Hi, I am a software engineer, road cyclist and astrophotographer living in Espoo, Finland, and working for the Intel Open Source Technology Centre.
Here’s a picture of my new workhorse, a Costruzioni Ottiche Zen “Simak 240”, a 10” Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope. This picture was taken by my friend Samuel, who was working on improving the collimation of the secondary mirror.
This optical scheme, known as Simak, was designed by Mike Simmons, and has recently been improved upon. The ample flat field makes this scheme very fit for astrophotography.
I hope I can show some excellent images in the next few months.
Two years ago I had an idea for a site, and I embarked myself in what turned out to be a task of behemothic size. Twelve months later, I released to the public the initial incarnation of AstroBin, a website dedicated to the hosting of astrophotographs.
Alas, it was my first complex and feature rich website, and I learned several frameworks and libraries on the go, such as Django and jQuery. Here are some pieces of advice for somebody starting out on a similar path.
Django projects can be split in multiple apps, to reduce complexity and allow
the application of the One Responsibility principle. Neglect to do that and you
will end up with a 6,000 line long views.py, and a shaggy mess of spaghetti code.
A project that can be deployed quickly will make your life easier if you have to migrate to a new server, if you have to quickly create a sandboxed server for testing purposes, if you want to get people to collaborate with you.
To do that, try to stay away from things that live outside Django’s sphere of influence, like bash scripts, cron jobs, or other third party code that has nothing to do with your Django app.
I recommend that you start your app on Heroku, because if you get it working there, it’ll work everywhere.
Do it if your app is small, do it if your app is large. But especially if it’s large. Do it for your Django code, and do it for your JavaScript code. The time spent doing it will be totally worth it when you have to deploy new features to thousands of users and you can have a piece of mind knowing that there are no regressions.
intended it
They will break it, they will abuse it, they will find holes, they will do everything that can be done to fill your database with inconsistent data. Spend a considerable effort to keep things as tight as possible, so that no unexpected input can reach your code.
Dependencies must be tracked and upgraded, and often things will break in the most mysterious of ways (see point #3 if you want to prevent that.) It’s really imperative that you keep your ecosystem as small as possible.
Today, Samuel will be awesome and fix the collimation on my Simak 240, so, I hope, the one above is the last image to present a hideous collimation.
I spent the last two nights on Sh2-252, aka the Monkey Head nebula, a diffuse nebula in the Orion constellation, companion to the the open cluster NGC2175. I collected 17.7 hours of narrow band data (yay for long winter nights!)
The nebula, lying at 6,350 light-years from Earth, presents a very familiar structure, with an oxygen rich core and hydrogen and sulfur on the outside, creating cresting and waving gases that protrude towards the center of the structure.
The pocket of hydrogen and sulfur right near the core is very interesting, and I wonder how it came about, so isolated.
Hopefully this is the second-last decollimated image with my new telescope (I’m working on NGC 2175, and it should be finished before Samuel fixes my collimation.)
18.3 hours in narrowband revealed a surprising amount of S[II] emissions, and some O[III] too, right on the crest.
I would’ve bothered to collect better data, as I forgot to take the Moon into account, and my O[III] channel was afflicted by a gradient, although nothing PixInsight couldn’t solve satisfactorily. However, it was not worth spending more time than that with a decollimated telescope. The loss of detail is quite bad, but still I got a good image out of it, so I can’t complain.
IC 443 (also known as the Jellyfish Nebula and Sharpless 248 (Sh2-248)) is a Galactic supernova remnant (SNR) in the constellation Gemini. On the plan of the sky, it is located near the star Eta Geminorum. Its distance is roughly 5,000 light years from Earth.
IC 443 may be the remains of a supernova that occurred 3,000 - 30,000 years ago. The same supernova event likely created the neutron star CXOU J061705.3+222127, the collapsed remnant of the stellar core. IC 443 is one of the best-studied cases of supernova remnants interacting with surrounding molecular clouds.
(source: Wikipedia)
The following three animated GIFs (please allow some time for them to load; it’s two 1-second frames each) show how vast and overwhelming the difference between a $300 and a $30,000 telescope can be.
I don’t need to tell you which is which, but know that one frame was shot with an 80 mm semi-apochromatic refractor telescope, and the other with a 400 mm Riccardi-Honders reflector.
The first to GIFs are crops that let you appreciate the impressive difference in detail, and the last one shows you the true extension of the galaxy, M101, which truly appears twice as large with the large telescope.
Enjoy the show and be patient while both frames of each image load!
(original images: with the 80ED by yours truly, and with the RILA 400 by Giovanni Paglioli)
Last year I moved all my gear to the mountains of southern Spain, to be hosted at AstroCamp. One of the first images I took was of the Rosette Nebula. I have since improved my post-processing technique, so here it is again, reprocessed, in modified Hubble palette.
Still 2 weeks to go before my telescope will be collimated, and I’m having some dew problems as well.
I still managed 8.7 hours on the Cone Nebula, part of NGC 2264, a nebular complex in Monoceros.
The O[III] data was pretty much missing, as there is nothing there: a large patch lies right off the field, on the right size in my image. I can’t wait to do this again one the telescope is properly collimated.
Despite the telescope being still decollimated, I pointed it to the IC 410 nebula in Auriga, for a couple of nights. I could collect 8 hour worth of data with my narrow band filter.
The result is quite surprising, I must say. The temperature must have been higher, those nights, because the pinching on the mirror is not so obvious, and after all the decollimation doesn’t look so dramatic.
The effect is clearly mitigated by the fact that I have stacked 23 sub frames, but the loss of detail is still there.
However, this is very promising for the future.
IC 410 is a region of faint Ha nebulosity surrounding the open star cluster NGC 1893. The cluster itself is small and located just below center, underneath the central dust region of the nebula. This nebula contains complex wisps of gas and is a beautiful target for Ha astrophotography, although it is surprisingly difficult to find detailed information about this region on-line. The two prominent filamentous columns located just below and left of center may have been blown outward as a result of radiation emitted from the open cluster (notice how their “tails” generally point away from NGC 1893). The lower column has a curved, globular head which might represent a bow shock as gases pushed by radiation accumulate in this region, and/or might indicate an area of star formation. I have no idea if these interpretations are correct, although I will continue to research this and provide updates when I have more information.
(Source: starrywanders.com)
Here’s how I’m going to do astrophotography in 2013. On top of the sturdy 10Micron GM2000 sits a Costruzioni Ottiche Zen Simak 240.
The CCDs are a Moravian G2-1600 (with Astronomik Luminance, H-Alpha, S[II] and O[III] filters) and a SBIG ST-i.
There’s a JMI EV2 focuser and an TSOAG27.
Clear skies to me!
As I said in my previous post, my Simak 240, a telescope manufactured by Costruzioni Ottiche Zen, is currently decollimated. That’s because of the long distance shipping, and misfortunate collimation attempt by the company that hosts my gear at the remote robotic observatory.
Anyway, the problem should be solved is a relatively short time. Because of the decollimation and the pinched optics, I doubt that FocusMax can do a proper job, understandably, and lots of detail is lost.
However, the result is very encouraging!
I guess this is a great start. I’m really happy that my 10Micron GM2000 didn’t complain at all about the 20 or 25 kg I loaded on it: my guiding graph is really smooth and usually oscillates within one third of a pixel. Not bad for a sampling of 1.24 pixels per arc-second!