Paul M

It was a dismal year for me and the only "showcasey" image I produced is perhaps my best to date. It's actually an animation of Comet C/2020 V2 (ZTF). It seems so long ago now... The story of its capture:

I agree with much of the sentiment above, film is a craft, a craft I never mastered beyond a few home processed rolls of slide film. My father had a dark room and processed his own colour prints. So I have a childhood fondness of film photography. And looking through @Nightfly's Flickr content, it doesn't get old. I almost get dewy eyed looking over images such as this one of Orion. It just delivers, whilst gently belying the effort that went into producing it!

Until a commercial interest, say BlackRock, find a way to monetise Mars, there'll be no incentive. The technology is all fantasy right now so, I don't see any gold rush in the offing. The technology is ikely beyond the life expectancy of existing technological civilisation on Earth.

Planetary nebula indeed! On my phone it looks like a low contrast image of Mars with a prominent polar cap 😀 It's astonishing too see these ultra deep sky objects being fished out by amateur equipment ( and not a little operator skill!). Well done!

There are a lot of tiny fuzzies showing through on the second image! Surely worth keeping going on this as a project? I haven't looked at the Hubble image, You didn't bother to post a link! 😁

You have a few books that used to own, I have very few books now, mostly "pretty picture" types that passing children might embrace. Of note, though, Chaos by James Gleick. I've mentioned it here a few times. It's one of those books that opened up a whole new way of thinking to my educationally challenged brain. It's quite an old book now I think. It shares a place on my mind's bookshelf alongside Asimov's Guide to Science, "Children of The Universe"; Hoimar von Ditfurth and, another one from your own shelf, Catalogue Of the Universe, David Malin's images being the best images I'd seen to date. Chaos introduced me to the algorithm for the Mandelbrot Set, from which I formulated a program in BBC Basic which worked like magic. On deeper "zooms" it took days to render a 16 colour BBC Model B screen. Fond memories of both my brain cells talking to each other...🤪

Wow! some intro! If you know how to drive that monster behind you, you'll be ok with most amateur offerings... maybe! 🤣

I've got all the components for a RasPi based allsky camera that I'll be siting in rural Cumbria, eventually. Unfortunately it's delayed due to a family upset and I've not yet been able to collect the RasPi (currently working as an IP camera server up there) to get the project moving. Your project motivates me to make a quick, sameday dash to get the Pi home, 150 mile round trip, without an evening at the village hostelry to make it worthwhile!!

It looks like a galaxy, but as you say not identified in SIMBAD, while fainter objects are: Anyway, not to be beaten, I looked with HNSky, a highly configurable, if a little glitchy, planetarium I use mostly nowdays. I got the area, downloaded the DSS imagery to confirm the spot then asked for Hyperleda annotation. I have the enhanced Hyperleda database installed for HNSky and it got an ID: It's a mag 16.5 galaxy, deal with it! 🤣

Thats a stunning foreground scene to frame the Aurora Cam, well actually it's even better in the All Sky Cam! Nice project!

I got 2 sessions in January. My problem is currency. I'm not using my gear frequently enough get proficincy and when it is clear, all plans go out of the window as I scramble to grab some subs. I didn't even tweak my collimation last time as I'd be pomising myself I would, and it really showed in the subs. Then I forget some feature in APT or how to do something simple... Seriously, I'm already worrying about the nights getting shorter and the summer hiatus being upon us! 🤪

You see it all the time, new starter buys the right gear, uses the best software and within a couple of years or so, they're gone. Burnt out, nowhere to go. I'm a fast learner but much more enjoy the journey. Perfection and I aren't good bedfellows! So have a blast, have a laugh, enjoy!

I'm mesmerised by the this story. I saw a headline elsewhere on the Interweb about NASA predicting a small body impact just hours after its discovery. It all sounded a bit Daily Express so I didn't follow it up. But wow! It did happen. I'm not overly excited about the find, but imaging it as it heads imbound, and then the predicted meteor/bolide right on cue! Great stuff! To paraphrase on old joke, I couldnt't work out why that asteroid was just getting bigger, then, wham! it hit me!

I've given up looking for the 9th planet, I don't think it'll ever be found. So I've started looking for the 10th planet instead...

I was less than 3 years old when the crew of Apollo 1 perished, but I remember both Shuttle disasters, vividly, and frequently watch related documentaries and video footage on YouTube. My main interest in those is the human aspect. The causes and the legacy. I'm bored senseless with what currently passes a manned spaceflight - ferry flights to the great white elephant in the sky. The engineering is fascinating but until they find somewhere interesting and worthwhile to send astronauts, I'll continue to be bored by it.

Is updating the FITS header a selectable option, maybe?

Ah, ASTAP to the rescue. You can select the whole image as a search for Simbad and filter for object type. Here are the Quasars found. You seem to have a few pixels for most of them!

I can't, but I plate solved in ASTAP and had a poke round with the Simbad annotation tool. Not exhaustively but enough to find a few pixels of a Quasar. Quasars trump normal galaxies, any day... 😉

Now that's what I call chromatic aberration... 🤣

That's a very pleasing image. Lots to see and not cooked to a frazzle Nice to see Alnilam included. It adds perspective and scale.

Oh, to have young eyes again. But even at 13 I was in denial about needing glasses. Something I his until I was 18... Anyway, I remember tying to discern the phase of Venus when it was heading in to inferior conjunction. No chance!

That's really something. I'm fascinated by asteroids (and comets) also. I'm not tooled up for real time video recording but like to make occasional animations of asteroid and comet motion.

That's great. It gives a good reference for the scale of the Jovian system to the unaided eye. I don't hear it talked about much these days but I remember reading that some people can see the Galilean Moons with the unaided eye. I'm not in that group of people!

While playing at producing a mosaic of M42 last night, I noticed an old name to the west of Orion's Belt; C/2017 K2 (PanStarrs). Stellarium gives it's magnitude as about 11.3 but photometry in ASTAP gives 14.5. Here it is, capture in 13 x 120 sec exposures, RC10 and ASI071 camera. Stacked on the stars in DSS and stretched in P.S. And here it is, stacked on the comet using the ephemeris stacking feature. Pretty much featureless.

Did I mention I was building a mosaic plan for M42? Well this is it: Ans last night I got to try it out. The sky was extremely clear but there was half of a glowing cheeseball making life and gradients difficult.. I used my 10" RC and ASI017 MC Pro camera. Here they are, playing nicely in my skyglow: As you can see I only captured 5 x 30 sec for the 9 frames. I processed the mosaic in ASTAP, which can now do the job in 2 ways. As described in my linked thread above: Process each frame a a separate image and then stitch them together. A bit of fiddling but not laborious. And nowadays, ASTAP will just build the mosaic if you load all subs in one go. It worked well for me but: 1) took ages to process 2) it doesn't manage my awful gradients and suboptimal calibrations frames quite so well as manual processing. Here is the result by using ASTAP original method, then I exported the resultant image as a TIF to P.S. to make it prettier. I'm very happy with the workflow. The residual mosaic artifacts are entirely due to the gradients and my duff flat frames (family crisis cut the session short ) so I used some from a different session that I think has some field rotation...