Photography

2022-02-04

Unavoidable Noise

M101, the “Pinwheel Galaxy”. It has low surface brightness, and the sky at Songbird Observatory, San Francisco East Bay Hills, is almost always at least a little hazy, with an ever-present skyglow from the nearby cities. The results are always noisy –like an analog photos with lots of grain:

Further processing with PixInsight and Gimp lessens the obvious noise, but you also lose some of the delicate shading in the galaxy:

I can’t see this object (it seems so strange to use the word “object” to refer to an entire galaxy…) with my naked eye.

In fact, most nights I can’t make out more than a couple of constellations — if I didn’t use software to point the telescope, I would not be able to find M101.

How, then, do I even know this is M101 I photographed? I can compare it with the Hubble view.

2022-02-03

Best yet shot of the Horsehead

Two nights ago the sky was clear and steady, and the telescope was working fairly well…

2022-01-25

The Crab

Last night waves of wispy clouds kept flowing across the sky. I pointed the telescope at M1, the Crab Nebula, and took a 2 minute exposure. Not much, but more than I expected:

So I set the scope for 30 2-minute exposures, and went away to dinner.

But apparently after 5 crummy shots like the above, the sky cleared for a short window, and the remaining 25 were good. Unfortunately clouds returned, along with a heavy mist, so I covered the scope for the night.

Here is the sum of the 25 shots:

It looks more like a brain than a crab. Maybe a crab without legs? But turquoise and gold on black velvet, at least. If it’s clear tonight I’ll add more exposures.

2022-01-24

The Skull Nebula

The weather has been inclement and overcast for weeks now, with only a few clear nights. It’s been so long that I have had trouble getting my telescope set up. Here’s an image I call “The Skull”. Really the Rosette Nebula, but this view, to me, looks like a distorted skull gazing wistfully off and up to the right.

Many years ago I was on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Floating through the Inner Gorge you can see Vishnu Schist worn by the water into beautiful fluted black walls. But I, in a grim mood, thought of that schist as the tortured souls of the damned, souls that had been sent back in time (God could do that, right?), buried miles deep and burned for eons by the molten interior of the Earth, crushed and twisted beyond all recognition and buried for millions of years until they were for a brief instant exposed to the sun and air and water, so I could see them as I floated by.

Anyway, the Skull Nebula.

2022-01-15

Snob Photography

Sometimes I look through the viewfinder, and I am overwhelmed with pure aesthetics. I follow the light where it takes me. This mood is relatively rare, and the results in retrospect are not always great. In fact, frequently the results are just trite.

But sometimes they aren’t.

I have never understood the contempt some photographers have for digital. I save almost all the photos I’ve ever taken. Pre-digital photos sit in boxes, slowly fading, but the digital photos look just the same as when I first took them. It is quite possible they could look the same ten thousand years from now.

But honestly, much of the time I take pictures as memos. Pictures out bus windows, just to remember what I saw. Pictures of something on an ad, pictures of the wifi password at a hotel. These pictures are useful, rather than beautiful or interesting.

Here’s a picture of the almost dry Li River in China. A memory: