*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

Man of Honour
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11 Mar 2004
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76,634
a bit more learning maxim DL 5 from youtube vids and I have this.

M42
uh0z.jpg


M52
jie4.jpg


NGC1528
amtr.jpg


NGC3372
klu0.jpg


NGC3132 5mins each Luminance, Ha, OIII, SII
r175.jpg


also imaged M101 in rgb but what ever I do, I just not get the frames to align at all.
As much as I want colour, my fad so far is NGC1528 it just has such clarity the others are lacking.

Ok talk to me about deep space telescopes, tracking mounts and cameras, spec me a kit. I'm hooked. but that site is so fun, but very expensive if you want to do long exposures. The tutorials I was following. Were using 18frames @ 5mins each and for each filter. So that's 6hrs exposure time in total.

Maxim DL is a nice bit of kit, thank god they do a 30day trial. Makes life very easy, once you've watched about 20 YouTube tutorials.
 
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mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
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18 Oct 2002
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SETI has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth. In the current search for advanced extraterrestrial life SETI experts say the odds favor detecting alien AI rather than biological life because the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence would be brief. “If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, then within 5 years, its successor is more intelligent than all humanity combined,” says Seth Shostak, SETI chief astronomer. “Once any society invents the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are at most only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of sentience to artificial intelligence,” he says.

Full article here - Interesting take on AI/Sentience and what some big thinkers are calling the "Singularity" which is supposed to come during the turn of 2040~

"But having now looked for signals for 50 years, Seti is going through a process of realizing the way our technology is advancing is probably a good indicator of how other civilisations - if they're out there - would've progressed. Certainly what we're looking at out there is an evolutionary moving target."

I think we're living in a prime time, we are the generation that will experience this, we've already experienced the birth and evolution of one of the greatest technological advances in modern human history and there still more to go.
 
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Man of Honour
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Metropolis
Time flies as four years have passed since the launch of SDO and now we get a rather nice look back at its fourth year in orbit:


SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. Different temperatures can, in turn, show specific structures on the sun such as solar flares, which are giant explosions of light and x-rays, or coronal loops, which are streams of solar material traveling up and down looping magnetic field lines. The movie shows examples of both, as well as what's called prominence eruptions, when masses of solar material leap off the sun. The movie also shows a sunspot group on the solar surface. This sunspot, a magnetically strong and complex region appearing in mid-January 2014, was one of the largest in nine years.

Scientists study these images to better understand the complex electromagnetic system causing the constant movement on the sun, which can ultimately have an effect closer to Earth, too: Flares and another type of solar explosion called coronal mass ejections can sometimes disrupt technology in space. Moreover, studying our closest star is one way of learning about other stars in the galaxy. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. built, operates, and manages the SDO spacecraft for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2003
Posts
23,732
first picture didn't go well, only cost 3 points though.

M42 5min exposure.
why does it streak like that?

That's blooming - basically the sensor wells overflowing and flowing into the next in the column.

It looks like the camera doesn't have anti-blooming. This is often the case with high end gear as anti blooming takes silicon real-estate on the sensor.

The 4000 I have at the moment does exactly that. The 383L does a very good job with it's anti-blooming.

Also I would be really really peeved if they charged me with that amount of tracking error! (that's the elongated stars)
 
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Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2003
Posts
23,732
I got myself a 5x power mate (sold by Mrs Nagler herself at astrofest).. stack with my 2x.. and taking pictures of the sunspots at 6700mm is something to behold (that's f63.8 for you camera people).
 
Associate
Joined
7 Jul 2007
Posts
1,408
There is a refund procedure for poor images, haven't tried it yet, so no idea how strict they are.

I just saw your post from a few weeks back and signed up for the $5 demo.
My first test shot was on the scope in Spain, autoguider failed and the picture was just noise, but they instantly credited the points back when I filled out the form, so I guess they aren't really that strict.
I've got 30 minutes queued up at 2am on the rosette nebula on T3 in new mexico, and another 45 minutes in a couple of days. I'll update with the results if they are any good.
 
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