looks like you have to be quite seriously competent with a computer in order to get the final images. Is that the case or is it more like a couple of clicks and the computer just gets on with it?

I think that it's quite remarkable that these days an amateur can produce pictures of galaxies such as yours which I suspect even the pros would not have been able to get as recently as 50 years ago.

I've been at it for twelve years and had an interest in both IT and photography before that, I'd say what I do now is fairly technical and processing the data is as challenging as capturing the raw images.

That said, you don't have to go to the lengths I do to get a few decent images. These two were taken with a camera phone held against the eyepiece of a basic manual telescope.