Sky Photography

[TheMightyEthan]

Not really the weather but close enough I guess.

 

Last night my wife and I went outside of town to look at the stars, and for shits and giggles I decided to try taking some pictures with my new tripod that I got at a garage sale, and I managed to get some surprisingly good pictures of Jupiter and its moons.

 

 

 

The blurriness is due to me having to push the button on the camera, I think they would have come out a lot better if I had one of those remotes, but nonetheless it was really cool to be able to see the moons. It made it seem like an actual real thing rather than just a light in the sky.

 

The remotes are cheap, so I'm thinking about getting one and going back out, and also playing with the exposure settings to try to get clearer pictures.

[Mal]

If you ever get the chance, come on over to the Eastern Sierra for really dark skies. In certain campgrounds, you may even see other people with telescopes.

[TheMightyEthan]

As I live in rural Kansas, there's some maximum-darkness areas only a few hours from here, and an area in the second-tier of darkness like half an hour away, so I don't want for darkness. 

[TheFlyingGerbil]

you can use the self timer if you don't have a remote. Most cameras have a short option like 2 seconds for the very reason of reducing camera shake, rather than thinking you can dash into a photo that quickly and so you don't have to annoyingly wait 12 seconds for each photo.

[TheMightyEthan]

That is a fantastic idea!

[TheMightyEthan]

*Edit - I'm not sure why some of the pictures are showing as broken links, but if you just click on them it will open it to a working one.

 

Updated picture of Jupiter and 3 of its moons from the other night using the remote so I didn't jostle the camera (this is actually about 50 pictures that I stacked using astrophotography software to get a clearer image):

 

 

And here's the same picture without cropping:

 

 

I also took some at lower exposure lengths and iso settings to try to see the planet itself without it being all blown out like that, so here are those results (also stacked images to clean it up):

 

 

And the same thing on Saturn for good measure (it's really cool to me how Jupiter looks like a circle but you can see Saturn definitely isn't):

 

 

I'm still experimenting and learning how to do it to get good pictures (as you can see in the Jupiter-with-moons picture I could have used a shorter exposure because even the moons are kind of blown out), but I just got my grandpa's 10" telescope (2000mm focal length) and ordered an adapter for my camera to hook it straight into that, so that should way up the quality (the zoom lense I've been using is only 300mm focal length).

 

Until that adapter arrives, here's a picture I took of the Moon this morning by just putting my phone camera up to the telescope's eyepiece:

 

 

That's the lowest level of magnification I can get with the eyepieces I have right now for the telescope. I took some more at the highest magnification (about 200x):

 

 

The phone picture really doesn't do it justice, it looked much better in person through the eyepiece (so did the first one, although that one I processed with some astronomy software to get it closer to what it looked like for real). At this magnification though the surface looked shimmery due to atmospheric interference, I think because there was a lot of moisture in the air, and it was about 9:00 am so the temperature was warming up pretty rapidly.

 

I'm going to try again tonight to see Jupiter and Saturn. I don't have the camera adapter yet though so sadly any pictures I take will have to be the phone-to-eyepiece method.

[TheMightyEthan]

Observed again Saturday night. No pictures because I don't have the camera mount yet, but we looked at Jupiter and Saturn again. We could see four of Jupiter's moons clearly, and even see some cloud banding on Jupiter itself. I think I saw the Great Red Spot for a second, but am not sure about that, the view was fairly wobbly due to Jupiter being close to the day/night terminator and so a lot of temperature change going on, plus it was pretty low in the sky so I was looking through a lot of atmosphere. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen, until we changed the view to Saturn. Saturn was farther into the night side and higher in the sky, so the view was clearer, and while we couldn't see any cloud banding we could very distinctly see the rings. I'm really excited to get the camera mount, which should hopefully be later this week. Finally, we tried to look at Neptune, and I'm about 51% sure we found it. I forgot to try my barlow lens, so we were only looking at it with 160x magnification, and at that level Neptune is far enough away that you can't see it's a disk, it just looks like a blue star, so it's possible we were in fact just looking at a blue star in the same general area as where Neptune is supposed to be. At the 320x I can get with the barlow we should be able to see that it's a disk and confirm if we're actually looking at the right thing.

 

I also realized I screwed up the math above, and that crater picture is actually about 320x magnification, while the big picture of the moon is about 80x. The new eyepiece I ordered should have 50x magnification, which will allow me to see the whole of big targets like the Moon or Andromeda all at once (as you can see above the Moon is slightly too big to get all in the frame at 80x magnification). If I get my stuff in time I want to try to go out of town this weekend to look at Andromeda without as much light pollution.

[Mal]

Oh no, you got a new (and potentially expensive) hobby. One that I kind of want to get into but I also want to head the other direction AKA microscope.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I would not be getting into it nearly as much as I am if I hadn't been able to get my grandpa's telescope. I bet if I were to buy new all the equipment I got from him it would cost $6,000-$7,000. Of course he bought it 30 years ago, but still, it's in great shape and is obviously extremely high quality.

