Some stellar photography I've had the opportunity to take this semester

[midwayfair]

These were all taken from Skynet, which uses a set of robotically-controlled telescopes in the U.S., Canada, Chile, and Australia. We got several minutes of access for our astronomy labs this semester. Most of them are fairly ordinary objects, and I haven't done any color images yet, but I have some time left now that I've gotten all the required images, and I plan to do at least one color nebula photo.

These aren't all the images I got ... the asteroid photos aren't exactly fun to look at (or analyze, holy crap).

Jupiter:



The moons aren't visible when the detail of the planet is, so if you want to see where the moons were in that photo, I labeled them here.

I also got two pictures of Uranus with four of its moons (I got very lucky -- it's hard to get a photo of Uranus), but again, not very exciting to look at.

The fun ones are the deep sky objects!

The crab nebula:


A portion of the giant Carina nebula, with the keyhole visible.



NGC 5128, an eliptical galaxy that consumed a spiral galaxy in its past. This is my desktop image currently! I'm also doing a project on similar galaxies to investigate the rate of star generation. (Consuming another galaxy jumpstarts additional formation.)



And three spiral galaxies, NGC 1365, Messier 66, and Messier 96.

[pickdropper]

That is extremely cool, Jon.

[alanp]

Very, very, very neat. I know a synth guy who does astronomy like that (Epicyclus), he uses the photos he takes for his album covers.

[EBK]

I took a Space Science class in grad school (it was an undergrad-level course), and we had an astronomy night on the roof of one of the EE buildings.  I think we were using a 9-inch (maybe 11-inch) telescope -- nothing too fancy, but we got to see Jupiter with its moons and Saturn with its rings.  For some strange reason, I seemed to have a "holy shit, those things are real!" kind of feeling. Weird.  Very awesome.

[gordo]

Holy shit, how cool is that???

[mjg]

Very cool.  What sort of aperture did you have on those telescopes Jon?

I've tried some of this sort of thing at an amateur (backyard) level before, but nothing that looked that good.

I always find it amazing when I spot the rings of Saturn - I agree, there's always a little moment of "holy crap, that's real".

Anyway, excellent shots Jon.   

[midwayfair]

Very cool.  What sort of aperture did you have on those telescopes Jon?

I've tried some of this sort of thing at an amateur (backyard) level before, but nothing that looked that good.

I always find it amazing when I spot the rings of Saturn - I agree, there's always a little moment of "holy crap, that's real".

Anyway, excellent shots Jon.   

The smallest of the telescopes is 0.36m. Several of the PROMPT telescopes are 0.41m, and UNC at Morehead's is 0.61m. There are a couple that are a full meter, but I haven't taken anything with them (the availability for them is really low).

Saturn's above the horizon now, I'll have to take a few. Could easily do color for it since I only need 3 seconds total.

By the way, if anyone's interested in messing around with stuff like this, NASA has the OWN program, which lets you take some photos. http://mo-www.cfa.harvard.edu/OWN/. They're shorter exposure, though, and you don't have too much control except putting in a request, but it's fairly fast.

[chromesphere]

Wow very cool Jon!  I have a telescope I mess around with when time permits (ie, never).   This is probably the best shot with it.  I took it a few years ago with a digital imager.  The image is stacked of course, I only have a 8 in scope (celestron nexstar).

[matmosphere]

Very nice stuff.

I have to admit though, from the title of the thread I thought you were boasting about the exceptional quality of your photographs, not pictures of things in putter space.

[culturejam]

That is totally bad-ass. 

[Govmnt_Lacky]

These were all taken from Skynet...

Was the lab manager named John Connor??

[midwayfair]

The Antenae Galaxies. It's a pair of galaxies that merged. The name comes from a feature on the right hand side that's very hard to see in this picture -- it's very far away [45 million light years] and pretty faint, so hard to capture from a terrestrial telescope -- where a pair of tails of gas and dust stretch out in two directions. Wikipedia has a picture that shows it better.



The star-forming region NGC6334, also called the Cat's Paw Nebula. Unfortunately, this is only part of the nebula, so the reason for the name isn't obvious in the slightest. The whole thing together looks like it has toes. This is just one of the toes or maybe the heel.



The colorization was much more challenging than I expected. I had to pull some strange tricks with gausian blur, contrast, brightness, and other nonsense on four different layers (RGB and a "luminance" layer, all taken with different telescope filters). But I think they're pretty for a first try.

[alanp]

The red one is very King Crimson album cover-ish

[EBK]

Can you capture infrared image data with those telescopes?

[midwayfair]

Can you capture infrared image data with those telescopes?

They have infrared and radio telescopes in the network, but I don't have any time allotted for them. I'm not sure if students aren't allowed access or if I would need to buy/request time on them.

If I did have radio and infrared time, I would have imaged Cygnus X-1 periodically per my dad's request.