the-maddest-robot
Astrophotographer & chemist, mid 20'sCurrently on the roof yelling at the clouds to get out of the wayMostly astrophotos I've taken, possibly other science related stuff
51 posts
Latest Posts by the-maddest-robot
This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).
This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.
This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:
This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.
The starless version :
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).
If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.
This reminded me of the isonitrile freezer at my previous internship.
For those who don't know, isonitriles (aka isocyanides) are a class of compounds that contain this motif:
They are known to smell very bad and many synthesis pathways to those compounds were discovered because of their stench. (I personally think they smell like a mixture of rotten cabbage and burned rubber but more ''artificial'')
So in that lab, we had a freezer dedicated to them, and even with sealed bottles in à -20°C freezers in a separated and ventilated cabinet, you would still be able to detect their odour if you stood next to it (not strongly, but still detectable).
We had to move that freezer to a new lab, it stayed unplugged for 15 to 20 minutes, and in the 5 minutes we need to power it back in the new lab, the entire room had filled with that isonitrile stench (mind you that freezer had not been open during the entire operation). Thankfully we did that on a Friday afternoon and by Monday the smell had disappeared.
Just for reference this is from the MSDS of benzyl isonitrile :
found on a fridge in my lab, haha
Ok, so I finished the processing of my new photo of the Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405)
Image taken in SII and Ha with a few RGB images to have the correct star colours. This is technically an SHH combination image but with a narrowband normalisation and a lot of curve modifications (with and without colour masks) to get colours/contrast that I liked. I already had taken a photo of this nebula, but it was using mostly RGB data with a bit of Ha (and a lot less integration time). It did show the dust reflection way better, but I like the contrast we can see inside the nebula's gas on this one. Thanks to @shaythempronouns for suggesting the use of an SII filter to image this nebula. Starless version :
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 29x300s for the Ha filter and 33x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 6h 35min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January)
sometimes astronomy camera companies will post about their horrible attempts to fix hardware problems with software. normally these are unremarkable.
and then sometimes they contain a beautiful single sentence that will live in your brain forever
Photo a few galaxies, M81 / bode's galaxy (centre), M82/the cigar galaxy (left) and NGC 3077 (right)
In addition to those three galaxies, there are many other (much) smaller ones hidden among the stars (a few examples):
The red-ish filament visible around M82 are ionised hydrogen gas and dust pushed outwards by galactic-superwind
Those are tough to be a combination of solar winds created by young stars and the shockwaves of frequent supernovas. They mostly occur in starburst galaxy a type of galaxies that experience heightened stars formation generally due to recent gravitational interaction with other galaxies, in the case of M82 the trigger is most likely its neighbour M81.
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm Ha filter. 12x180s image for each colour filter (RGB), 6x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 2h 54min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)
At least viruses are a distinct physical thing, prion on the other hand are just fucked up geometry.
It's just angry geometry that angers the other protein around it. It doesn't even have DNA or RNA!!!
i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf
Those do not look like much, but they are, to the best of my knowledge, Herbig-Haro object (to left: HH 94, top right: HH 249 and bottom: HH 95) Herbig-Haro object are ionised gas clouds formed when the jet of hot plasma ejected at the poles of newly born stars interacts with Interstellar gas, they are thus more common in star forming regions. I first noticed one of them (HH 94) after I shared the image with a friend. The What's in my image PixInsight scrip from SetiAstro was very useful in finding out what that was. I couldn't find a lot of information on those objects specifically (and very few pictures), but a few publications did have images to compare with (orientation differs):
(original publication ref for HH 94 & HH 95; additional publication ref for HH294 aka NGC 2023 HH 3) (better images of other Herbig-Haro object taken by Hubble : 1, 2 & 3) Position of the three objects in the original image (another might be present but I wasn't confident they were visible):
Ok, so I was searching for information on some of the objects visible in my photo of the horse head nebula and I found these two posts (Reddit and Astrobin) by DanielZoliro that also used a SII and Ha combination but with a slightly different processing (Notably, the RGB combination being R: SII, G: 0.6xHa + 0.4xSII, B: Ha). I loved his results and I had to try it with my own data. Did turn out great, but there was a reflection of a star on the SII data and this processing amplified it (the big reddish round/donut thing on right of the full image).
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 22x300s for the Ha filter and 32x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)
Photo of the NGC 2237, the Rosette nebula and the star cluster inside it, NGC 2244.
The star cluster, which is estimated to be about 5 million years old, is responsible for the ionisation of the surrounding gas. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be about 10 000 times the mass of our sun, which is relatively massive for a diffuse nebula.
This image uses a SHO palette, I quite like the colours I manage to get, both as the normal and starless images.
