Flickr user FlintstoneStargazer captured all 110 of the Messier Objects between March 7th and August 6th this year. They have all been compiled into a big mosaic. This is very cool - anyone else ever tried anything like it?

Those that follow me on Twitter will know that I have been taking pictures of the stars in the past couple of dayse. I’m located right down in the south of France, near Aix-en-Provence. They get very dark skies here and after several trips over the past few years I have become determined to take full astronomical advantage of the situation. I’m quite adept at using the Meade ETX90 that is handily sitting here, but astrophotography has never been my forte. I wonder if anyone out there in blogland can help me?

I am stuck and need some help in both taking and then processing the images. I know there are loads of photographic astronomers out there - I need you!

I’m using a Pentax digital SLR, which can perform exposures up to 30 seconds long. I don’t have fancy tripod but I do have a small, pocket tripod. Last night I tried out some different settings and ended up using either ISO 800 or 1600 speed and the full 30 seconds of exposure available to me.

I took, amongst other things, these three images. The first is the Plough, the second is the Summer triangle and the third is Jupiter, hanging nicely above the house.

What I need to know are what most people starting out would need to know I imagine: what are the best websites, tools and softwares packages that one should try to use when starting out? Do I need to be stacking these images to get the best results, if so how?

I have RAW image files for all of these, but what does that get me? Googling is a bit of nightmare, as all you really see are all the images everyone else has made - which are lovely (and intimidating) - but not useful in getting you there yourself.

All assistance much appreciated.

Moon Darbar  

Originally uploaded by Light and Life.

Flickr Find 5 of 5. I thought it was time once again to profile some of the great pictures that can be found on Flickr. Many astrophotographers can be found in the various groups all over the photo sharing website.Here are a few from the astrophotography group, which is always featured in the sidebar on Orbiting Frog.

For my final featured photo in this series, I thought it was worth proving that you don’t need a telescope to take excellent astronomy shots. The Moon here is surrounded by thick clouds, which give it a dramatic and artistic aura.

Cocoon Nebula    

Originally uploaded by banarger.

Flickr Find 4 of 5. I thought it was time once again to profile some of the great pictures that can be found on Flickr. Many astrophotographers can be found in the various groups all over the photo sharing website. Here are a few from the astrophotography group, which is always featured in the sidebar on Orbiting Frog.

The Cocoon nebula is fond in Cygnus. It comprises both reflection and emission nebula, which is unusual. This image is an excellent photo of the region and shows the colours very well.

    

Antennae Galaxies - Originally uploaded by dgoodin.

Flickr Find 3 of 5. I thought it was time once again to profile some of the great pictures that can be found on Flickr. Many astrophotographers can be found in the various groups all over the photo sharing website.Here are a few from the astrophotography group, which is always featured in the sidebar on Orbiting Frog.

This image is so good I honestly wondered if it was really taken by an amateur. Absolutely brilliant. You can compare this to the HST image of the same objects and marvel at the accuracy of this earth-bound image.

First try at Saturn - Originally uploaded by Marc Arnault.

Flickr Find 2 of 5. I thought it was time once again to profile some of the great pictures that can be found on Flickr. Many astrophotographers can be found in the various groups all over the photo sharing website. Here are a few from the astrophotography group, which is always featured in the sidebar on Orbiting Frog.

Saturn is a great first target for astronomers taking photos. Its not as easy as you think. A lot of it depends on equipment, and then more on timing and skill. Here is someone’s first try. It may not be the best image you’ll ever see of the ringed planet, but no high-tech wizardry went into - just everyday stuff and a bit of hard work.

Polarity - Originally uploaded by Computer Science Geek.

Flickr Find 1 of 5. I thought it was time once again to profile some of the great pictures that can be found on Flickr. Many astrophotographers can be found in the various groups all over the photo sharing website. Here are a few from the astrophotography group, which is always featured in the sidebar on Orbiting Frog.

