Starship Asterisk*

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Please post your images here for October 16-18.

If you need instructions on posting images, please see this thread.

Thank you!
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IC 1805: The Heart Nebula
http://www.mitchtrilling.com/mtrilling.com/Welcome.html
Copyright: Mitch Trilling
[attachment=0]IC 1805 The Heart Nebula-1.jpg[/attachment][/i]
http://www.mtrilling.com/mtrilling.com/ ... Large.html

M33 Triangulum Galaxy
http://www.starkeeper.it
Copyright: Leonardo Orazi Full Resolution ad Info:
http://www.starkeeper.it/M33.htm

Ciao from Italy ,
Leonardo

7 months of Venus' motion in the evening sky, between December 2006 and July 2007.
It can also be seen in this TWAN page:
http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos.asp?ID=3001233

This is a time lapse of the same project:
http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos.asp?ID=3002807

Tunç Tezel
http://www.twanight.org

3d Stereoscopic "Wiggle" of Shuttle Discovery VAB roll-out
Copyright: Daniel E Herron File is a Stereoscopic 3D "wiggle" i created from two separate images I took on September 20th. I was fortunate enough to view the shuttle roll-out from the VAB and Discovery is about 60 feet from me in this image.

Two images taken: Sept 20th 2010
Location: Kennedy Space Center
Camera: Sony Alpha350
Focal Length: 35mm
ISO: 400
exp. 1/30 sec

LBN 667 - "Soul Nebula" in Cassiopeia - SHO Palette
http://hwilson.zenfolio.com/p1053910869 ... #h2c23b85f
Copyright: Hunter Wilson

M33
http://www.veil.gr
Copyright: George Vidos - Sakis Giannousopoulos Hello from Greece

George

Wow, that's a wonderfully beautiful portrait of M33, Leonardo Orazi!

And that's a truly fascinating illustation of the apparent path of Venus across the sky, Tunç Tezel.

I very rarely get much of a kick out of pictures of spaceships, but I, too, am impressed by the "power" you impart to your picture of the shuttle Discovery by "wiggling" it, Daniel E Herron!

Ann

Southern Milky Way sky
http://www.astrosurf.com/emilio/
Copyright: Norberto Rodríguez / Emilio Rivero

Wow, what an image, Norberto Rodríguez and Emilio Rivero! Hey, that's Gamma Velorum and Zeta Puppis inside all that red nebulosity on the right!

Ann

Heart & Soul
http://darkskyimages.com/image.php?phot ... ry=Nebulas
Copyright: Scott Tucker 2-frame mosaic of the Heart & Soul nebulae. Total of 6.5 hours of exposure time.

Star Count Please
http://www.tonylicata.org
Copyright: Tony Licata Object Name: Double Cluster
Optic: TeleVue NP-101
Date: 09Oct10
Location: Gladwin Michigan

Moon - Antares sequence over the medieval Castle of Sümeg in Hungary.

http://www.sumegvar.hu/the-story-of-the-castle
There are the star of Antares below and triple star of Rho Ophiuchi (with its C and D component) up.
Note the colour changing of the Moon because of the atmosphere.
Time-lapse of the event:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8_-UD8Kmso

Technique: Canon 500D, Canon 200mm objective at f/2,8, 7 frames aligned

Tony Licata wrote:Star Count Please
http://www.tonylicata.org
Copyright: Tony Licata

Click to view full size image

Object Name: Double Cluster
Optic: TeleVue NP-101
Date: 09Oct10
Location: Gladwin Michigan

An interesting problem, Tony. How many stars? I thought at first that a bit of software which could examine the code of the image for anything that was "not black" would do the trick. But then I zoomed in on the center of the image by a factor of 5000% and got the view below. A human bean can easily see there are 8 stars in that little piece of your image. But obviously "not black" won't get the job done in code. An interesting problem indeed.
Rob

Yes Rob you are seeing my problem, and a swatch of roughly the same area (below) from the full res image reveals as many as 12 definite point sources and possibly more. Dunno of any software that can do a good job of counting these closed regions of brighter pixels.

