February 2024

Welcome to Hank’s February 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The skies this month only gave me two short nights to get any viewing in. I spent those two nights fine tuning my capture and processing strategies and have four images to share. The first is Thor’s Helmet that I showed last month, but I’ve been able to clean it up, by plugging some light leaks on my telescope and learning more about how to do calibration frames better (Thanks to the NEW BHAS OBSERVATORY DIRECTOR Rick for his spot-on advice!):

The second is a planetary nebula in Puppis, NGC 2438:

The third is a trio of galaxies, M15, NGC 3384 and NGC 3389 that sit in the constellation Leo:

The last is an image of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. These photos were captured on my 8” Celestron Evolution Telescope and iOptron CEM40 mount, using my Mallincam DS10c camera. I’m using 2 minute exposures for an hour’s worth of capture on Thor’s Helmet and 30 minutes on the others. Processing was done with Siril, Photoshop Elements and Topaz DeNoise:

Last month I read “The Last Astronomers,” a book that gives a history of how the life as astronomers has changed over the years. The past was all about sitting in a cage high up on a telescope and manually moving it to keep the target centered in an eyepiece while collecting the light on glass plates. The future is all about robotic telescopes, where astronomers never have to get their hands on telescopes again and images are saved as digital files and sent to them. In many ways the future is already here, and after a little searching I found a way to take advantage of this future, to get high quality raw images, from a choice of many targets found in both the northern and southern hemispheres, taken using high end telescopes/mounts/cameras, from some of the most pristine sky locations on Earth. Sweet!

I signed up for Telescope Live, who provides this service. The images cost between about $1.00 to $1.50 an hour for each hour of capture. They have hundreds and hundreds of images to share, with some of them having dozens of hours of capture time. Then I get to process them. Telescope Live also has a great set of video instructions on how the pros do processing, and they have been helpful for me in upping my skills. So now when the skies are cloudy, I can dive into their catalog and order up a few hours of telescope data to process.

Here are the Telescope Live images I’ve been working with this month.

NGC 3521 Galaxy. The camera in my home setup is a One Shot Color camera. It captures the Reds, Greens and Blues (RGB) all at once. The Telescope Live cameras capture those Red, Green and Blue colors one at a time plus a Luminance frame (LRGB). For one hour of capture, each of the colors has 15 minutes of capture time. Each frame was only 5 minutes long, so here’s the math: 3 five minute frames of each color x 4 different captures (LRGB) equals 1 hour. This was the first image I tried to do, so I only bought an hour of the images, of the 3 hours that were available, to just try it out. Below shows the original image I processed, and the 2nd shows the detail that is available when it is zoomed in. Pretty cool! The telescope that took this image was from a high desert area in Chile that has amazing skies. The telescope was a Planewave CDK24 (the mirror on the telescope is about 24” in diameter!), the mount is a Mathis MI-100/1250 (very cool looking), and the camera is a QHY 600M Pro (61 Mp—that’s 61 million pixels capturing light!). I did the math and the going price for the telescope, mount, camera and accessories is about $125k (yikes!).

Eta Carina was photographed from another observatory Telescope Live has in Australia. The telescope was a Takahashi FSQ-106ED, on a Paramount MX+ mount, using the QHY 600M Pro camera. This image did not use the RGB filters to pull out those wave lengths but had filters that pulled out the Hydrogen (Ha), Oxygen (OIII), and Sulfur (SII) wave lengths (HSO) that are emitted by the nebula. These wavelengths are then assigned to the colors Red, Green and Blue so we can see them. It’s cool how each of those filters show different aspects of the nebulas. The first image shows the whole image, then I cropped 4 different areas to check out different details of the larger image. This image represents 2 hours and 10 minutes of capture time.

Rosette Nebula. I have captured the Rosette Nebula in the past (most recently in December), but this image zooms into the center of the nebula, and I wanted to compare the detail from my image and the Telescope Live image. This was captured on the same setup as the Eta Carina image, but for 3.75 hours. Also shown are two zoomed in close-ups.

Centaurus A is another target visible in the Southern Hemisphere. It shows a very large star with a dust lane in front of it. This represents about 3 hours of capture time, using the same setup as the Eta Carina capture.

Tarantula Nebula. This image shows the same set-up as the Eta Carina photo, but it uses a different camera type—a CCD camera. It is another southern hemisphere object and represents 5.75 hours of capture.

And finally, The Statue of Liberty Nebula. This southern hemisphere target was captured using HSO filters from the same telescope as the Eta Carina nebula, using the CCD camera. It represents 11 hours of capture time. What a beauty!

I looked up the Telescope Live observatory on Google Earth in Chile and it looks like a telescope farm where many people and institutions from around the world park their telescopes and do their observing remotely. These “farms” are really compounds with buildings where the roofs roll off, exposing the telescopes to the night sky.

I’ve done some research on what it would cost to set up a telescope in Chile and get it up and running, and I’m figuring it would run about $400,000, plus the annual rental fees and paying for on-site support when things go haywire. That’s way out of my budget range, but it would be cool to go to Chile now and again and check in on how my telescope is doing. It’s also on the list of things to do when Marianne hits the lottery jackpot.

It’s my plan to keep processing these Telescope Live images when the skies are poopy and I’ll be including them in this blog for you. You’ll know the images are not taken at from my home telescope by the quality and detail, and they will say Telescope Live on the label.

Until next time, Clear Skies! –Hank