A duck in the little pond behind my house at 300mm #birds

🧪Due to the Gifford Fires, there was a lot of smoke in the air and the moon looked as red as a lunar eclipse! I got this shot using my EOST6 hooked up to my 6SE. This isn’t over saturated; the moon was really that red! What do you this kind of moon should be called? I was thinking of "Ember Moon".

1.5yrs of progress imaging the moon. What have I learned? -Don't be afraid of multiple exposures to achieve HDR. -Clouds can be your friends, not just a nuisance. -Capture what you saw, not what you wish you saw. -Limit glow to taste. #moon #lunar #astrophotography #photography #progress

🧪We published a paper exploring the ability of a black hole's photon ring to measure how fast the BH is spinning, using the kinds of images we hope to make with BHEX. One cool result was tools (e.g., below) to measure the geometry of the PR. Read our study here: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

🧪 I captured last night's total lunar eclipse! I used a Celestron 6SE and a EOS T6 Rebel DSLR to capture the moon at different phases during the eclipse. For the partial eclipse, I exposed the moon 3 times for the red, lit, and middle part, and then composited it in procreate to show all the light!

🧪I caught the full Mars occultation by the Moon last night! I used the same techniques I describe in previous posts to make these composites showing the full scale of the Moon in comparison to Mars. I also made a timelapse of the entire event, see it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=odUO... #Mars #Moon

🧪sunspots on the sun during a solar storm! I took this image with my S50 50mm APO, with some light post processing. The sunspots visible here are the source of the huge CME/solar storm a few weeks ago that caused aurorae at unusually low latitudes. #space #sun #solar #storm #aurora

🧪My friend David and I are astrophysicists. He's at the CTI Observatory in Chile right now, and we made this walkaround of the telescopes and crazy views! David worked there for many yrs so he knows all the equipment/science very well. Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7km9... and sneak peek below!

🧪What's a day on Mars like? Beats me--but here's 90 minutes of the Mars day! I made this hyperlapse with the 6SE + ZWO ASI224MC + Celestron 2x Barlow + IR cut filter, 40,000 frames per image over 120s, top 1% stacked, each frame 5-10 min apart. #mars #space #timelapse #planet #solarsystem

🧪I am a member of the BHEX collaboration, a space mission which will detect the "photon ring" of a black hole for the very first time. We made a free app which can simulate black hole spacetimes on your phone! Check out the download and discussion here: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4218...

If your object has moons, process them separately from the surface to make them bright and large. Composite the moons back together with the surface and enjoy your final image! (8/8)

Take your data; planets rotate, smearing your image, so don’t capture for too long. Jupiter = <3 min, Saturn = <6 min, Mars = <2 min. I end up with ~20-30k frames. Use AstroSurface to stack by quality, and stack the top 1-5%. Use wavelets corrections to bring out surface detail. (7/8)

Using software (e.g., FireCapture) read in data, adjusting exposure, gain, gamma. Use the shortest exposure and smallest ROI possible while still resolving the object (short expo/small ROI = more frames = better lucky imaging). (6/8)

The process looks something like this: let your scope cool down (>1 hr) to ambient temperature. Use a dew shield to protect the lens. For GOTO scopes, align using maximum # of objects, which will hold the planet steady in your FOV. Focus (e.g., Bahtinov mask) on bright star. (5/8)

We overcome the seeing problem via “lucky imaging”. We use a special camera (ZWO ASI224MC) to quickly (~minutes) record 1000s of frames of the planet, and use software (AstroSurface) to sort the frames from best->worst. By averaging only the best frames, we can negate the effect of seeing. (4/8)

We overcome the small size problem by using the largest telescope size we can. Bigger is better, allowing you to see more details. You can start making out surface details around 4”. The telescope I use is a 6” (6SE). The design (SC) requires temperature cooldown but gives high-quality images. (3/8)

Planets are hard to image because they are very small on the sky, requiring a large telescope aperture to see them. Their small size makes them susceptible to changes in the atmosphere, which we measure via “seeing”. Poor seeing makes an object look like it's underwater, like below. (2/8)

🧪How do we image the planets with consumer hardware? A thread 🧵I’ll cover: 1) what makes planets hard to image? 2) What equipment is needed to overcome these challenges? and 3) what does the process look like? This is based on a video I made on this topic here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-fD... (1/8)

🧪 I’m making a Solar system 🪐 composed of my own shots of the planets. These images were made with consumer hardware: a 6SE + ASI224MC + IR cut + 2x Barlow + FireCapture. For each, I used lucky imaging to stack the best of ~30k frames. Just Venus and Mercury to go! #space #planets #astrophotography