|
|
|
|
Astronomical image manipulation software |
Touring the Universe and returning with pictures |
Tips & tricks for the Meade Deep Sky Imager |
Astrophotography Blog
Astrophotography Targets for October |
10/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Like a bag of trick-or-treat candy, October holds a multicolor variety of sweet targets: pale blue galaxies, red and teal planetaries, and deep red nebulae. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Astrophotography Targets for September |
9/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The reign of the nebula continues in September, but the bright objects of Sagittarius give way to the fainter and subtler clouds of Cygnus. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Astrophotography Targets for August |
8/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If you ever wanted to be an astrophotographer, August is the perfect month to start. In the Northern Hemisphere, August nights are warm and generally clear, at least in many parts of the Western United States. More importantly, August has more beginner-level objects than any other month of the year. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M63 |
7/15/2010 |
M63 is one of the first galaxies I ever captured. Now, with better equipment and some more experience I visit the Sunflower Galaxy again. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for July |
7/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
July's most famous jewel is the Great Hercules Cluster, also known as M13. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M106 |
6/15/2010 |
Active galaxy M106 is one of my favorite targets. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for June |
6/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The month of May got all the good ones, but June still has some beautiful galaxies, including gigantic M101. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NGC 4216 |
5/15/2010 |
Beautiful NGC 4216 is flanked by two smaller companions: NGC 4222 (left) and NGC 4206 (right). |
|
Astrophotography Targets for May |
5/1/2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
May is officially recognized by every self-respecting international organization as Galaxy Month. You can see from this giant list of targets that some of the best galaxies are out this month, including M51, NGC 4565, M63, and M104. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NGC 2903 |
3/24/2010 |
After all the El Niño-spawned clouds this winter it was nice to have some clear nights again. This is an image of NGC 2903, one of the galaxies of Leo. |
|
NGC 6946 |
9/1/2009 |
The galaxies of Autumn are starting to appear. |
|
M16 |
6/30/2009 |
I don't remember where I first saw that image, but I remember thinking how beautiful and amazing it looked. For the first time I could imagine this distant nebula as a real place. Now I've finally captured that nebula with my own modest equipment. While it does not compare to Hubble's iconic image, it does connect me, in some small way, to that magnificent object. |
|
Clear Skies Are not Steady Skies |
6/20/2009 |
Just because the skies are clear doesn't mean that it will be a good night for astrophotography. Sometimes the skies are turbulent because of winds or temperature changes. On those nights the stars will twinkle ferociously and looking at the sky through a telescope will be like looking at the bottom of a clear lake on a windy day. Astronomers call that "bad seeing" and it causes the light from distant stars to flicker and jump. Needless to say this distorts astronomical images, leaving them blurry and wavy. The image on the left is a shot of the galaxy M101 under good seeing conditions. The one on the right shows the same galaxy, taken with the same equipment, on a night of poor seeing. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for April |
4/8/2009 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The most popular target in April is the Leo triplet, a grouping of three beautiful spirals: M65, M66, and NGC 3628, but there are other, less famous, galaxies this month that are well worth capturing. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M82 |
3/30/2009 |
Unravelling the nature of M82 took almost two centuries and required dozens of independent insights from many astronomers. But Johann Bode, the one who first spotted those two faint patches of light and wrote them down in his journal, is the only name commonly associated with M81 and M82. Those other astronomers? I confess I don't even know their names. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for March |
3/4/2009 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
March is the beginning of galaxy season! In its trek around the sun the Earth's nightside sometimes faces the disk of our galaxy. When that happens we see the band of the Milky Way high above us. But as the Milky Way dips towards the horizon, we see what lies beyond our little metropolis of stars—and that means galaxies of all kinds.
