Amateur Astronomer Grabs Amazing ISS Picture 80
The Bad Astronomer writes "Ralf Vandebergh is an amateur astronomer, and using a simple telescope with a video camera attached to it, he took an incredibly detailed picture of the International Space Station. You can easily see the recently-installed truss and solar panels, as well as the Space Shuttle Discovery docked to the station."
Par for the course... (Score:5, Informative)
He has a number of photos posted at Cloudy Nights [cloudynights.com] in the "Planetary and Solar System Observing" forum.
A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:5, Informative)
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam [wildimaging.co.uk] and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
On a clear night... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:5, Informative)
Stacking frames does not require precision tracking. You only need to track it well enough to keep it in the frame. And in some cases partially out of the frame still has limited usefulness. The software correlates the positions based on what is in the picture. If there's enough of a pattern to make the alignment (at sub-pixel resolution), then it's easy. If it's fuzzy, you might have to do the alignment manually.
Re:If they want to save power (Score:5, Informative)
What about Rayleigh Criteria? (Score:4, Informative)
A mirror -- just in case (Score:2, Informative)
Funny how nyud.net has disappeared from
No Subject (Score:5, Informative)
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image [nasa.gov] of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here [asahikawa-med.ac.jp].
Re:A simple technique taken to an extreme (Score:4, Informative)
You might be interested to have a look at some software called ALE [dyndns.org], which can be used to do this more or less automatically; you give it a sequence of frames and it'll synthesize a superresolution image combing data from every frame.
(You can also use it to generate panoramic images from video pans --- it automatically locates, rotates and transforms every frame correctly, figuring everything out for itself!)
The only problem with it is that it's really slow, so you'll probably want as big a computer as you can humanly manage.
One day I should try taking some simple digital camera footage of the moon and running it through ALE just to see what happens...
Re:Vandeberghâ(TM)s 25 cm Newtonian Telescope (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Subject (Score:3, Informative)
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image [nasa.gov] of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here [asahikawa-med.ac.jp].
Holy shit. There's a picture of his on that site which actually managed to capture an astronaut on a spacewalk [asahikawa-med.ac.jp]. Talk about impressive.
Thanks for the link, there's a whole lot of very interesting shots there.