Clear skies ... and clearer pictures
The remarkable things you can see in deep space when you remove the foreground stars in our Milky Way
I started taking ‘astro’ pictures nearly 30 years ago on 35mm slide film, and my father did the same for years before that. It was laborious, time consuming, and often yielded zero results when the end photo was processed. The digital age has changed all that. Today’s telescopes, digital cameras, and software have made it possible for pretty much anyone* to capture deep space objects with much more detail and much less error. Possible, yes, but it still requires a fair bit of time - and financial - investment to do it right.
It’s more than the telescope
We acquired our current telescope that currently lives in the observatory with the sole purpose of using it for ‘imaging’, that is, taking pictures. (We avoid the term astrophotography because for us it’s more about the astronomy than the photography - we’re more interested in using the photos to learn about what’s out there, and possibly make a new discovery ourselves** - the pretty pictures are just a bonus!)
But it’s not as simple as point and shoot. Modern day deep space photography involves a process called “stacking”, taking many photos repeatedly then using software to combine them into one. The rationale is this: every photo you take of the sky contains signal and noise. Taking repeated photos lets the software “learn” what stuff is “noise” and what is “signal” (the stuff you want to capture). For this reason, “stacked” photos can reveal way more detail than a single long exposure photo. Noise is random and doesnt hog pixels like signal does - so an algorithm can sort them very quickly.
But wait it gets cooler: algorithms have been making use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some clever people have used AI to match up astro pictures with the known star catalogues of all visible stars in the Milky Way and we can now remove them from pictures to reveal what these fascinating objects look like. For me, the Sombrero Galaxy (M104) pictured above was the wow moment. The picture above shows all the stars in our own Milky Way in front of the galaxy. Removing those stars reveals dozens more galaxies (you might have to zoom in!). These tiny objects are hundreds of millions of light years away:
Here’s another, the Pinwheel Galaxy M101, 25 million light years away. Last year a japanese amateur astronomer took a picture of the pinwheel galaxy and recorded a supernova (SN2023), in an outer spiral arm. It has since faded into a supewrnoav remnant, too small to our scope, but below is M1 Crab Nebula whcih is a supernova remnant.
*We know not everyone has the means and time to acquire the equipment to do this and learn how to use it. This is why we started the Astronomy Club and open the observatory to the public whenever we can. You can join the club for free over at astronomy.scot and support our work by becoming a paid subscriber.
** Who knows where a supernova is hiding out, most discoveries are by amateurs doing exactly this.
Other photos we’ve taken recently
We haven’t removed the foreground Milky Way stars here because they’re beautiful and fantastic as is!
Watch this space!
It goes without saying that the observatory and telescopes cost time, effort, and of course cash to acquire and maintain, but we are committed to make it affordable and accessible to all. You can support this effort and our other work with Eat Sleep Wild by subscribing to this Substack as a paid subscriber, which comes with some cool perks and of course our eternal gratitude!
These are incredible!