Amateur star-gazer captures astonishing images of Milky Way through hole in roof of his garden shed

[redqueen]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1244686/Amateur-star-gazer-captures-astonishing-images-Milky-Way-hole-roof-garden-shed.html

An amateur star-gazer has stunned astronomers around the world with these amazing photographs of the universe - taken from his garden shed.

Peter Shah, 38, cut a hole in the roof of his wooden shed and set up his modest eight-inch telescope inside.

After months of patiently waiting for the right moment, he captured a series of striking images of the Milky Way from the comfort of his own back garden.


Striking: Amateur astronomer Peter Shah captured this incredible image of The Pleiades from a telescope in his garden shed

His photographs show a vivid variety of star clusters light years from Earth and have been compared favourably with the images taken from the £2.5billion Hubble telescope.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1244686/Amateur-star-gazer-captures-astonishing-images-Milky-Way-hole-roof-garden-shed.html#ixzz0dMKNxcWo

At first I thought this must be a hoax... the images are amazing.

[niyad]

1. off to greatest with you

[DrDan]

2. GREAT picture!!! - Thanks!

[pleah]

3. K&R

[Jim__]

4. Beautiful images. But I don't understand how they can compare favorably with ...

... images from Hubble. Hubble avoids the distortion of the atmosphere. Can anyone tell me how it's possible for these to compare to images from Hubble?

[redqueen]

7. Precisely why I thought it must be a hoax...

but with £20,000 invested, perhaps he has software which can do the same.

[Jim__]

9. More images and his e-mail address.

He offers to talk about his imaging techniques - Here - Caution: may be a sales pitch.

[Fumesucker]

10. To a big extent it's a matter of software..

Which is also true of the Hubble images, they are surprisingly unimpressive before they are processed through the imaging software pipeline.

Here is one of my own astrophotos of the Pleiades, first is the processed image and second is the raw image straight as it came from the camera only resized.. I didn't even use a motor drive for this image, it was taken by manually tracking the stars with a high powered eyepiece and the slow motion controls on my inexpensive 6" german equatorial mount reflector.

For a more thorough explanation and pictures of my shade tree setup you can see my OP on the DU photography forum.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=280x63820

[shireen]

17. LOL! Not always ... even raw Hubble images can be stunning.

I saw one yesterday that was pretty :wow:

[Fumesucker]

18. Umm.. If you saw a color image it was not a raw Hubble image

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0303/01-howi-nf.html

Raw Hubble image..



Cleaned up..



Finished image from three monochrome filtered images like above and after a lot more processing..

[shireen]

19. but i see them all the time

I've been doing Hubble imaging work for more than 15 years. Sure, some of the raw ones appear dull like the one above (a reflection nebula), and parallel fields. But i've seen plenty of raw images that are mind-blowing. In fact, i worked on some earlier today.

[Fumesucker]

22. Could you post an example or two?

[shireen]

23. check out the Hubble Legacy Archive

go to http://hla.stsci.edu/
click 'enter site'

Example:

click 'advanced search'

select the following buttons:
- uncheck all instrument boxes except ACS
- under data products, select 'all'

in the search box, enter the name of a target. For example, type in one of my favorites,
ngc4038

Click search

You'll see images at different levels of processing.
- At the lowest level are 'raw' images that have only undergone bias subtraction, dark subtraction, and flat fielding. Those are easy to recognize, they have tons of peppery white features that are either cosmic rays or hot pixels.
- There are the 'clean' ones; raw images of a given visit, filter, and instrument mode were combined and corrected for geometric distortion.
- The 'color' images are not true color. For a given visit, if there are two or three sets of observations taken with different filters, each filter image is assigned a color, then the 2 or 3 different filter images are combined to create the 'color' image. The purpose of this is not aesthetics. It's to identify objects in a field that stand out at certain bandpasses. (These are not the same as the pretty pictures you see in Hubble press releases; Those have undergone specialized processing in the public information department.)

You can click on 'interactive display' to look at a bigger version, click 'lighter' or 'darker' to stretch the image to bring out subtle details. Only then can you appreciate the amazing dynamic range of the images.

Some of those raw images may not pass muster as spectacular. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you're looking for 'pretty pictures,' then stick with the ones issued by the public information office. But for scientific interest, even the raw images with those pesky cosmic rays and hot pixels, can be exquisitely beautiful. My point of view comes from the latter.

[Fumesucker]

24. Interesting.. thanks..

Point of view does make a big difference, yours is rather different than my own.

