Welcome to my little corner of the web. Thanks for letting me come to your classroom to talk about astronomy. I was glad to see this is a topic of great interest to everyone. Everyone paid attention and almost everyone had a good question. I only started this website a few months ago so most of my images aren't on it yet. They are still available on my old site though.

Go to my gallery to see most of my pictures. The 'C11 Hyperstar' images are most recent, followed by the 'M110...' images. The 'DSI ...' images are my first attempts and not really worth viewing. I keep them around to remember where I started.

Messier 51 (M51)

Took this image on 3/17/10. 68 Dithered subs allowed for a 3x drizzle stack in DeepSkyStacker to regain some resolution lost due to the short focal length and bayer matrix of my QHY8 camera. I typically don't attempt drizzle but I think that it worked OK in this case. I have yet to process the 1:1 (no drizzle) version to compare.

Click on the image for a 1200 pixel version. Click here for a full sized version.

Because many folks won't click on the 1:1 version here's a 1:1 crop of the galaxy itself.

The Process

• 68 5 Minute lights (5h40m) captured 03/17/10 with Nebulosity 2
• 3 bad columns removed with my Fixfits utility
• Drizzle 3x stacked with 100 flats and 100 bias frames in DeepSkyStacker with custom rectangle to reduce output image size.
• Processed in PixInsight Core 1.5 with DBE, Background Neutralization, Color Calibration, histogram transformation, ACDNR (medium scale), High Dynamic Range Wavelet Transform (HDRWT), L-masked Saturation curves, SCNR.
• The monitor used during processing was calibrated using Spyder3Elite. The image was processed and published using the sRGB color profile for the widest possible compatibility. FireFox 3.5 has color management capabilities enabled by default.

Hardware notes in the Equipment section.

Larger combination stack

A week before I took the image above I captured a similar amount of data of the same subject. I considered them wasted as the outer edges of the sensor had iced over. I then realized I could still use the middle section of the images and combine them. The result is the image below:

Total exposure is 117 5m images or 9h45m. The difference isn't staggering. Twice the image count should result in sqrt(2) less noise. Not really evident. The real test would be to redo a drizzle stack with all the 117 images. I have other images to process though so I'll shelve that until later.

Messier 101 (M101)

Preview:

1:1 crop:

http://gallery.tungstentech.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1768

and a wide field version (with 1:1) which shows many more galaxies in the vicinity of M101:

http://gallery.tungstentech.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1765

Further details next to the images.

I decided it was time to buy a new domain for my astronomy photos. Here it is, CarpePhoton.com. The site is based on Joomla which I haven't used before so it will take some time to get used to it. I would have preferred DotNetNuke but the SQL Server database that sits behind it is hard to migrate so I decided against that.

For now I'm still struggling to force this CMS into a presentable website suitable for my (evil) purposes. I may just scrap it and go with a simple blog and be done with it. Meanwhile you can find my images here:

• Images taken with the C11/Hyperstar 3 and QHY8 camera
• Images taken with the William Optics Megrez 110ED and QHY8 camera
• Older images, taken with DSI and DSI Pro