The past month or so I have been collecting photons by remote control using a large telescope at the University of Arizona’s SkyCenter. Although I plan to take one more post-processing pass, I think my first effort is worth sharing with you while I am letting the experts at the PixInsight forum tear it apart. [...]
As I eyeball the night skies I am terribly impressed with the vastness of it all and wonder where I should start. My conclusion is that I should stake out a small portion of cosmic real-estate and concentrate on becoming familiar with its contents, passing on what I see by posting on the Orlop. Show [...]
No, not that kind! I mean galaxies and nebulae in God’s cosmos. Lately I have been getting a bit tired of trying to coax image data out of a 17″ aperture telescope in southern France by remote control. The weather in that part of the world has been just terrible. So, having too much time [...]
From today’s Wall Street Journal: Eastman Kodak Co. is preparing to seek bankruptcy protection in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would cap a stunning comedown for a company that once ranked among America’s corporate titans. It is interesting how certain events seem to mark the ending of an [...]
You absolutely must carve out 11 minutes and 20 seconds of your time to see this animation of the voyage of Curiosity Rover to Mars. View the beautiful lift-off for the mission. I can’t help but ponder the theological implications of this unbelievable NASA mission. Why would God enable some of his creatures the ability [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