[TheMightyEthan]

Got the mount to hook my camera to my telescope, so I went back out and took some more pictures of Jupiter and Saturn.

 

This first one is just a raw picture of Jupiter from the camera through the telescope, with the exposure adjusted on the camera to show as many of the moons as possible:

 

 

Then we have a much shorter exposure time photo of Jupiter, to try to get as much detail as possible (not much detail, but you can at least see the color):

 

 

After that I started experimenting with taking videos, which I can feed into some free astrophotography software to get these:

 

 

 

Then I can do some Photoshop compositing to yield:

 

 

Which is actually pretty close to what it looks like in person through the eyepiece of the telescope.

 

Then I moved on to Saturn. Again, the first picture is just a direct shot through the telescope:

 

 

Then take a video, run it through some processing (and also apply a 2x barlow lens, which I forgot to do with Jupiter, and the result is):

 

 

That last one actually might be clearer than it looks in person.

 

The reason all the processed ones are angled opposite from the direct shot ones is that the telescope has an odd number of mirrors, which means the image you see is left-right reversed, so when I was doing the processing I fixed that.

 

Next I want to try Jupiter again through the barlow, to hopefully get even more detail. I also want to try some longer videos. The longest one I took last night is the one that resulted in that last Saturn picture, and it was just under 2 minutes long. The longer the video the more frames the software has to work with, so the better it can correct for atmospheric disturbances and the like, and the better the resulting picture.

[TheMightyEthan]

More astrophotography! Also I think it's probably time this got its own thread...

 

First up is the Moon. These two shots were taken an hour or so apart, both by taking a video and then using software to refine it into a single image. The crazy thing to me is that even over such a short period of time, if you look closely you can see that the terminator (the line between light and dark) has moved noticeably across the Moon's surface. It's especially noticeable on the three big craters right on the line, just a little below the center of the image.

 

 

 

(Also this time I've reduced the image sizes in Photoshop before uploading so hopefully they don't upset the forum quite so bad. If I'm feeling motivated I'll go back and do the same on the pictures in the previous posts.)

 

Another crazy thing is how much better the images come out if I take a video and then stack it, rather than just a single picture. Here's a single still shot of the Moon for comparison:

 

 

It's way blurrier, even though it's the same optics and a much higher capture resolution (5184x3456 for the photo, vs 1920x1080 for the video). The main problem is the atmosphere, when looking through the scope directly, or watching one of the videos, you can see the objects shimmering due to atmospheric disturbance, and that shows up in the stills too. But with a video you can average it all out and come out with something that's a lot clearer than any individual image.

 

Moving on, I also took another shot of Jupiter with much higher magnification (again by stacking a video), and it came out so much better.

 

 

I am absolutely in love with this picture. I was shocked by how well it came out, because it was very low on the horizon at the time, so I was looking through a whole lot of atmosphere. The video I used to make that was about 9 minutes long though, and at 30 frames a second that's a lot of image data to stack. This is the maximum magnification I can get with my current equipment, so to get anything better I'll need a new eyepiece for the telescope. Just for shits and giggles I also redid the composite image with the new and improved Jupiter shot.

 

 

I tried to image Saturn at that same magnification (about 2x my pictures from last time) but it's just not bright enough (the 2x multiplier lens also cuts the amount of light in half), so all I could get was an amorphous blob.so 

 

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For comparison, here are two frames from the videos I used to generate the composite images. The first is from the Jupiter video I used to make the picture above, and the second is Saturn with the same settings. I drew a box around where Saturn is, because you would be forgiven for not being able to see it.

 

 

 

They're off-center because it's really fucking hard to line up the telescope just right on something so tiny. 

 

And last but certainly not least, I tried taking a picture of Andromeda:

 

 

That's just a single 10-second exposure that I processed the hell out of. I wanted to do a longer exposure, but I must not have had the telescope lined up quite right, so I kept getting star trails (where the stars turn into lines on long exposures). In fact even at 10-seconds most of my pictures had trails in them, this one the only usable one, which was a bummer, because I was hoping to try out another piece of software that is made for stacking images of dimmer objects like this. I'll try again in the future, hopefully with some longer exposures and more usable pictures.

 

I'm really looking forward to Monday, when Mercury is going to transit the Sun, which only happens about every 13 years. I ordered a sheet of solar filter film, which is supposed to get here tomorrow, and I'm going to make it into a cover for the telescope so I can do direct solar imaging without blinding myself or ruining my equipment.

[TheMightyEthan]

Built my solar filter for my telescope. Isn't it fancy?

