
1060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by amateur astronomers - dmitrybrant
https://astrospace-page.blogspot.com/2019/04/1060-hours-image-of-the-large-magellanic-cloud-chile.html
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samirop
Hi Everyone! I'm glad to see so much interest in this Image in this amazing
community. I'm the CTO of Observatorio El Sauce, the observatory where this
telescope is located. This place is a fully robotic observatory that provides
a service called "Telescope Hosting", which basically means that people send
their telescopes and observe remotely from wherever they live. Why would they
do that instead of observing from their backyards? That's because in that part
of Chile we have the best sky quality for astronomy in the world, in terms of
amount of clear nights a year (320 clera nights a year), light pollution
(class 1 en Bortle scale), and in something called "seeing" (average below
1"), which is a measure of the smallest thing the sky would allow you to image
(the smaller the better). Thus, from our observatory our clients get the best
possible image they can get with their telescopes.

Also, a good friend of mine developed this digital scope so you can zoom in
the picture easily without going back to the 90ties internet experience:
[https://scope.avocco.com/case/20/eWKcUiIXpuQU9V0z](https://scope.avocco.com/case/20/eWKcUiIXpuQU9V0z)

I'd be happy to answer to your questions :) Enjoy!

~~~
siavosh
Cool service! Can you say anything on how many telescopes you host, and
ballpark price, and any history of how the observatory got started (land,
permits etc)?

~~~
samirop
Hi! Thanks :) We have already 30 telescopes for different purposes, mainly for
science and astrophotography. Our standard plans, which include maintenance
and most of the support you'd need, cost around 7500 usd/year. The project
started in 2012, we spent a couple of years finding the land, doing all the
necessary paperwork and getting permits, getting internet, etc. Our first
telescope arrived in the beginning of 2015. Our goal is to be a professional
alternative to the big scientific observatories, but mainly purposed for small
and middle-sized telescopes.

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cek
The robotic telescope mount they use (Paramount MX+) is made by a small
company in Golden, CO called Software Bisque [1].

These mounts are amazing pieces of engineering. I want one just to fondle the
finely machined and anodized aluminum.

[1]
[http://www.bisque.com/sc/pages/ParamountLandingPage.aspx](http://www.bisque.com/sc/pages/ParamountLandingPage.aspx)

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gravy
Full image
[http://www.cielaustral.com/galerie/photo95.htm?fbclid=IwAR3G...](http://www.cielaustral.com/galerie/photo95.htm?fbclid=IwAR3GMt0zg_9VrcXH3moy7-lR7stH2Gb-
ZOYPpvpTKMZooK7LpMBa97PQx2Y). (Linked in article) Really incredible.

~~~
anonytrary
For anyone with a shitty computer like me, zooming into that is currently
crashing my browser ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
dorgo
I have random freezes. Firefox can't handle 200 MP, I guess

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Moru
Works just fine for me. Loads in 2 seconds, zooms instantly. Maybe something
wrong with your computer or Internet?

~~~
mixmastamyk
My first guess, not enough ram.

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anm89
" Indeed, astrophotographers used a couple of special filters which transmit
narrow parts -lines- of the visible spectrum : the Hydrogen Alpha line at 656
nm, the Sulfur line at 672 nm and the Oxygen III spectral line at 500 nm"

Can anyone comment on how much the images produced by these filters differ
from what the human eye would see if somehow it was able to look at these
objects. Are they also taking in information from the non visible spectrum and
coloring it or is this all just a focusing of a light that real humans would
have been able to perceive?

I know they mentioned using different filters to achieve the two different
images but was

~~~
_ph_
There are several parts to the answer of your question.

First of all, emission nebulas are not very bright, so no telescope can give a
picture as bright as a long-time exposure does. If you can see a nebula
through a telescope at all, it will be very faint. Which triggers another
effect in your eye: the cells for color reception are not very sensitive. Like
with general night vision, you will see nebulas usually only with your light-
sensitive receptors, which don't see colors. So it will appear in a grey-
greenish color.

High quality pictures of nebulas are taken at very specific wavelengths, of
common emission frequencies, you listed them. Even at high brightness, they
wouldn't directly convert into a good color picture, as 500nm is turquise, 656
and 672nm are very deep red. A color image converting these wavelengths
directly into RGB-values would be not very impressive, it would look more like
the bottom image on the page. So usually a color mapping is used to generate
impressive images which also show a lot of the detail information. With 3
different "colors" in the source image, you can apply an arbitrary
transformation to generate an RGB-image. For example, most images from the
Hubble telescope use a common mapping which is consequently called the Hubble-
telescope mapping. Like shown on the page, you can create very different
looking images from the same data set by choosing the color mapping.

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johnny313
I love that this was done by five amateur astronomers. Here is a description
of the group and their set up:
[http://www.cielaustral.com](http://www.cielaustral.com)

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irrational
It blows my mind to zoom in on just one part of the picture and see how many
stars there are. And then multiply that by the entire picture. And then
multiply that by all the galaxies in the universe. My mind just isn't built to
comprehend numbers that large.

