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

I saw Saturn for the first time tonight through my scope. It was indeed a 'wow' moment even though I had street lights in my face and that it is right beside the moon. I look forward to seeing it in better conditions.
 
Is anyone into astrophotography..? I quite like the idea. I like in the middle of nowhere so no light pollution. In the summer is generally clear skies...I could throw a few k at it for a stqrter package, and if it isn't for me I can sell the gear for a small loss and move on.
 

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is an upcoming space telescope designed to perform wide-field imaging and spectroscopy of the infrared sky. One of WFIRST's objectives will be looking for clues about dark energy--the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Another objective of the mission will be finding and studying exoplanets.

WFIRST uses the same 2.4 meter telescope size as Hubble, but with 18 cutting-edge fourth-generation image sensors compared to Hubble's single first-generation sensor. As a result, each WFIRST image will cover over 200 times as much as a Hubble Wide Field Camera 3/IR image and be 300 megapixels in size. Hubble images reveal thousands of galaxies; a single WFIRST image will uncover millions.

To help uncover the mystery of dark energy, WFIRST will make incredibly precise measurements of the universe. These measurements, like the distance and position of galaxies, can be compared to other measurements—such as the cosmic microwave background from the WMAP mission—to determine how dark energy has changed over time. WFIRST can also measure the slight distortions in light from distant galaxies as it passes more nearby mass concentrations. These data will build a three dimensional picture of how mass is distributed throughout the universe, and provide independent confirmation of its structure.
Click to expand...
 
Well I deemed the keyboard with my omnipotent digits.


There's no lens on the camera (bare sensor). The camera is an 16bit mono astro camera that is peltier cooled. In the video it's sensing the movement of my fingers (hence the shifting of some of the frames). Once the camera is mounted on a telescope it will be more sensitive to the alignment.

So.. what did I write..
1. The 16 bit mono camera driver that uses USB I/O without doing copies for speed..
2. The application that renders it's images in OpenGL for speed..
3. The image registration code that uses the GPU to register images as fast as the camera can supply them (15FPS, images take 0.057 seconds to align). That rotation and translation.

Now optimising this could be increased to 60fps greyscale as the images are aligned using each colour - Red, Green, Blue and Alpha here.
Later I'll add "super resolution" that means it will recover image details on the fly too as well as image stacking to reduce noise.

This will be used for high speed imaging for solar, planetary and DSO imaging :D
 
NickK said:
Well I deemed the keyboard with my omnipotent digits.


There's no lens on the camera (bare sensor). The camera is an 16bit mono astro camera that is peltier cooled. In the video it's sensing the movement of my fingers (hence the shifting of some of the frames). Once the camera is mounted on a telescope it will be more sensitive to the alignment.

So.. what did I write..
1. The 16 bit mono camera driver that uses USB I/O without doing copies for speed..
2. The application that renders it's images in OpenGL for speed..
3. The image registration code that uses the GPU to register images as fast as the camera can supply them (15FPS, images take 0.057 seconds to align). That rotation and translation.

Now optimising this could be increased to 60fps greyscale as the images are aligned using each colour - Red, Green, Blue and Alpha here.
Later I'll add "super resolution" that means it will recover image details on the fly too as well as image stacking to reduce noise.

This will be used for high speed imaging for solar, planetary and DSO imaging :D
Click to expand...

Looks good.

Can I ask which cam you are using and also which scope will you be fitting it to?

Amjust getting into astro imaging so am keeping my beedy eyes peeled for all interesting things on it and this deffo looks very interesting indeed.

Also, will you be making the software available to other backyard space image grabbers?
 
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