Views of the Solar System | Hacker News Reader

Views of the Solar System

damianpeach.com

74 pointsxioxox13 comments

There are many amateur astronomy images, sometimes even better then professional. For example checkout this corona pictures, author started as an amateur, not sure about his current status:

http://www.zam.fme.vutbr.cz/~druck/eclipse/Ecl2001z/0-info.h...

http://www.zam.fme.vutbr.cz/~druck/eclipse/

Damian is using cutting edge equipment and processing software, so it's no wonder he's got such great results. Many times it's more about the equipment than the observer; give an observer the necessary tools and they shall do wonders with enough motivation, experience and willingness to learn. Nevertheless, his images are great, and I've looked over them many times in the past.

Shri Kulkarni said something along the lines of "Given a sufficiently large telescope even an arbitrarily idiotic astronomer can make a discovery."

Where by "views" is meant hundreds to thousands of raw images selected with bad ones removed, then aligned and combined via software to enhance features :) Don't expect to see anything close to that level of detail in the eyepiece.

Super nice images though, way beyond what the pros were doing with the biggest scopes only a few decades ago.

For those who want more information, this technique is called "lucky imaging"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging

Woah. This certainly deserves an HN post of its own.

Per your request: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258272

From an amateur astronomer's perspective these are absolutely amazing images.

I think anyone who already did astronomical observations using a "conventional" telescope can probably attest how difficult it is to even get a very basic image of a planet let alone an extra-solar object in the night sky. The images shown in the article probably make extensive use of long exposure times and computer-aided merging of photo series taken over a long observation time. This technique usually requires a telescope with an equatorial mount and a motor that allows you to "follow" an object in the sky while taking pictures of it, which by itself is already quite challenging to build (except of course if you can simply afford to buy one). Also, vibrations, trigger timing and many other factors need to be taken into account in order to get a reasonable image quality. Hence those are some really great photos!

A lot has changed in last a few years. Taking images of planets is relatively simple with lucky imaging and decent webcam. One can even use unguided dobsonian now.

> The images shown in the article probably make extensive use of long exposure times and computer-aided merging of photo series taken over a long observation time.

More and more amateur astronomy images rely on stacking images digitally from several relatively short exposures. Not having to deal with long exposures makes this quite a bit more approachable as a hobby.

> This technique usually requires a telescope with an equatorial mount and a motor that allows you to "follow" an object in the sky while taking pictures of it, which by itself is already quite challenging to build

When we're dealing with stacking images digitally, an azimuthal mounting can work. A computerized "goto" alt-azimuth telescope mount suitable for amateur astro/planet photography is well within the budget of a hobbyist (a few hundred bucks is enough for an entry level mount).

This is also how the giant telescopes operate, they all are alt-azimuth mounted these days. The last equatorial giant telescope built was the Mt. Wilson observatory built in the 1930s or so.

The issue with alt-azimuth mounts is that the image gets "rotated" as the mount tracks the object in the sky. This can be corrected digitally by rotating the image and aligning it to background stars. Equatorial mounts don't have this issue and they can be used with long exposures on photographic plates.

Despite all this new fancy digital technology, astrophotography is still a very challenging task and a fun hobby!

Thanks for updating me on this! Has been a while since I've done any astronomical observations myself. Back in the day I used a Dobson telescope which made it a bit challenging to follow objects as you said, but which was much cheaper than a telescope with a professional mount.

Related: Thierry Legault http://www.astrophoto.fr/

Oh boy what I wouldn't give for seeing conditions that nice here in the Southeast US. Gorgeous shots. Amazing what someone can do with a 14' CAT these days.

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