I might as well ‘fess up. It’s the glitter that gets me. Like that fraud on TV, I just like the heavy feel of a fistful of gold coins. I wish I had more of ‘em. I wish I had the Midas touch, except perhaps when reading Acts 20:33. I remember, back in the 1980s, [...]
For years I have observed a special two-season calendar with my summer starting with major league baseball spring training and ending with the last pitch of the World Series. My second season is “bummer,” which started a week ago on October 29 and will last for another five months or so. (Sigh!) I usually try [...]
I gathered these photons using a newly available telescope located near South Alpen, France. If you’re curious, it’s the center telescope picture here. For my first test of using this large telescope, I exposed “luminance” images of the Pelican Nebula (no color for now). From Wikipedia, The Pelican Nebula (also known as IC5070 and IC5067) [...]
A Kansan at heart, I like the looks of Messier 63, aka Sunflower Galaxy. I used Jim Misti’s raw data to follow a PixInsight tutorial, and this is the result. I keep saying this, but Real Soon Now I will resume using photons that I have gathered myself. It appears that my favorite LightBuckets site [...]
Here is another of my practice images using raw image data generously offered by Jim Misti. One of these days I hope to be acquiring my own photons again. But in the meantime, here is my version of the Andromeda Galaxy, about the size of our Milky Way and on a collision course with our [...]
Data acquisition by Jim Misti On August 24, 2011, a supernova torched off in the Pinwheel Galaxy, only 21 million light-years away. This makes it one of the closest supernovas seen in decades. The guys and gals who track these things dubbed it PTF 11kly, a type of white dwarf detonation that usually progresses in [...]
I worked hard on processing this image, because the data was acquired on a still, dark night in New Mexico in April and was some of the highest quality data I acquired while I was still able to use LightBuckets remote controlled telescopes. I processed the data last month, finally got tired of looking at [...]
I keep plugging along, trying to get better at putting together astronomical “pretty pictures.” My raw material was acquired using the LightBuckets observatories in New Mexico, as well as from data made publicly available. I have discovered that there are two software approaches to digital processing of astronomical data. The well-traveled path uses Photoshop CS [...]
When I suspect someone is trying to play mind games with me, messing with my head, I don’t like it. Nicholas Carr, author of What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains: The Shallows, believes it is far worse than just mind games. The digital world can actually cause organic changes in the structure of [...]
It’s officially summer now, and the trees have pretty much done with their annual growth spurts. The car was due to go on the operating table at The Glass Doctor to get a windshieldectomy, courtesy of a flying rock from our last trip to the lake, so I drove to the auto hospital and took [...]
