A Year of Astronomy from the Pinetree Observatory

Yes, that's hours or days worth of capturing data for a good clean image. I don't do so much of that, due to the UK weather being so unhelpful. I've got the gear to do it, but haven't focused on it much due to the effort.

 

Here's an old one of the Orion Nebula. This nebula has a wide range of brightness, with the core being very bright. The nebula can be seen with the naked eye. This image was taken with a Canon DSLR and is made up from 14 x 5 minute exposures, 14 x 30 seconds and for the core, 15 x 10 seconds. The close up of the Trapezium stars was taken on a different camera.

The Trapezium was discovered by Galileo Galilei. On 4 February 1617 he sketched three of the stars (A, C and D), but missed the surrounding nebulosity. A fourth component (B) was identified by several observers in 1673, and several more components were discovered later like E, for a total of eight by 1888. Subsequently, several of the stars were determined to be binaries. Telescopes of about 5-inch aperture can resolve six stars under good seeing conditions.



Another old one from 10 years ago, the Horse Head and Flame nebula.

 

Fantastic! Can we see a photo of your telescope?

By the way, interesting to see that D-B-A-C is a bit like Ursa Major's chariot!

Keep looking up ... we certainly look up to you!

 

This is the 8-inch reflector I generally use for planets and close ups of the Moon.



Here's the 80mm Refractor I use for nebulae, the whole Moon and Sun discs.



There's also the Hydrogen Alpha telescope for the prominences on the Sun.

 

I just squint through a pair of Boots' glasses!

 

9th January 2025

That was a long cold night. I was in the observatory from 16:37hrs to 22:39hrs, bar one short coffee break indoors! 86 video files captured of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, plus some DSLR and phone shots. Moved on from cold to freezing to hyperthermia, but all in a good cause. Here's the selection of pictures from the evening.

I began with Venus, catching it in the early evening light before it followed the Sun below the horizon.



Jupiter was next, catching a 75 second video every 2 minutes for an hour. Each video was processed into an image which were combined to produce a rotation animation. This shows approximately 1/10th of a day on Jupiter, since it completes one rotation every 9.9 hours. First a still image with the Great Red Spot.



Now the 1 hour animation, compressed into about 4 seconds.



I also got a wider view, catching Jupiter along with the Galilean moons.



After the coffee break, Mars was now high enough in the sky to have a go. The Jetstream winds were 70 to 110mph over the country, churning up the atmosphere, which doesn't help to get a good image. You never know what the weather will bring, so it's worth trying over several nights, as conditions from day to day can vary.





I tried some close up images of the Moon, but the conditions weren't giving decent results, so I settled for some full disc mosaics. The first is a colour mosaic, made from ten overlapped images to cover the whole Moon. It was shot at 1 metre focal length, giving a 4,000 pixel wide image, which I reduced by 50% to add to my website.

The second part of this picture is a 5 pane mosaic, greyscale image through an Infra-red filter. This combination usually gives a sharper image, as IR light passes through the atmosphere with less distortion. The sensor on this camera is much larger than the colour camera, so I needed less images to cover the whole disc. Each section of the mosaic came from a 3,000 frame video, with 5% of those frames stacked to create the image. Stacking improves the signal to noise ratio of the image, making a cleaner, less grainy image.



This is the same greyscale mosaic, but with colour added from a DSLR shot. The coloured boxes show each area that was covered by a video clip. Once all the panes of the mosaic had basic processing, they were combined into the final image in GIMP 2.10.38. This image was 6,000 pixels wide, reduced to 2,000px for upload.