This is fab star trail image. I always love these, they say something very deep about the Earth spinning on its axis. They also take some patience to create and sadly, they require fairly rare, dark skies.

I had a question via email asking about Comet Holmes. I thought that by answering it on the blog, maybe others would also have some questions answered. so, thanks to Marycie for her question.

Comet Holmes was a very dim, and expected comet. Until October last year. During the period October 23rd to 24th 2007, it suddenly brightened. If you want to know more about why it suddenly became visible, I’d recommend reading Astroprof’s post on Integrated Magnitudes.

The comet was visible to the naked eye after that date, and on about the 26th of October it began to look more like a classic comet, with a tail and nucleus. Comets have a nucleus, a tail and a coma, or halo. The nucleus is the hard, chewy centre. This is rocky bit and really ‘is’ the comet, if you like. The tail and coma are produced when the object passes closer to the Sun and particles of ice and dust begin to sublimate. A cloud of material (the coma) appears to boil off the nucleus and becomes the glowing, cloudy ball that makes comets familiar to most people.

The tail is produced by interaction with the Sun. Particles from the coma and nucleus are blasted back from the comet by the Sun and so the tail always points away from the Sun.

Comet Holmes’ coma grew enormously in size and this became interesting later on in October. Late in the month, the coma had grown to be about half the width of the Moon on the sky. However it was lying about twice as far from the Earth as the Sun is (2 AU), so the true size was around 1 million km. That’s two-thirds the diameter of the Sun.

Here’s an animation from the Comet Holmes Wikipedia entry, showing the location of the comet and the size of the coma on different dates.

In November 2007 the coma became even larger and was in fact bigger than the Sun. However because of this, the coma has become so diffuse that it was hardly visible to the naked eye at all. Although much of the internet was talking about Comet Holmes being bigger than the Sun, most general news and media didn’t care because they couldn’t see it well enough to show the public a good picture.

The final part of Marycie’s question was asking where in the solar system the comet was located. Well I mentioned earlier that it was 2AU away from us. For the time it was visible, Comet Holmes sat just beyond the orbit of Mars. You see its location in this video I’ve made using the excellent Starry Night software.

This video covers the period October 2007 to April 2008. You’ll note that the Earth moves half an orbit during the video. Apologies for the low quality of YouTube.

There is an excellent composite photo of Comet Holmes over the course of the 2007-2008 outburst on the Wikipedia page covering the topic. This image is shown below.

One of my posters at the UK National Astronomy Meeting was about using 3D to look at data in a different way. Whilst I was looking into 3D astronomy I came across lots of internet forums and sites where people are discussing 3D pictures of nebulae.

I thought I would share some of the best I found. I must stress that this is more art than science. The third dimension in these pictures is not real, it is inferred. Most are Hubble or other images that are manipulated - rather cleverly in my opinion - to make them 3D. They are pretty though.

These images are stereoscopic. You can view them by focussing in front of the screen (cross-eyes) using the left-hand and centre images; or by focussing beyond the screen (relaxed-eyes e.g. Magic Eye technique) using the centre and right-hand images.

M33

The Ant Nebula

Rosette Nebula

Part of the Orion Nebula

Dumbell Nebula

I have no credits for the pictures, if you know sources for any of them by all means let me know and I will add them in. Also, if you know of any more lying around the internet, just post a link in the comments.

Here are some of my personal favourite wallpapers for your desktop (and iPhone). Sizes 1900×1200, 1024×768, 1280×800 and 800×600 are all here to fill your eyes with spacey goodness. Let your own scattering of icons sit amongst glorious nebula and spectacular scenes!

I usually have a nice space picture as my computer’s desktop wallpaper. Today someone asked me where I find them. Well I find them all over the place. In the spirit of sharing, here are ten of the best. I have credited where possible. As far as I know, all images are Creative Commons licensed (but feel free to correct me).