Read more... |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Eskimo Nebula |
2/8/2009 |
Fortunately, only a few weeks later, a Space Shuttle orbiter rendezvoused with Hubble and four astronauts repaired the multi-billion dollar telescope in a series of spacewalks. To test out the newly repaired observatory, scientists on Earth commanded it to point to a target and take some pictures. The result was magnificent—the telescope had been fully repaired. And the target that Hubble captured, a bright planetary nebula known as the Eskimo Nebula, was revealed in all its glory. My shot of the Eskimo Nebula (or NGC 2392) is of course far inferior to Hubble's. Nevertheless, there is something very satisfying in capturing the same object. You don't need a ten billion dollar space program to enjoy the night sky. All you need is some modest equipment, a little luck, and a lot of patience. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for February |
2/1/2009 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Astronomers love catalogs the way physicists love graph paper and biologists love gooey biological stuff. When I bought my first CCD camera, I didn't need a catalog: My target choices were either the Orion Nebula or the Whirlpool Galaxy. Everything else looked like a brownish blob of varying texture and fuzziness. Now that cameras (and my skills) have improved, I have more choices. Every month I pore through my catalogs in search of interesting objects that might make good pictures. Last month I wrote down my favorite objects for January. This month I list my favorite objects between 6 and 8 hours of Right Ascension, that is, those objects that happen to be pretty high in the sky at night in February:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M78 |
1/23/2009 |
M78 was harder to capture than I expected. The faint nebulae and dark clouds required a lot of exposure time and some aggressive processing. |
|
M77 |
1/9/2009 |
M77 has been badly neglected photographically, at least compared to more popular galaxies like M51 and NGC 891. The Hubble Space Telescope hasn't imaged the whole thing yet, though both Robert Gendler and Russell Croman have (which is almost as good). One reason for skipping M77 is that it is very difficult to capture. The long exposures required to bring out its faint outer arms often leave its bright central core overexposed. Nevertheless, the results are worth it. I love its tightly wound disk and the contrast with its faint outer arms. It looks a lot like M94, which is another favorite of mine. |
|
Astrophotography Targets for January |
1/1/2009 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
With the beginning of the New Year we say goodbye to the galaxies of Andromeda and say hello to the nebulae of Orion. January is the best month to capture the Orion Nebula, the most famous nebula in the sky and probably the easiest deep space object to photograph. But there are many other nebulous objects to capture this month. These are some of my favorites:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M33 |
12/9/2008 |
I wasn't always a fan of M33. Its ragged, messy arms are less photogenic than the classic spirals of M51 and M81. But what M33 lacks in grand pattern it more than makes up in detail. |
|
M74 |
11/16/2008 |
|
I finally got a chance to take some pictures from the dark skies of the West Coast. This shot of M74 required more than seven hours of exposures. |
|
Can I See a Galaxy? |
9/6/2008 |
Looking at the sky through a telescope is a lot like reading—you need to use your imagination to complete the picture. That bright pale orb? That’s the planet Jupiter, large enough to swallow a dozen Earths and home to the largest hurricane in the solar system. That ghostly smoke ring? That’s a star exploding—a cataclysm that must have destroyed its planets and that awaits us in less than a billion years. And that fuzzy patch of oval light? Yes, that patch of light is a galaxy! Nothing in the sky stretches our mind quite like a galaxy. A hundred-thousand light-years across, yet so far away that all we see is a smudge. Its billions of stars spin silently away, out of sight and out of mind to approximately 100% of the world’s population. Seeing a galaxy is the closest we will ever get to grasping the vastness of the universe. So how can I see a galaxy? |
|
M27 |
11/23/2007 |
I took this image more than a year ago, but I didn't have a chance to process it until now.
|
|
Reprocessed M51 |
11/16/2007 |
I recently reprocessed an image of M51 that I took back in February 2006. I have learned a lot more about processing since then, and I think the new version is a significant improvement. |
|
NGC 891 |
2/15/2007 |
|
|
Two Versions of M1 |
2/2/2007 |
The image on the left was taken with the Meade DSI in December 2004. The image on the right was taken last week with the Meade DSI Pro II. |
|
M81 |
10/23/2006 |
|
|
Penumbra 0.5 |
10/21/2006 |
|
|
|
Three Spirals |
2/27/2006 |
|
|
M104 |
5/5/2005 |
The dark central dust lane gives this beautiful galaxy a three-dimensional appearance. This is my favorite edge-on galaxy, but its small size and overwhealmingly bright core make it a very challenging object to capture with the DSI. |
|
M106 |
2/27/2005 |
|
|
M51 |
2/25/2005 |
|
|
M94 |
2/19/2005 |
|
|
M81 and M82 |
1/19/2005 |
 Today, anyone with a modest telescope can easily see the fuzzy patches of light from these two galaxies. So why did it take a hundred years for them to be discovered? As with so many things in life, it's easy to find something if you know where to look. In 1774, before telescope go-to computers, before "Sky Atlas 2000.0" and even before "Astronomy for Dummies," finding a deep sky object was strictly trial and error. More... |
|
NGC 891 |
1/12/2005 |
The central bulge is the core of the galaxy, where (very likely) a massive black hole is gorging itself on star systems and belching out X-rays and gamma-rays. The dark band across the middle is a dust lane along one of the galaxy's arms. If this were our galaxy, the solar system would be two-thirds of the way from the central bulge to the edge of the galaxy. More... |
|
The Orion Nebula (M42 and M43) |
12/22/2004 |
 What would the Orion Nebula look like if we could see it up close? Probably nothing like the image above. The human eye is probably not sensitive enough to see M42's winged mantle of nebulosity, even if we got a lot closer. The nebula would get brighter as we got closer, but since it would also get larger, its light would be spread out over a larger area and would be just as hard to see. Most likely, any future astronaut-tourists would just see the central core of the nebula, where newborn stars have carved out a diaphanous web of illuminated gasses. More... |
|
The Horsehead Nebula |
12/18/2004 |
In some alternate timeline in which the descendants of horses, rather than of monkeys, evolved into telescope-wielding beings, perhaps fringe groups of conspiracy-lovers might look at this picture and believe that super-intelligent, alien horses created this stellar monument. Instead, in our timeline, conspiracy-lovers are more interested in a different picture. |
|
The Crab Nebula (M1) |
12/17/2004 |
 On a summer day in A.D. 1054, Chinese astronomers looked up at the sky and saw a new star. At first, it was brighter than the planet Venus and visible even in daylight, but month after month the “guest star” dimmed until it finally faded beyond their power to see. Almost a thousand years later I captured the image that you see above. Now known as the Crab Nebula, it is all that remains of the brilliant explosion that the Chinese astronomers saw, visible to me now only by using a telescope, a digital camera, and a personal computer. More... |
|
The Orion Nebula (M42 and M43) |
11/23/2004 |
 Even with the naked eye, the Orion Nebula is visible as a fuzzy patch of light in the center of Orion's sword. The nebula is a young star-forming region only 1,600 light-years away. Entire star systems are being born and the light from the new-born stars illuminates the cocoon of gas that surrounds them and from which they came. Perhaps our solar system was born in such a place. More... |
|
M15 |
11/19/2004 |
 M15 is a globular cluster in the constellation Pegasus. It is not quite as large or as bright as M13, the Great Hercules Cluster and not nearly as impressive as Omega Centauri (at least, that's what I've read—Omega Centauri is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere). Nevertheless, M15 is an easy telescopic destination and one of the best Autumn deep-sky objects. More... |
|
The Meade Deep Sky Imager |
11/19/2004 |
 The new Meade Deep Sky Imager (DSI) is an entry-level CCD camera designed for beginner and intermediate digital astrophotographers. When combined with a fast (f/4) Newtonian like the 8" LXD75, the DSI is capable of some decent images. Of course, they can't compare to the pictures streaming out of a fat SBIG chip looking down the barrel of a Takahashi apo, but for that kind of money, I'd rather rent time on Hubble. More... |
|
First Light |
8/26/2004 |
 The first lesson of amateur astronomy is patience. Most of the time we wait for the weather--a month of muggy New England days can seems like a million years to an amateur astronomer waiting for a dark and crisp fall night. And then there's waiting for UPS. Fortunately for me, only a month and 117 days after ordering a new 8" Meade LXD75 Schmidt-Newtonian telescope, I signed for two boxes bearing those magic phrases: "MEADE INSTRUMENTS" and "MADE IN CHINA". Yes, my telescope had arrived. More... |
|
A Picture of the Moon |
6/27/2004 |
 The magnificent desolation of the lunar surface is visible even through a small telescope. I created this image by stitching together eight separate close-up pictures. I took each picture with an Olympus D-40z digital camera looking through an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. Then I arranged the pictures into a mosaic in Adobe Photoshop. The resulting image was 25 megapixels, but I've scaled it down for the web. |
|
The Transit of Venus |
6/8/2004 |
 The secret to amateur astronomy is to manage your expectations. The Whirlpool Galaxy in the eyepiece? Don't expect more than a glowing smudge. The greatest comet since Halley's? Don't bet on it. The first transit of Venus in 122 years? It will probably be cloudy. More... |
|
The Moon |
3/14/2004 |
 I take the moon for granted sometimes. I spend hours trying to take a picture of Mars or Saturn and end up with nothing more than a blurry disk a few hundred pixels across. My 4 megapixel camera ends up using 3.9 million pixels to record the color of deep black space. It's almost enough to make me give up astrophotography and take up a more rewarding hobby—maybe building perpetual motion machines would be less frustrating. But then I remember: The moon! More... |
|
Jupiter |
2/16/2004 |
 On any clear night you can look out into space and see the other planets that share our little Solar System. You don't need any special equipment—five planets are visible to the naked eye—all you need is the knowledge of how to recognize a planet when you see one. More... |
|
Saturn |
12/29/2003 |
 I took some pictures of Saturn on Sunday. The result is not impressive, even by the standards of amateur astronomy, but it's the best image of Saturn that I've made. More... |
|
A Lunar Eclipse |
11/8/2003 |
I've never been interested in lunar eclipses. Even a partial solar eclipse can be an unforgettable event, and watching a total eclipse of the sun can count as one of life's most amazing experiences. But for some reason I have never been able to get too excited about a lunar eclipse. The moon starts getting dark. Then it turns sort of reddish. Then it starts getting bright again. Whatever. More... |
|
Mars from Earth and from Space |
9/20/2003 |
 Mars from Cambridge, MA through a 20 centimeter (8") Meade SCT. |
|
Neurohack
By George Moromisato
Dedicated to the art of hacking your neural patterns to match mine
Anacreon
Information and downloads related to the classic 80's game of galactic conquest
Astrophotography
Images of the stars and planets
The Astrotourist
Touring the universe and returning with pictures
Books & Art
Review of books, movies, games, etc.
Earth
A resident's guide to planet Earth
Graphics
Posts and images related to computer graphics
The Kronosaur Blog
Notes and articles about Kronosaur Productions
Luminous
Digital image creation software
Penumbra
Astronomical image manipulation software
Photography
Touring the world with a digital camera
Run_Program
Notes on computers and software
Tech
Words and pictures about all things technological
Transcendence
A game of space combat and adventure in a large and detailed universe
About
Links
Astrophotography 
Copyright © 1999-2013
by George Moromisato
All Rights Reserved