I've been sporadically participating in the online supernova hunt and galaxy classification project at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

Most of those images are not particularly "pretty" either but some are quite remarkable..

[shireen]

25. re: galaxyzoo,org .. me too! Did you see my signature?

It's made of SDSS galaxies. :D
Most of the alphabets are stored in the forum, do a search to find them.

The supernova search drove me a bit nuts because the images alignments from the two different epochs were not precise enough, leaving too many residuals in the subtracted image. After reviewing so many false positives, I gave up. Then i tried the galaxy mergers exercise, and found it to be a bit frustrating. Since I do this on my own time, I wanted to do something relaxing so i went back to classifications. So far, I've looked at more than 25,000. :wow:

[shireen]

16. aesthetically beautiful photos. but comparing with Hubble doesn't make sense.

Those telescopes have two completely different purposes. He's using his telescope to take pretty pictures.
But with Hubble, each image produces new knowledge about the physics of our universe -- pretty pictures are a nice by-product of Hubble's main purpose, which is scientific research.

[Jim__]

26. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks. - n/t

[tridim]

5. Sweet pics, but I wish he would explain how he did it.

How did he adjust for atmospheric distortion?

[joshcryer]

8. When I was a kid I had a little 200 power scope. I heard of the legendary "clarity" that occurs...

...very rarely. When atmospheric distortions cancel each other out or are just non-existent in the atmosphere above your viewing platform. I spent most of my teenage childhood looking at the stars.

One night, after watching Mars for hours on end, just a tiny brownish red dot, pow. Clarity. I will never forget that moment. One which lasted at most two seconds.

Just a thought, I'm sure he didn't just get lucky, as it appears that he spent a lot of money on his setup.

[jayfish]

11. It's Done In Software.

Multiple exposures of various length (all long) are taken then cleaned up with editing software and merged using stacking software. The operator uses a guide scope to track (manually or automagically) his object. Mr. Shah being a little coy on his "modest" equipment. His scope might not be the best ever but his mount looks to be first rate.

Jay

[Canuckistanian]

13. And he's using a CCD imager worth more than $3,000

FLI CM8-ME
Anyone who knows Finger Lakes Instrumentation, knows this is not your ordinary ccd.

Features include:
The KAF1603ME, 1536 x 1024, 9u pixel ccd, with a very high QE peak at around 83%, this one without the coverslip boosting is a further 8%. Very low noise.
Controllable cooling with a maximum of -30 below ambient, the ccd chamber is purged with argon to prevent frosting.
It has a mechanical shutter to allow self contained dark frames.
has been well looked after and very clean.

Images taken with this camera can be seen at the link below:

http://www.opticstar.com/Run/Astronomy/Astro-Imagers-FLI.asp?s=eddaa5d5-3ee4-4c27-88d6-89474b556137&p=0_10_19_1_6_10

Price: £1,550

[jayfish]

14. I Can't See It On The Scope(s)...

dues to the angles of the photo but I'd wager he's using and auto-guider as well. It could be that he's just cherry picked the best images for publication but I don't see a lot of tracking error in his shots. Regardless of the equipment he's using his shots are very, very nice.

Jay

[shireen]

20. the astrophotography equipment and software used by serious amateur astronomers ...

are pretty impressive. That's some very nice imaging work. But you gotta be pretty well-off to afford this gear on your own. Or it helps to belong to a club where members pool resources to get the equipment. Another essential requirement is a dark sky -- that's getting increasingly hard to find.

[girl gone mad]

21. My favorite earth-based images are by Jason Ware..

who has been taking astronomical photographs for over 2 decades now, with film and, more recently, using a ccd. His work is amazing and I used to live right down the street from him.

These were both taken using a 12" Schmidt, the first is just film + photoshop:

[atomic-fly]

6. Awesome!

I have a Nexstar 8, but it's not good for long exposures like these...
When I get a job I will work towards getting the equipment need for this.

[scubadude]

27. Those are great pictures! It is ironic to note he calls his setup "modest"...

at 20,000 pounds, or over $32,000.00, it isn't exactly cheap...

Scuba

[atomic-fly]

28. yes

and it's not a hole in the shed...it's a shed with a sliding roof with a mounted tripod...

[damntexdem]

12. How do we know he did it from his garden shed?

Maybe he went out in space to get them.

Maybe he's a space alien. Maybe these are maps for the coming invasion!

;-)

[nilram]

15. I'm there, I'm so totally with you, I'm getting the tin-foil out now

and lining my house with it. They'll never find me!

[Orrex]

29. I hear he was thinking of fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops his mind from wondering

Good thing he changed his mind!