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Archive for September 2017

Ring Nebula (M57)

September 24, 2017 @ 11:08 By: gordon Category: Astronomy, Photography

Yesterday evening was a beautiful evening to be out with a telescope. I decided to go after the Ring Nebula (M57), which was visible high in the sky.

This is an extract from one of the images I captured. The rest are being stacked as we speak.

Andromeda galaxy (M31) – first attempt

September 10, 2017 @ 11:13 By: gordon Category: Astronomy, Photography

I headed out yesterday evening to see what I could see. One of the things visible in the sky last night was the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I put my camera on the back of the telescope and took a number of images. After aligning the images and working on them in Photoshop, I have an image where you can start to see some of the structure in the galaxy.

Andromeda galaxy (M31) (9 September 2017) © Gordon P. Dewis, 2017.

There’s specialized software for processing astrophotographs. For this image, I used one to figure out the image offset between the 8 images that went into it and then used Photoshop to manually align them. Then I converted the layers into a smart object, stacked them and applied some curves, exposure, level, and brightness/contrast adjustments.

For a first attempt, I’m happy with the results. I want to explore some of the other astrophotography software out there to see what works best for me.

Possibly the scariest tweet I’ve seen in a long time

September 08, 2017 @ 19:23 By: gordon Category: Current affairs, Weather

There’s a lot of stuff on Twitter, some of it pretty scary and/or creepy. This tweet, however, probably jumps to the top of the holy-crap scary list: