This is a massive mosaic made from over 100,000 individual images. By far my most ambitious solar project, and with orders of magnitude more detail than anything I've previously attempted. Zoom in and check out those juicy details!!
2021-04-05 23:59:33 +0000 UTC View PostHello and a happy Easter to all who celebrate it!
April is deep in the heart of "Galaxy Season", since te Orion spur sets too early to do any kind of meaningful observations with it, and the milky way core doesn't rise until the wee hours of the morning. That means when you look up at night, you are looking away from our home galaxy and out into deep space! Unfortunately if you've been following along with my posts lately you'll know that I have had some issues with my mounts, and as a ...
2021-04-05 03:57:51 +0000 UTC View Post
I'll also give you a look at how an image evolves, since I decided to keep working on this one after posting it here... take a look at the attached. A smoother transition between moon/sun I felt was in order, and made the contrast between the two halves a little more subtle. I'm not sure if it's better necessarily, just a different approach. I'll start including more of my "cutting room floor" type images.
2021-04-01 23:09:57 +0000 UTC
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A dying star shaping the vast clouds of an emission nebula sculpt this incredible scene. This is a combination of a friend's narrowband data and my color data. (My data is available to aspiring astrophotography patrons if you want to take a crack at processing this)
2021-03-28 15:56:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Thanks for your support! Been a slow month for me for imaging, a lot of equipment issues and bad weather making things a challenge. Either way, here are some new wallpapers, cut from the high quality originals from my latest images, including one that is 2 years old and previously only available as a paid wallpaper on my site.
As always, let me know what you hope to see and I'll try and work it in.
2021-03-27 17:09:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The sun has some nice little active regions and a few prominences, as seen in this picture I took today. Nothing too crazy, but it sure looks interesting. During processing, I composited it against a starry backdrop to show how it would appear in space if it weren't NEARLY as bright.
2021-03-25 21:58:15 +0000 UTC View Post
This is actually not from my telescope, but from one down in Chile. A few members of the astrophotography community are challenging astrophotographers to try their hand at processing the data from this telescope, and this was my image from the data. This was shot at nearly 3,000mm, so is highly magnified.
What you're seeing here is a supernova shockwave travelling through space!
2021-03-19 02:23:13 +0000 UTC View Post
The Horsehead and Flame nebulas are star forming regions of space located around the leftmost star of Orion's Belt. The Horserhead is rich in Hydrogen, which gives it such a vibrant red color. This was captured over a 2 hour period from my backyard.
I find this area looks particularly stunning in just the Hydrogen Alpha channel, so I included that for you here. This is *almost* unedited, it just has had a very basic histogram adjustment applied to make the image balanced and the n...
2021-03-16 05:10:05 +0000 UTC View Post
This was done by Shooting the moon as usual, and then creating a special device (a mix of 3d printed parts with household items) to hold small lights in a circle, which was mounted on my equatorial mount and then spun in a circle. The images were combined digitally to create this view.
2021-03-03 05:51:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Howdy Patrons!
Winter is coming to an end, and along with it, the winter constellations. The coming months are known as "Galaxy Season" among as astrophotographers, because our night sky is pointed away from out own galaxy and out into intergalactic space, so that will be the theme of more of my images in the coming months. This is a tricky time to shoot deep space, because galaxies are fainter and angularly smaller than nebulae (not actually smaller though, that'd be just silly). Thi...
This was a unique transit for me- in addition to costing me all but 2 hours of sleep, it also is the first time I was able to identify a structural change in the ISS from my shots! Right now in prep for an EVA, solar panels are perpendicular to each other, where ordinarily both sets would be face on towards the sun The arrays on the upper left are set 90 degrees from where they should be in this configuration, giving the illusion that the ISS is winking to me.
See attached for vid...
2021-02-28 18:51:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Check it out with Jupiter for scale
2021-02-26 22:16:29 +0000 UTC View Post
This composite image is the result of around 50,000 16-bit images, stacked and sharpened using a wide range of tools, to produce one of the sharpest images I've managed so far. The faintly visible portion of the unlit side as well as the starry backdrop are composited in as an aesthetic choice, as this more accurately represents what I see through my telescope when observing the moon, as well as what is actually in the sky. The colors were revealed after a careful saturation adjustment, revea...