 

 

 

I bought some solar filter film and two plexiglass discs. I sandwiched the film between the discs (because the film scratches really easily), trimmed it to shape, then hot-glued around the outside seam to make the filter itself. Then I used some spare soda and cereal boxes to construct a sleeve to hold it on the telescope. The main problem I've found so far is that the plexiglass is super staticky, so it attracts dust really badly, although it doesn't seem to much of an impact on the photos. Here are the results:

 

 

And an bonus one with some clouds just because I think it looks cool:

 

 

I'm all set to observe the transit of Mercury tomorrow morning, except it looks like it's going to be super cloudy... 

[TheMightyEthan]

Well, I was all set to view the transit, but then the sky looked like this all morning:

 

 

The next transit of Mercury won't be visible from the US until 2049...

[Mal]

30 years... All the more time to git gud aka spend a fuck ton of money on this hobby. 

 

Are you planning on traveling for the total solar eclipse in like 2024?

[TheMightyEthan]

Yes, I am planning to travel for the 2024 eclipse. My plan is to ahead of time book two hotels in the path of totality a few hundred miles apart, and then a day or two before pick the one with the best forecast go there.

 

There's another Mercury transit in 2032 and 2039, but I'd have to fly to Europe to see those, which I don't think I'm going to do.

[Mal]

I look forward to the photos. 

[TheMightyEthan]

First, a new photo of Andromeda:

 

 

I took it a couple weeks ago, but I only just got around to running it through the processing yesterday. As you can see, it came out much better than my last one. I'm still having problems with the telescope's tracking, but whereas last time I was only able to get one usable 10-second exposure, this time I was able to get 3, so I had a lot more data to work with. The reason for the difference in angle is its different position in the sky and hence a different position the camera was in.

 

Next is Venus:

 

 

It doesn't look like much, but you can tell it's only partially lit, which I find very cool. Venus goes through phases just like the Moon, and my plan is to try to get all of them, which will take about 5 months. They should get clearer as it goes on, because Venus will be getting closer to Earth, so it will be getting larger in the sky.

[Mal]

The Venus one is really cool. You got enough details where you do expect Venus to have an atmosphere. The atmosphere really helps my mind fill in the gaps in detail.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, it at least looks like a sphere lit from the side, instead of just a bright circle, which helps me see it as a real object. I think this is the only planet photo I've taken that looks better (after doing the processing) than what it looked like in person. It was pretty low on the horizon, and I was observing right after sunset (you have to with Venus, it's never far behind the sun to set) so there was a lot of wobbling due to atmospheric effects, which made it really hard to see. The software was able to average it out though and get a really good picture.

[Mal]

I have a suggestion... Try photographing while Star Link is over ahead. People are trying to get a handle on what it means to sky/solar photography and you could give insight into it. 

[TheMightyEthan]

My exposures of planets tend to be pretty short (the Venus one was 1/80th of a second), so I'm not going to get the streaking like some have been seeing. That kind of thing would definitely show up in the Andromeda pictures though.

[TheMightyEthan]

Apparently I never posted in here back in February when I took some more photos of Venus.

 

 

This was taken on February 8 (oh what a different world that was), with Venus slightly gibbous. I didn't discover until afterward that I had the exposure too high, which is why it's so blown out, but I was able to get much better focus, so you can see it a lot more clearly than my previous pictures. It's no longer just an amorphous blob! 

It's small because I wasn't able to get it lined up with the 2x barlow lens (2x zoom means half the viewing area, which means it's much harder to find objects).

 

 

This was taken on March 24, with Venus about as close to half as I'm going to be able to get. Interestingly, this picture makes it look like it's ever so slightly less than half, but official information suggests it should have been ever so slightly more than half. I think the effect might be an artifact of the algorithms my software uses to sharpen the image, causing a little bit of a bulge at each point of the limb. This one I was able to get lined up in the barlow, so you can see a lot more detail in the shape of it, and I also fixed the overexposure problem from last time. Overall I'm very happy with it, and it gives me great hope for getting good shots of it when it's crescent. Those should be even bigger, because Venus is getting closer and closer to us as it moves between us and the sun.

 

It's comforting to me that even with all the shit going on down here, the heavens are just plodding along as always.

[TheMightyEthan]

Wow, it's been a while since I posted in here...

 

This is the promised crescent Venus photo:

Not a lot to say about it, it was taken on April 10. After this it got too close to the sun for me to be able to observe it, and then it was rising in the morning, and I don't have a good view of the eastern skies.

 

This is Mars taken on October 10, a few days before Mars' closest approach to Earth for the next 15 years, so it was unusually big in the sky. I was hoping I'd be able to see the polar caps, but no dice. The fact that I can see any surface features at all though is exciting.

 

I took this tonight. A great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is on Monday, but the sky was clear tonight so I wanted to look at them in case it's cloudy on Monday. They're already close enough to get in a single telescope field, and they're going to get even closer over the next two days. I also lucked out and 5 of Jupiter's moons were lined up perfectly (the fifth one is super faint in the top left). This picture is a quick and dirty cleanup job I did, I'm hoping I can get something better after I do more work on some videos I took, but even if I can't this is pretty cool.