~~~
el_benhameen
And some of those "stars" are actually galaxies themselves! Truly mind
blowing.

~~~
spuz
Actually, most of those dots are galaxies. The dots that make up the large
structures are stars in the LMC which is a collection of star clusters, but
everything else that is not part of some larger structure must be a galaxy.

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labster
The glowing up arrow this site displays is makes reading on mobile really
annoying. Why distract from the content with a UI pulsar?

~~~
kristopolous
Maybe the designer believes the feature of scrolling to the banner image at
the top is absolutely essential and should be done frequently! That's why they
made it red and blink, it's very important!

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kunalpowar1203
While spending about 30 minutes zooming in and marvelling at it, i came across
[https://imgur.com/fdb6JZH](https://imgur.com/fdb6JZH). Is this an exploding
star?

~~~
avidmoon
This is DEM L316. It might seem like one object, but these are the remnants of
two different supernovas (of different types: smaller is Type Ia, bigger Type
II).

[0]
[http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/d316/](http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/d316/)

~~~
kunalpowar1203
Ah! Thanks for the link.

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athenot
This was made with 3936 photos taken between July 2017 and January 2019, each
of up to 20 min long, looking at several parts of the spectrum. Amazing!

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lavaslice
Here is a viewer for the images

[https://scope.avocco.com/case/20/eWKcUiIXpuQU9V0z](https://scope.avocco.com/case/20/eWKcUiIXpuQU9V0z)

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PMan74
Does anybody know how expensive the setup described is?

\- Remotely-controlled observatory at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile

\- A 160-mm APO-refractor telescope and a Moravian CCD

\- Presumably hefty image processing requirements

\- etc.

I get that these guys are amateurs in that they are not being paid for this
but presumably this costs some serious money? Or are the components they use
in reach of a well to do hobbyist these days (all relative I know)?

~~~
coffexx
All in USD: Scope 13k Camera 7k Mount 9k

Thats just the big ticket stuff. Theyll have a guidescope, colour filters,
laptop (i assume), all sorts of paraphernalia supporting the effort.

Given that its remote controlled and in an observatory in Chile I suspect that
adds another order of magnitude to the cost. But I'm unsure specifically how
much, or if they're renting scope time.

You can buy much cheaper equipment and still do admirably, this set up is
really quite extreme for a hobbyist.

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ardy42
Can someone give a quick explanation of the objects the picture? Are all the
nebulas in the LMC or in the foreground? Is the LMC the reddish haze in the
backround?

~~~
subcosmos
The LMC is effectively a galaxy that we captured and started tearing stars
from. The white disk is the core.

~~~
lifeformed
Are the cloudy puffs remnants of exploded stars?

~~~
KnightOfWords
Some of them, yes.

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hguhghuff
I'd love to print this on 15 foot wide wallpaper for the kids bedroom.

~~~
rodolphoarruda
Well, that's what I'm doing tomorrow, but it will be for my living room. It's
a 135x242cm piece of wall, which is a not as a square ratio as the image, so I
had to crop it from its upper left corner down. Inkscape exported it to a
666MB PNG (ugh) I don't know why. So let's see...

~~~
el_benhameen
How large are the sections that you're printing? And how are you printing
them?

~~~
rodolphoarruda
It's one section only which is 15945x28583px. I'll have it printed at a shop
near home which is specialized in large printings for cars and trucks. Their
printings are like peel out stickers.

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kartickv
What kinds of image processing are used for this? Do the images need to be
aligned, or can telescopes be pointed precisely enough? Are the images
combined using mean/median, or something more sophisticated than that? What
settings are the original photos captured with?

~~~
dylan604
There are several software options on image processing for astrophotography.
Do a search for 'astrophotography image stacking', and you'll get a list of
software, tutorials, videos, etc. A couple of the popular ones are Deep Sky
Stacker[0] or PixInsight[1] or even Photoshop. They offer different
options/capabilities.

The main thing about the capture settings is to use RAW. Other settings
ISO/exposure time/etc is dependent on camera being used. However, whatever you
can do to capture as much light as possible within each frame is the goal.

The software does image alignment rotate/scale/etc to do the stacking. You can
stack images taken of the same object from different physical locations. Spend
a weekend in the desert shooting an object, then spend another weekend the
next month at the top of a mountain shooting the same object, and all of the
images can be stacked.

The telescope alignment precision is important, but less so than it used to be
for a couple of reasons. With gear available today, you can take "portable"
telescopes into the field, do a decent polar alignment and then allow the
guide scope/software to correct for any imprecision of the main scope's
alignment and even tracking issues from manufacturing issues with the mount's
worm gear. A guide scope is a second smaller telescope (wider field of view)
attached to the main scope with a camera attached to it. That camera is
connected to a computer running the guide software, and will track a
designated star. The guide software will talk to the telescope's motors, and
can speed up/slow down the motors to keep the guide star to within a 1/4 pixel
deviation.

Also, with digital cameras, images of shorter exposure times are taken and
then stacked in software. There's multiple benefits to doing this. Consider
exposing a single frame for 60 minutes, or 12 5 minute exposures, or 30 2
minute exposures. If anything bad happens during that exposure (a plane or a
satellite crosses your view, someone uses a laser pointer through your frame
of view, a bug lands on your primary, etc) it's not "that big of a deal" to
capture it again. Also, digital camera sensors tend to get noisy with longer
exposures due to heat build up around the sensor (a problem film cameras do
not suffer).

[0]
[http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html](http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html)
[1] [http://www.pixinsight.com/](http://www.pixinsight.com/)

~~~
munificent
_> Also, digital camera sensors tend to get noisy with longer exposures due to
heat build up around the sensor (a problem film cameras do not suffer)._

Maybe worth pointing out that film has its own issues with long exposures,
though. If I remember right, film's response to light isn't strictly linear
with exposure time so you get less and less useful additional exposure as you
expose longer.

~~~
_ph_
Yes, with film there is the Schwarzschild-effect which causes the sensitivity
and the color reaction vary with the exposure time.

While digital camera sensors usually pick up noise for long-time exposures,
this is less an issue for astronomical cameras, because they fight this noise
by cooling the CCD-chip. Usually the chip is cooled via a Peltier-element to
temperatures below -20C, where thermal noise is very low.

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veryworried
It is not possible to ever see a scene like this even if one were sitting in
deep space is it? These sorts of images are the result long exposures, but a
human would only see blackness and stars, and maybe some faint puffs of light
here and there.

~~~
sandworm101
You wouldnt ever see the colors. They are far too dim without magnification.
If you were standing in the cloud you would probably see it a little, like we
see our galaxy as a blurry cloud, but only on the darkest nights.

~~~
newaccoutnas
There's some astrophotography that fills in bands of the wavelength we can't
see with colours to give us the perception of being able to see gas clouds
etc. I'm not sure if this is done here but it's probably worth mentioning that
not all space images you see are realistic in terms of human visible
wavelengths.

~~~
sandworm101
Then we should also mention that human color vision changes depending on light
levels, with us being more sensitive to some colors than others. So when you
over-expose an image you aren't just making it brighter but changing the
ratios of perceived colors. (A big deal for eye witness reports of crime at
night.) At very low levels our vision becomes essentially black and white.

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sandworm101
Lol, nostalgia. Watching that image load slowly from top to bottom is so 1994
for me.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Are you using zmodem? Believe it can resume a broken transmission. ;-)

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fizixer
With these hi-res images I'm always curious which of the stars actually belong
to the galaxy and which ones are "noise", i.e., stars that are from our own
galaxy "blurring" the view.

I think filtering out "local" stars should be very doable given ML/CV
progress.

~~~
NickNameNick
With images taken 6 months apart, spanning earths orbit of the sun, you might
be able to detect some parallax motion of the nearest stars.

~~~
gmiller123456
Propper Motion is usually the greater of the two effects that cause stars to
appear in different places. So it's not quite so simple.

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ValleyOfTheMtns
I would love to see a version of this with the "noise" of the stars cleaned up
and the brightness/saturation of the clouds increased.

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azhenley
The actual title is: 1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
captured by Amateur Astronomers

It should probably be changed to a shortened form of that.

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psykus
Are there areas of the world with no light pollution where you see anything
remotely like this with the naked eye? Any parts of the Milky Way?

~~~
newnewpdro
No, the best you can do unaided is just a general view of the Milky Way.

But if you're willing to accept some optical aids like a reflector and eye
piece, a large amateur "light bucket" dobsonian telescope can unveil deep
space objects to the naked eye.

I don't think it's possible to get anything like these photos though, the
sensor is collecting light over a _very_ long duration to present as a single
image. The only way to get more light into your naked eye real-time is with
more aperture, obviously there are practical limits there.

~~~
smueller1234
I've seen the Magellanic Clouds with my naked eye. I worked at an observatory
in rural Argentina (location because light pollution). One night, I went out
to one of the telescopes for emergency maintenance. When we got back out into
the dark and hadn't turned on the headlamps of the car yet, the Milky Way
stretched like a band across the sky, and you could see both Magellanic Clouds
as small but macroscopic objects, indeed looking like clouds.

This was among the most breathtaking things I've ever seen (the other being a
particularly vivid showing of northern lights in Alaska). The southern
hemisphere's sky is infinitely more exciting than the northern one.

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tathougies
The fractalness (is that a word?) of the universe never ceases to amaze.

~~~
hguhghuff
Fractosity?

Fractal nature of?

~~~
ncmncm
Fractality.

~~~
ssijak
Sounds like Mortal Kombat finishing move.

~~~
afturner
or something Andy Samberg would say on Nine-Nine.

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Spinosaurus
What is the very bright object with a bluish hue in the top left?

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mstngl
The Beam Nebula N11 as per
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Eso1021d...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Eso1021d.jpg)

~~~
ncmncm
It says "Bean" there.

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SpaceInvader
It certainly has a Van Gogh feel to it. Really awesome :)

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ldarby
That link redirects to a spam site for me. Anyone else?