I also tried using the Foraxx palette, I think it's a bit less interesting visually, but the dark dust structures seam a bit more visible.
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 15x300s for the Ha filter 20x300s for the SII filter and 18x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 4h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)
Finished working on my photo of the hors head.
Technically speaking the Horse Head is only the dark nebula, is bright hydrogen cloud behind it is known as IC434 and the second nebula (bottom left) is the flame nebula. The bright star in the center left is Zeta Orionis also known as Alnitak one of the three stars of Orion's Belt. IC434 primary ionisation source is the multiple star system Sigma Orionis (a bit above the frame), the hydrogen cloud being mostly ionise by the UV coming from those blue giant stars. The streaks visible in the nebulosity are mostly likely due to magnetic field within.
The Flame nebula's ionisation source is hidden behind it's dust cloud and is most likely part of a star cluster that Is only reviled using IR and X-ray imaging.
This photo appears mostly blue/teal wear-as most photos of this nebula are red(ish) this is because this nebula emits most of it's light in the H-alpha (656 nm) and S-II (around 672 nm) wavelength both of which are red, so in classic RGB images the nebula appears red. Initially I thought of doing an SHO image (were red is SII emission, green is H-alpha and blue is OIII) but this nebula lacks OIII emission (around 500 nm), so instead a used a modified SHH palette More precisely, I used SII for the red, a combination of both Ha and SII (0.8Ha + 0.2SII) for green and Ha for blue. The stars were taken separately in RGB and added back to the SHH image.
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 22x300s for the Ha filter and 32x300s for the SII filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)
Just got a week of clear weather will I had access to my telescope, managed to get a good amount of data, treatment will have to wait though (I have some exams in 2 weeks). In the meantime, here's a quick test I did with the horse head nebula.
This is a SHH composition (there is nearly no OIII emission in this nebula and I did bother imaging in this wavelength).
“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch
Ok, so I needed a bit of help from a friend who know more about this than me (unfortunately my knowledge of computer science is very limited). He suggested to try base64 since this string ended with a ''='' signe (he said it indicates padding if all the bits don't aligne perfectly at the end in this encoding schemes) and had both lower and upper case letters.
the translation from base64 gave : FGS: Thi& is Fleeting Green Sunsets. Can anyone read me?
I must wonder: have you ever encountered a failed broadcast, corrupted or otherwise?
TSAC: Corrupted broadcasts are commonplace. They often occur as a result of interruptions during radio transmissions, caused either by environmental factors or damage to associated communications arrays.
If a communications tower fails to transmit a message for one reason or another, the data is dumped into a local storage medium (usually a pearl) for the sake of preservation. The data then needs to be retrieved manually by an Overseer in order to be recovered.
Data recovery subroutines can be used to reconstruct partial transmissions, but broadcasts caused by faulty or decaying equipment often become corrupted. I usually ignore these signals. However, occasionally an abnormal broadcast will catch my attention.
An Overseer of mine patrolling the nearby long-range communications spires retrieved one such broadcast rather recently...
[ OUTGOING REQUEST ] COMMUNICATIONS MANIFEST [[ERROR]] UNABLE TO SEND - Malformed Message Header SOURCE NODE TRACE: (NULL)_ROOT, (NULL)_COMM06, 464753_SPIRE02 || DESTINATION: (NULL)unknown group MESSAGE CONTENTS: --- FATAL EXCEPTION: UNABLE TO RENDER MESSAGE CONTENTS INVALID SYMBOL AT LINE 01, SEQUENCE 08. LINE 03 MISSING TERMINATING EXPRESSION. == BROADCAST IS CORRUPTED. == ATTEMPTING RECOVERY. PARTIAL BROADCAST RECOVERY SUCCESSFUL. RAW CONTENTS: 01010010011010110110010001010100010011110110100101000010010101010110000101000111011010110110110101001001010001110110110001111010010010010100010101011010011100110101101001010111010101100011000001100001010101110011010101101110010010010100010101100100011110010101101001010111010101100111010101001001010001100100111000110001011000100110111001001110011011000110010001001000010011010111010101001001010001010100111001101000011000100110100101000010011010000110001001101110011011000111011001100010011011010101010101100111011000110110110101010110011010000101101001000011010000100111010001011010010101000011100000111101 [ Pending upload by dispatched Overseer. Unit will enter read-only state in 146 cycles. ]
Picture of the bubble nebula and surrounding objects : Top left (the vague group of stars): M52 an open cluster
Center right: NGC 7538 an emission nebula (also known as the northern lagoon nebula)
Bottom center: NGC 7635/the bubble nebula and the surrounding hydrogen cloud
The ''bubble'' part of this nebula is created by the stellar wind (flow of gas, plasma and particle) emitted by the central star at nearly 650 million km/h hitting and compressing the surrounding interstellar gas. The central star (BD +602522) is currently estimated to be about 45 times heavier than our sun and about 4 million years old. Being so massive and thus very hot (it's a type O star) its lifespan is very limited for a star and it should go supernova in about 10 to 20 million years.