Orion’s Belt (Credit: Digital Sky Survey)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Galactic Centre (Credit: Susan Stolovy, Caltech)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Helix (Credit: NASA, JPL)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Rover Shadow (Credit: NASA)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Pleiades (Credit: J. Stauffer, Caltech)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

ISS (Credit: STS-117 Shuttle Crew)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Four Suns (Credit: T. Pyle, SSC)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Sepia Moon (Credit: Stefan Seip)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

Aurora (Credit: Joshua Strang, USAF)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

NGC1977 (Credit: Martin Pugh)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone

It was a little while ago now that Comet Holmes first came into our sights in Perseus. It flared from magnitude 17 to 2.8 in only two days and has since been picked up by many amateur and professionals alike, including a very recent Hubble press release.

So here is a collection of my favourite images of the Comet as it now begins to fade. We’ll begin with Sky & Telescope’s excellent finder chart for locating the comet:

On October 25th the first images of Comet Holmes were taken and the internet was buzzing with news and pictures. One image that seemed to really get around was this one from Cloudbait Observatory in Colorado.

We then started to see the comet expanding and getting even brighter. It was now clearly visible and many noted that it was larger than Jupiter in the sky. This animation from the Observatoire du Cégep de Trois-Rivières shows the first few days as it changed and grew.

In early November the comet began to change, now forming a tail. This striking image from Don Goldman from Nov 3rd shows that it no longer looks spherical and can start to be discerned as a comet.

Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a wonderful image on November 5th of a very long exposure, colour Comet Holmes. It was takenin Spain by Vincent Peris. It appears the comet has a greenish hue and a faint tail that is more pronounce than first thought.

As the nights get darker and the preparation becomes more intense, photographers are able to get even better images of the now much more comet-like comet. VC Astro’s beautiful Nov 14th photo is a really lovely example.

Finally in this collection, Hubble has been turned to view the comet’s nucleus. With its powerful optics, Hubble has taken high resolution images of the central part of the comet.

They have also put together a video which shows you the scale of the comet on the sky and so iI’ll finish with that video and hope you’ve enjoyed this small collection of Comet Holmes snaps. If you want to downloada higher resolution version of this video do so here. The file is approx 11MB.

I finally caught the Space Station in Cardiff last night.

Having rained on me all day, it finally cleared up and was almost cloudless at both times for the ISS going over. Caught a few crappy photos, one of which is right here. You can see the ISS as a little dot, just above the chimney, about the bump into my TV aerial.

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else Top Ten but they represent some of the best things about the APOD site as well as being some of the most impressive images.

10: Mars Then and Now

Two images of Mars taken over 100 years apart. The first was drawn by Eugene Antoniadi in 1894, the second is from Hubble during the close approach of Mars in 2003. Its interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong. Notably the extensive system of Martian Canals, which Percival Lowell was so adamant existed and proved the presence of Martians.

Credit: Tom Ruen, Eugene Antoniadi, Lowell Hess, Roy A. Gallant, HST, NASA
More Historical APODs - Yuri Gagarin, Voynich Manuscript

9: The Surface of Europa

Back in January 1998, when this image appeared on APOD, the Galileo Mission was still sending back amazing new pictures from Jupiter and it’s Moons. This was around the time I first discovered APOD and have been checking it ever since.

Credit: Galileo Project, JPL, NASA
More Groundbreaking APODs - Shadow of Saturn, Pluto’s True Colours

8: Bubble vs Cloud

This 2005 APOD captured my imagination for some reason. You can really see a three-dimensional effect in this beautiful picture. The actual title of the image is ‘ NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula’ but the phrase ‘Bubble vs Cloud’ stuck with me somehow. It just got me thinking about how dynamic all of these giant objects are, even if we will never see it for ourselves.

