05-12-10 – Happy Farktography Anniversary 5

I might have to recind that statement; Extremely energized ionized hydrogen coupled with similarly excited oxygen could product the yellow-green seen there (same as the Rosetta nebula). But even so; a picture of not nearly this quality is found here;

http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/News/MegaPrime/MegaPrime-PR-AstroImage-Rosette.html

…and it’s stacked of 36 images, exposed 5 minutes each. I didn’t find the Hubble match, but then, the hubble site is emmense and it’s likely the guy’s shot is just a cropped portion of a larger image. Personally, I would delete it and then wait for his response to validate his picture. But I don’t think he can, and there’s no way it’s not at least a stacked composite, which goes against the rules.

The other possibility is he’s one of the super-lucky persons who’s submitted an idea for Hubble and got it–but even then, he wouldn’t be the one taking the picture.

Well, not with 36 of them. Usually it’s just a stack of red, blue and violet filters (for hydrogen balmer lines, or green, for oxygen ion lines). Taking a shot in each of the three eliminates possible chromatic abberations, which is the nature of glass to only focus on one color in the spectrum (you only notice such things in highly magnified instances, such as in telscope views). Most good quality lenses have two types of glass, to focus two wavelengths of light, but the third would still be out of focus. So by doing them one color at a time, each color is in perfect focus. There are instances where they do more, though, such as Hubble’s ultra-deep field, where they stacked two hour exposures over and over to create an image with over a million seconds (10 days) exposure time. Stacking for amateurs is mostly used to increase resolution and eliminate noise, ala use-a-web-cam-and-let-the-computer-compile-the-clearest-shots. This will get you down below that 1/2 arc second limit by up to 10fold, which is huge.

This shot was certainly not composed that way. And unless he has a $10k (or more) polar mount, there would be at least some vibration caused by the little gears keeping the skypoint in view. But who knows? Perhaps he has a really, really, really awesome telescope. I just can’t picture that picture not being something from a professional telescope. It’s just too damned good; the detail is far more than one would expect from an amateur. This, for example, is an image from Palomar:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0509/IC1396_demartin_f.jpg

Taken through a 48″ telescope, it’s more what one expects to see when astropicing.

Looking at the top 10 right now… soosh, swampa, u-man, elsinore, ranger joe… me? One of these things is not like the others. Ha.

Which also has me wondering… where is orionid?

On Behalf Of

Thanks. 😛

Lol I know you weren’t talking to me. Actually while I did make some suggestions just because they couldn’t even look at their profiles, kestrana, at least, had something in mind on her own. Anyhoo, it’s done, they got to play. Kestrana says they will have internet on Tuesday, so in time for next contest!

Schnee pretty please take note! kestrana and orionid need pictures swung onto their profiles from mine. 3 each. Just leave me the three with the most votes. 😆

Elsinore, can you restore my broken?

It may well go down again, ’cause we seem to be having server issues tonight that I can’t quite figure out – may have something to do with posting twelve pictures in a greenlit thread, but I dunno yet.