It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => Science, Technology, & Medicine => Topic started by: Libertas on May 12, 2011, 11:44:47 AM
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And what a pic it is!
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/photographer-creates-incredible-night-sky-picture-using-37440-exposures/ (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/photographer-creates-incredible-night-sky-picture-using-37440-exposures/)
Well done Mr. Risinger!
::clapping::
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Astounding.
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Wow, that's real dedication.
“Making an atlas of the night sky is something that mostly professional astronomers would have done in the past,” said Fraknoi, who is also chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif. “With new computer tools at our disposal, it’s remarkable what amateur astronomers can discover.”
That's true too.
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That's amazing. My first impression was amazement at the number of stars, and my very next thought was amazement at how infinitely the void between them dwarfs the totality of them. What looks like an infinite cluster of energy is really little specks of indescribably sparse dust when held up to the vastness of space.
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That is fantastic.....The creativity and excellence of man when untethered by gov't.
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Very impressive work. When you go somewhere truly remote, you get to see the stars how pre-industrial people saw them. It's actually quite astounding to see when you're used to the night sky in a developed area.
Once as a kid we were on a fishing expedition at Cape Hatteras, out on the beach at night. I've never seen anything like it. You realize how shooting stars are actually not all that uncommon, you just usually can't see them. I must have seen at least 10 shooting stars that night.
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Being in the middle of the ocean will work too. It's overwhelming to see on a pitch black night.
Makes a man truly feel he is just a mote.
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Damn!! That's something.
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Very impressive work. When you go somewhere truly remote, you get to see the stars how pre-industrial people saw them. It's actually quite astounding to see when you're used to the night sky in a developed area.
Once as a kid we were on a fishing expedition at Cape Hatteras, out on the beach at night. I've never seen anything like it. You realize how shooting stars are actually not all that uncommon, you just usually can't see them. I must have seen at least 10 shooting stars that night.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern MN is a perfect place for such viewing. On a clear moonless night, it can almost feel like you're IN space. And sometimes you get the added pleasure of vivid Aurora Borealis.
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at his website there's an interactive page (http://skysurvey.org/)
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Pretty cool!
::thumbsup::
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I wonder what accounts for the globs of red, or the wisps of black. I'm sure it has to do with the light spectrum and the gases involved, but I mean, what accounts for them being where they are? Just one of those red globs has got to be unimaginably huge. I'd be interested in a scientific explanation.
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It could also be an effect of the filters he used and how they interacted with the light coming from nearby stars, nebulas and gas clouds. Plus, post-picture digital scrubbing tom enhance definition could have also magnified the filtering. In any magnified lense red-shifting is more pronounced too, but for this I do not think he was using anything too powerful, 85mm lenses by the look of it so I am thinking it is filters and enhancements.
The type of filters he used (Ha & LRGB) can be found at a lot of places, for a good desription of what they do Orion Telescope has pretty good info -
http://www.telescope.com/Accessories/Telescope-Eyepiece-Filters/125-Orion-LRGB-Astrophotography-Filter-Set/pc/-1/c/3/sc/48/p/5563.uts (http://www.telescope.com/Accessories/Telescope-Eyepiece-Filters/125-Orion-LRGB-Astrophotography-Filter-Set/pc/-1/c/3/sc/48/p/5563.uts)
http://www.telescope.com/Accessories/Telescope-Eyepiece-Filters/125-Orion-H-Alpha-Extra-Narrowband-Filter/pc/-1/c/3/sc/48/p/5587.uts (http://www.telescope.com/Accessories/Telescope-Eyepiece-Filters/125-Orion-H-Alpha-Extra-Narrowband-Filter/pc/-1/c/3/sc/48/p/5587.uts)
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I believe the dark areas are interstellar dust and the red areas are hydrogen gas.
Some of the brighter gas clouds are visible in telescopes from ideal dark sky sites (which are increasingly rare nowadays). NGC 1499 - The California Nebula (http://www.dougsastro.net/NGC-Catalog/ngc1499.php)
The more notable dark dust clouds are also visible in telescopes, but they reveal their presence by obscuring the stars in the background. In other words, you can pan across the Milky Way with your telescope, and notice an area which seems to have fewer stars. You're looking at a dark dust cloud with maybe a few stars in the foreground, while the more numerous distant stars are obscured.
See this Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalsack_Nebula). I've heard of the Coalsack Nebula, but I've never heard of the Emu in the Sky before.