Credit: Russell Croman
More APOD Nebulae - The Eagle Nebula, Orion Nebula, Carina Nebula

7: Close Up of the Face on Mars

After years of being told by people that there was a giant human face on Mars that an ancient civilisation had once created it was satisfying to see it for real and notice that ‘hey, there is no face’.

Credit: Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA
More Debunking APODs - Equinox Eggs, Green Flash, The Moon Illusion

6: Binary Black Hole

This composite image shows the x-ray in blue and the radio in pink. You can see two black holes in the middle, which are each streaming out relativistic particles. These two objects are 300 million light years away! This APOD from April 2006 was the first time I had ’seen’ a black hole in any convincing sense.

Credit: X-Ray: NASA/CXC/D.Hudson, T.Reiprich et al. (AIfA); Radio: NRAO/VLA/NRL
More Unseeable APODs - Dark Matter, Neutrinos

5: A Sun Pillar

One of the things APOD does best is show not only planets, nebulae and other distant objects, but also some cool, Earth-bound astronomical tit-bits. This Sun Pillar is created by ice crystals in the atmosphere. They are best seen during the colder months.

Credit: Stan Richard
More Earthbound APODs - Giant Machine, Lenticular Clouds, Aurora

4: Earthrise

This is a Christmas Eve APOD from 2004. The site has never been afraid to put up historical pictures or to be a little poetic when it feels like it. This image was taken around ChristmasEve when the three Apollo 8 astronauts were orbiting the Moon. They returned safely on December 27th, in time to see the 1967 Sunrise back on the Earth.

Credit: Apollo 8, NASA
More Poetic APODs - Martian Love, Huygens Discovery, Liberty Bell

3: Hyperion

Like a 250km sponge, Saturn’s Moon Hyperion is covered in odd craters and has a density so low that it has led researchers to assume it made up of vast deep caverns. This image shows the moon in excellent detail. The images on APOD have steadily improved with improving technology over the years and this amazing Hyperion picture is a great example.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
More High Resolution APOD - Annual Eclipse, Mars HiRISE, ISS Silhouette

2: Blue Lagoon

Sometimes you see a picture that just takes your breath away. This APOD was just such a picture. This wonderful Lagoon Nebula picture, which to me, looks like a painting, was not taken by Hubble as many might think but by a 20″ telescope on Earth.

Credit: Russell Crowman
More Artistic APODs - Moon from Space, Sombrero in IR

1: Venus Near the Moon

Not a grand finale in one sense, but a stunning picture never-the-less. What APOD has always done best are images like these, taken not by massive telescopes but by normal observers with affordable equipment. The stuff you can see with your eyes and appreciate instantly without explanation. This crisp, detailed image of Venus near the Moon sums up what so many of us like about astronomy, and why the subject remains accessible to just about anyone.

Credit: Jay Ouellet
More Backyard APOD - Moon Animation, Station and Shuttle, Blue Moon

So thank you to Astronomy Picture of the Day for many years of service to the internet. May you long continue to wow us on a daily basis.

APOD is also available as a Google Homepage Gadget, a Netvibes Module, an Apple Dashboard Widget, a Wordpress Widget, a Yahoo Widget, a Windows Vista Gadget , as a Twitter Feed and probably loads more.

If you have other APODs you think deserve attention, leave a link in the comments thread so we can all see.

The morning sun burns into the clouds…Originally uploaded by hole-in-one.

This image from Flickr shows the rising Sun as it glows through the clouds. It is quite reminiscent of nebula containing or reflecting powerful light from stellar nurseries and is a good reminder that sometimes these nebulae are not always as they seem. By that I mena than in this image, the Sun is not actually in amongst the cloud but does look a lot like it could be.

But its a lovely picture never-the-less and if anyone has a similar effect captured on video I’d be very interested to see it.

ISSOriginally uploaded by jarguel.

Haven’t seen much that I’ve liked in the Astrophotography group on Flickr lately but I went trawling earlier and found this lovely capture of the ISS from someone’s back garden. Thought it was worth sharing.