Posts Tagged ‘astrophotography’
Professional Astronomers Assemble Hundreds of Amateur Photos To Track Comet’s Path
In October 2007, Comet 17P/Holmes briefly became the brightest object in the solar system, sparking interest from astrophotographers worldwide. Dustin Lang from Princeton University and David Hogg at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie in Heidelberg, Germany, found 2,476 unique images of Holmes on the Internet, using a simple Yahoo! search.
They fed the images into Astrometry.net, which can recognize images of the sky and measures star patterns, and found 1,299 were night-sky photos. There were some outliers, too, evidenced by the curious kitty in the montage below. But the researchers were able to superimpose many of the comet images, carefully aligning the stars, Tech Review’s reports.
Many of the images were time-stamped, and when they were superimposed on each other, the comet’s path across the sky was visible. Finally, Lang and Hogg compared their orbital data with observed information from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found a close match.
The astronomers are already trying it again, using a collection of images of Comet Hyakatuke. They note that Flickr alone has 3,500 images of the Orion Nebula.
“You can do high-quality quantitative astrophysics with images of unknown provenance on the web,” the authors write. “Is it possible to build from these images a true sky survey? We expect the answer is ‘yes.’”
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Professional Astronomers Assemble Hundreds of Amateur Photos To Track Comet’s Path
In October 2007, Comet 17P/Holmes briefly became the brightest object in the solar system, sparking interest from astrophotographers worldwide. Dustin Lang from Princeton University and David Hogg at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie in Heidelberg, Germany, found 2,476 unique images of Holmes on the Internet, using a simple Yahoo! search.
They fed the images into Astrometry.net, which can recognize images of the sky and measures star patterns, and found 1,299 were night-sky photos. There were some outliers, too, evidenced by the curious kitty in the montage below. But the researchers were able to superimpose many of the comet images, carefully aligning the stars, Tech Review’s reports.
Many of the images were time-stamped, and when they were superimposed on each other, the comet’s path across the sky was visible. Finally, Lang and Hogg compared their orbital data with observed information from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found a close match.
The astronomers are already trying it again, using a collection of images of Comet Hyakatuke. They note that Flickr alone has 3,500 images of the Orion Nebula.
“You can do high-quality quantitative astrophysics with images of unknown provenance on the web,” the authors write. “Is it possible to build from these images a true sky survey? We expect the answer is ‘yes.’”
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Backyard Astronomer Nabs Stupendous Sun Photo
Astrophotographer Alan Friedman captured this shot at a star party in the Florida Keys last week, using a fairly small amateur telescope. has a whole collection of space snapshots and more boiling sun photos like this one. Click through to for a nice description of how it was done.
See the two sunspots beneath the puff? The little one, to the right, is twice the size of Earth.
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A Long Exposure Captures Bioluminescence Below, a Swirling, Starry Night Above
Judging from his gallery, Hart has been shooting these bioluminescent protists for a few years now, since wildfires in Victoria that began in 2006 set off a mulit-year chain reaction in the local ecosystem that eventually led to these Noctiluca scintillans algae thriving in the Gippsland Lakes. This particular shot was captured via an hour-and-a-half exposure that reveals the rotation of the stars in the southern sky and the trillions of Noctiluca scintillans glowing in the water.
Hart tells the of his fascination with and capturing of these bioluminescent organisms on , which we highly recommend checking out if not for the back story then for the impressive collection of biologically (and astronomically) pretty pics. Like this one.
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An Amazing Pic of Discovery Docking with the ISS, Taken from Earth
By hand? Yes, Bullen was operating his telescope by hand rather than via carefully calibrated electronic equipment that one might expect an astrophotographer to be using. On Saturday he took his telescope--a relatively tiny setup as far as space telescopes are concerned--outside under a somewhat overcast sky, figured out where to point his rig (by hand), and just like that the sky cleared up, the ISS appeared, and the image was captured.
The ISS isn’t so hard to see from the ground--it’s well more than 300 feet long these days--but it is moving really, really quickly (like 17,000 miles per hour quickly). Cheers to Bullen for giving confidence to amateur astrophotographers everywhere.
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ESO’s “Hidden Treasures” Astrophotography Contest Shows Incredibly Talented Amateurs
This kind of imaging is no easy task; the amateur entrants had to scour the ESO's many terabytes of data just to find an image that would, with proper processing and artistic recreation, yield something we'd want to look at. And that's all before the actual processing, which entails an awful lot of correcting, sharpening, and adjusting for the limits of the telescopes' images. There aren't really any restrictions, short of manually painting in images--any number or type of filters, combination of frames, and enhancements are allowed. Processing these kinds of images is highly difficult, requiring the use of complicated professional tools like Scisoft to combine and process the different shots, but also fairly open--you can see in the Flickr compendium that there are a few different takes on the same "scene," so to speak.
The ESO got about 80 entries (all of which you can see on Flickr), which is actually pretty impressive considering the high level of difficulty involved in the project. You can't just snag a photo, insert some colors with Photoshop, and call it a day--this work requires an intense level of commitment and effort. The grand prize is a trip to the ESO's Very Large Telescope, located in Paranal, Chile, with runners-up rewarded with iPods, a model of the Telescope, and various space-related books. The grand prize winner is pictured above--congratulations to Igor Chekalin of Russia, who we're sure is looking forward to his trip to Chile!
our favorite astrophotography from the Hidden Treasures competition.
Astrophotographer Grabs a Snapshot of the Darkest Possible Sky
The images above and below were taken during a new moon, meaning there is no moonlight to mute the incoming light from elsewhere in the universe. Moreover, Guisard took the shot at such a time of year that the Milky Way, usually seen as a band of light across the night sky, is actually circling the horizon. The rim of light surrounding the full-sky views isn’t sunlight or light form nearby cities, but actually the galaxy itself. Guisard also took measures to time the photo so as to minimize this light as well.
The rest of the light you see is known as , or sunlight bounced back to earth from particles in solar system. The result is a glimpse of the night sky with the least amount of intrusive, extraneous light that reduces the depth and detail of night sky pics. In the big pic above, you can see both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds on the left, the Gegenschein effect on the right (it’s stronger opposite the sun) and the constellation Orion at the top. That bright star near the center? That’s no star at all, but Jupiter.
But if you’re just looking at the shots on this page, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Click through the link below to get up close and personal with zoom-able, pan-able versions that really let the stars shine through.
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