Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149
krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."
Re:Fooooosh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cool project and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stunning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stunning (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally... but comparable to photos from Hubble? Sure, I guess "not as good as" is a comparison. Living here in Britain I can confirm getting pictures of the sky like that is no easy feat, and are definitely impressive... but there's no way you could achieve anything like Hubble's output, what a silly thing for them to say! I expected better from news outlets than that... haha jk.
Re:Cool project and all... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cuts to UK astronomy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even with the smallest budgets? (Score:3, Insightful)
Jesus, some people will make up conspiracy theories about anything.
Pretty pics, but not research grade (Score:5, Insightful)
However, none of them is worth a dam' for research use: where calibration is much more important that prettiness and resolution, low noise and even the spectrum of light used (not all light makes it through the atmosphere - esp. IR) are the sole reasons for spening all that money getting Hubble up there.
While I applaud the Telegraph for publicising this, it not what professional astronomers do - nor is it even close to what Hubble does to earn it's money.
Re:Cool project and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer), and I'm not stunned. Sorry. Nice work for a back-garden job, but any comparison with Hubble or any of our 4, 8, 10m class telescopes is utterly specious.
What's he and many other (admittedly very dedicated) amateurs are benefitting from is the enormous improvement in detectors (in this case, CCDs) over the past 20-odd years, plus the not-unrelated improvement in computer processing power to align, stack, and mosaic digital images. Obviously, professional astronomers have access to all that in spades, as well as much larger telescopes / telescopes above the atmosphere as well.
So yes, superficially similar and impressive coming from an amateur with limited resources, but to compare this with Hubble is completely lame-brained. Indeed, the cynic in me notes that TFA is puffing a book of his images: what a coincidence. A sidebar link takes you to a similar article in 2008 about another amateur who's "seeing the beginning of the Universe" from his shed: surprise, surprise, that article also puffs a book of his pictures. Of course, the article's in the Torygraph, which delights in celebrating a fifty years out of date vision of Britain populated by toffs, proles, and eccentric back garden amateur boffins, so hardly unexpected.
Going back to the point about better detectors, however, it's interesting to note that although we've built bigger and bigger telescopes over the past twenty years (as well as developing adaptive optics, space telescopes, broader wavelength coverage, etc.), the main gain we've experienced in terms of scientific performance has come from the vastly improved detectors. Problem is, we're now pretty close to detecting every photon that falls on the detectors and we can build detector arrays that almost fill the available focal plane.
To go further in ground-based astronomy then, we need much (much) larger telescopes, such as the E-ELT, TMT, and GMT. With their much larger collecting area and higher spatial resolution, you can expect truly fabulous things in the next ten years. From space, it's JWST, of course ...
These are great pictures! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Beautiful pictures (Score:2, Insightful)
I would assume he collects many hundreds of frames with a much shorter exposure time and then adjusts for the motion in the frame prior to "averageing" frames. A Bayesian statistical model that accounts for motion and various noise sources, any optical aberrations etc.. would be capable of extracting the level of information seen in these images.
Re:Beautiful pictures (Score:3, Insightful)
In step 11 of the HDR link you provided it seems to me that, except for a bluer sky, the HDR photo is actually somewhat worse for details than the original on the left.
The problem with stacking astronomy photos over a long time without an equatorial mount is that the image field rotates from one photo to the next. Your software should take that into account, otherwise the result will be a lot of circles centered on the celestial pole.
You're joking, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry to be negative, but this Slashdot post reads like it was written by someone with absolutely no experience in astronomy.
While the gentleman certainly takes high-quality pictures, he is solidly in the amateur category and no different from the thousands of other committed amateur astronomers that have a minimum of $20K in equipment to be able to observe and image the stars. There are amateurs who take much better pictures and have far more spectacular (and expensive) equipment out there.
Furthermore, it is absolutely ridiculous and insulting to compare his images to that of the Hubble Space Telescope. His telescope has a smaller aperature (8 inches versus 95 inches), his CCD resolution is much lower and has a much higher operating temperature. Furthermore, he has to contend with the effects of atmospheric distortion. Just because the object shapes and colors look similar to a layperson, his images achieve nowhere near the resolution and detail of the Hubble.