The nearest proper galaxy to us, the Andromeda Galaxy, is a very large and bright object in the autumn sky. It’s visible with the naked eye outside of the city, and it spans about 2.8 degrees in the sky, making it appear six times larger than the full moon. It… Continue Reading... "Andromeda Galaxy"
I frequently see posts and headlines like “You won’t believe what Jupiter sounds like!” and “The sounds of a black hole are TERRIFYING!” While many of these are some interpretation of radio data and are not actual sound, you can sonify just about anything in many different creative ways. I… Continue Reading... "Sonifying my astro images"
If you haven’t checked out the live allsky camera on my website, you have missed out on some of the cool features that the software provides. In addition to live images being displayed at all times of day, it also processes data from each night to create three different ways… Continue Reading... "Allsky camera features"
Been a while, hasn’t it? My wide-field setup consisting of an EQM-35 and Evostar 72ED has been nothing but trouble. While I am very pleased with the telescope itself, which seems quite well corrected for being so cheap, the mount has been a nightmare. I finally dismantled the entire thing,… Continue Reading... "The Double Cluster"
I’ve finally had a bit of a break in the clouds and have started a new imaging project. I’ve been looking for ways to somehow stream the imaging process as it happens at night. I’ve found lightweight solutions to this by adding auto-updating screenshots of the imaging laptop along with… Continue Reading... "New Live Feeds"
I’ve been struggling for some time now to find a decent method to fix the brightest stars in my images. Since some stars are so much brighter than the deep space objects I am imaging, they become saturated due to the limited well depth of cameras. This means that information… Continue Reading... "Fixing saturated stars in PixInsight"
I came back to my image of the Deer Lick Group and Stephan’s Quintet from last year due to the JWST reveal. While my original take on the image was not terrible for the tools and knowledge I had available at the time, I wanted to give the original integration… Continue Reading... "Reprocessing the Deer Lick and Stephan’s Quintet"
On my spectral analysis of a quasar project, I had cheated by already knowing the redshift of the quasar from professional research, and was able to reverse-discover what elements should be in my spectrum. It led me to wonder how I might discover the elements in my spectra naturally. The… Continue Reading... "Galactic Redshift Script"
A low full moon made the other night a great night to do some EAA. I used SharpCap live stacking and 25 second calibrated exposures to create these images. They were post-processed in PixInsight using photometric color calibration, downsampling, arcsinh and histogram stretches, NoiseXTerminator, and some multiscale median transform for… Continue Reading... "A plethora of short stacks"