I haven't used the program Registar in a while, but as I recall, it counts the total number of stars it finds when it finds points in an image for alignment. I don't know what algorithm it uses to determine what is a star and what isn't. You would want to use a dark-subtracted image to eliminate hot pixels that might skew the count, I would guess.

Hmmm, that reminds me of Olbers' paradox, Tony Licata. Why is it dark at night, if the universe is infinite and infinitely full of stars?

Well... because... the universe is not infinite, certainly not infinitely old (only 14 billion years!) and because it is not infinitely full of stars, either. I have seen estimates of how many galaxies there are in the universe (40 billion? A hundred billion? More?), and you could use that to estimate the number of stars, I would think.

Check out this wikpedia entry. It is quite nice, I think:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

As for your image, remember that most stars are little red dwarfs that are so faint, so faint. Don't forget that the star which is closest to our Solar System (except the Sun, which is, however, very very much a part of our solar system) is Proxima Centauri. This ridiculously dim li'l red runt is so measly that not only can't you see it with the naked eye even though it is closer to us than any star that we are not orbiting, but you can't see it with a pair of binoculars, either! You actually need a telescope to see the very closest star apart from the Sun!

So how many stars are there in your image? You mean the stars you have detected and recorded in your image or the stars that are actually there in that direction of the sky, including all the li'l Proxima Centauris?

Anyway, that is a great image of yours! There are sure very many stars in it! And their colors are delightful, too.

Ann

Hi,

this is a picture that shows the motion of three geostationary Hotbird satellite during 8 hours.
For a fwe minutes they showed flares.

Hotbird satellites with flares
http://www.skytrip.de
Copyright: Mario Weigand larger version:
http://www.skytrip.de/satelliten/geosat-2010-10-10a.jpg

- Riedelbach / Gemany
- Canon EOS 5D MkII
- 80/480 TMB with TV0.8x

see this one for ID:
greets

Mario

Though I'd like to say I had Olbers' paradox in mind when I posed the question, alas it did not even cross my mind. But I'm happy to say I am familliar with it! Actually though, now that you mention it Ann, both questions appear to compliment each other nicely. On the one hand, though the image shows many stars, there is nonetheless much "empty" sky between them. BTW, doesn't it seem that the stars appear to follow "strands" or form many patterns and asterisms? Why is this? Does it suggest something about how they formed? Or are there tidal "currents" sweeping them around? But I digress. To be sure I only wondered how many were "actually imaged", and if they could reliably be counted.

Thanks. T.

Milky Way over Devil Garden, Utah
http://www.gcollier.com
Copyright: Grant Collier
This was shot with a Nikon 14-24 lens at 14mm on a Canon 5DII, ISO 6400, 30 secs, f2.8 I'm new to this forum and love all the great astro pics being posted!

IC 1848 THE SOUL NEBULA IN THE HUBBLE FALSE COLOR PALETTE
http://www.sharma-astro.net
Copyright: Anjal Sharma

Crater Moretus
http://astrophotography.fr
Copyright: JL Dauvergne / Elie Rousset / Philippe Tosi / OPM / S2P
May on of the best image of this crater from the ground. It was observed with the 1 meter telescope of the Pic du Midi Observatory.

NGC7023 (vdB139) Iris Nebula - dark and dusty region in Cepheus

ProLine FLI 16803, FSQ 106 EDXIII, AP Mach1GTO
LRGB 7.66h (18080:100) sub-frame (L-720s, RGB-600s)
Bieszczady (Roztoki Gorne), Poland:
Bogdan Jarzyna
http://www.starrysite.com
jarzynabogdan@o2.pl

Tucker512 wrote:I haven't used the program Registar in a while, but as I recall, it counts the total number of stars it finds when it finds points in an image for alignment. I don't know what algorithm it uses to determine what is a star and what isn't. You would want to use a dark-subtracted image to eliminate hot pixels that might skew the count, I would guess.

Hi, yes I have heard it does but have never tried it. So does Deep Sky Stacker a freeware stacking program but as you say it is primarily for the purpose alignment and not expressly for reliable star count. So I dont know if it can be used for that.
Thanks for your post! - Tony

grantcollier wrote:... love all the great astro pics being posted!

I do, too! They are fabulous!!!

Thanks to all of you who share your images with us; I appreciate seeing them a great deal!