2021-02-24 00:26:49 +0000 UTC View Post
This image is inverted to highlight the prominences at the top, one of which is a huge plasma stream being ejected into space.
2021-02-21 21:45:28 +0000 UTC View Post
On the last picture, The countries are (roughly from left to right) Taiwan, Ireland, Jamaica, Fiji, Hawaii, Iceland, and New Zealand. All these are to scale, to give you a since of how massive the moon is.
2021-02-20 23:02:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm waiting patiently for the (hopefully) good news that Perserverence has successfully touched down on Mars, which will happen in about 4 hours. This image is A composite created from Hubble's Mars data and my own shot of the Milky Way Core.
FYI, this hubble data is available to anyone. I downloaded it here: https://opus.pds-rings.seti.org/opus/#/
You can downlaod the data and create yo...
2021-02-18 16:41:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Many of you may have been following my Journey the evening of 12/21/20, when I was attempting to photograph a once-in-a-lifetime conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. An unforecasted wall of fog rolled in early, before the sun set, so sadly I did not have much to work with, and I assumed the evening was completeley ruined. I even drove for hours attempting to outrun the fog (every time I set up my equipment though it would catch up to me). However, I did manage to take many pictures throug...
2021-02-15 19:06:15 +0000 UTC View Post
This was captured in about 40 minutes from dark-ish skies.
2021-02-14 20:40:19 +0000 UTC View Post
The Corona of the sun was captured the day of the great American Eclipse, and superimposed into this Hydrogen-Alpha shot catured yesterday. The Corona is frequently shifting, so It probably doesn't look exactly like this right now, but it is a good reference for the relative size and shape of the sun's outermost atmosphere.
2021-02-10 03:05:32 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the orion constellation- but it's hard to tell at first. You can see the bright orange betelgeuse in the upper left, and the belt about 2/3rds in from the left at the center. At the bottome of the belt is the horsehead and flame nebulae, and to the below right of that is the famous Orion nebula (which I recently share an up-close picture of). That's the Rosette on the left. The gaseous parts of space are extremely faint, and the red areas are on the cusp of the light that is vis...
2021-02-08 19:46:18 +0000 UTC View Post
If you look deep into Orion's Scabbard, you will find a bright mass of stars hidden within a foggy envelope of interstallar gas. In long exposures, rich colors surface, showing the vibrant pinks and blues the burning oxygen and hydrogen emit. By blending data collected in true color and false color, I captured my most detailed image of this region to date. The brilliant colors showcase the composition of this star forming region of space. This is one of the easiest targets for amateurs to cap...
2021-02-08 19:31:41 +0000 UTC View Post
I've shared a lot of moon pics with you, usually focused on creating an image that reflects what your eyes can see (sometimes with colors enhanced of course). This time I processed the image with an inverted luminance layer to enhance the lunar texture, and show where the moon once flowed with magma (the brighter regions.) Our eyes are quite incredible, but sometimes it's cool seeing what things could look like with superhuman vision. In this version the colors show how the composition change...
2021-02-02 02:58:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I included desktop and mobile wallpapers from my recent images, as well as a sneak peek at something I may or may not post- a unique way of processing a moon image to reveal the rich composition of the moon!
Any requests for a specific size, etc, let me know!
2021-02-02 00:04:31 +0000 UTC View PostI've been getting a bit stir crazy with the terrible weather I've faced in Sacramento over the last few months, so I plan on making trips to darker skies this month. This is a quiet period for celestial events- so I included some more challenging observations I would ordinarily have skipped. See if you're up for the challenge!
February 6th: Conjunction of Venus and Saturn
This will be a tricky one to observe, as it happens in the wee hours of the morning a...
Since I can't bring you fresh original content right now, I thought I'd do a patreon- only write-up of the more technical details behind a shot like this.
This is the pinwheel galaxy, one of the galaxies in our local group. This image was captured over many nights from my light polluted skies to bring out the faint spiral structure within it. If you are subbed to my astrophotography tier this is the data labelled "M101- LRGB + HA". That means it was captured using 5 filters: Lum...