BD +602522 is slightly off center from the bubble, this is due to the interstellar gas being a bit more dense on one side and thus slowing the stellar wind more efficiently.
Single exposure to make the central star more visible.
Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.
Starless version of the same image:
Older image where the bubble is more distinct from the background hydrogen clouds :
Listen to the sound of wikipedia
This is a way to listen to changes to wikipedia. You are literally listening to knowledge being added to the world.
Pluck sounds are an addition, strings are subtractions, and the pitch says how how big the edit is. My heart shudders at this I love it so much.
Friendly reminder that CRT TVs were basically a particule accelerator you had in your living room. They used power supple capable of delivering tens if not hundreds of thousands of volts, to accelerate the electron that were quite literally being boiled of a glowing piece of metal.
They sometime used a lead infused glass as the front plate to limite if not eliminate the small amount of X-ray they emitted towards you.
They had to be heavy because of the thickness of the glass needed to resist the distance of pressure between the atmosphere and extremely low vacuum inside the vacuum tube. It's that difference of pressure that would result in them exploding in a shower of glass shrapnell if the tube was broken.
![Title: Temperature Scales.
[A table with five columns, labelled in order: Unit, water freezing point, water boiling point, notes, and cursedness.]
Celsius: Zero, One Hundred, Used in most of the world, two out of ten.
Kelvin, 273.15, 373.15, 0 Kelvin is absolute zero, 2 out 10.
Fahrenheit, 32, 212, Outdoors in most places is between 0 to 100, 3 out of 10
Réaumur, 0, 80, Like Celsius, but with 80 instead of 100, 3 out of 8.
Rømer, 7.5, 60, Fahrenheit precursor with similarly random design, 4 out of 10.
Rankine, 491.7, 671.7, Fahrenheit, but with 0 degrees Fahrenheit set to absolute zero, 6 out of 10.
Newton, 0, 33-ish, Poorly defined, with reference points like "the hottest water you can hold your hand in", 7-ish out of 10.
Wedgewood, –8, –6.7, Intended for comparing the melting points of metals, all of which it was very wrong about, 9 out of 10.
Galen, –4?, 4??, Runs from –4 (cold) to 4 (hot). 0 is "normal"(?), 4 out of negative 4.
''Real'' Celsius, 100, 0, In Anders Celsius's original specification, bigger numbers are ''colder''; others later flipped it, 10 out of 0.
Dalton, 0, 100, A nonlinear scale; 0°C and 100°C are 0 and 100 Dalton, but 50 degrees celsius is 53.9 Dalton, 53.9 out of 50.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a1245ddf8fe705ed003ff654e7fed9f/493f691ca340ebdc-12/s500x750/3831f393817b973028d629c1385ea50cae811ec4.png)
In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.
Temperature Scales [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
Temperature Scales
[A table with five columns, labelled: Unit, water freezing point, water boiling point, notes, cursedness. There are eleven rows below the labels.]
[Row 1:] Celsius, 0, 100, Used in most of the world, 2/10 [Row 2:] Kelvin, 273.15, 373.15, 0K is absolute zero, 2/10 [Row 3:] Fahrenheit, 32, 212, Outdoors in most places is between 0–100, 3/10 [Row 4:] Réaumur, 0, 80, Like Celsius, but with 80 instead of 100, 3/8 [Row 5:] Rømer, 7.5, 60, Fahrenheit precursor with similarly random design, 4/10, [Row 6:] Rankine, 491.7, 671.7, Fahrenheit, but with 0°F set to absolute zero, 6/10 [Row 7:] Newton, 0, 33-ish, Poorly defined, with reference points like "the hottest water you can hold your hand in", 7-ish/10 [Row 8:] Wedgewood, –8, –6.7, Intended for comparing the melting points of metals, all of which it was very wrong about, 9/10 [Row 9:] Galen, –4?, 4??, Runs from –4 (cold) to 4 (hot). 0 is "normal"(?), 4/–4 [Row 10:] ''Real'' Celsius, 100, 0, In Anders Celsius's original specification, bigger numbers are ''colder''; others later flipped it, 10/0 [Row 11:] Dalton, 0, 100, A nonlinear scale; 0°C and 100°C are 0 and 100 Dalton, but 50°C is 53.9 Dalton, 53.9/50
Image of IC 405 aka the Flaming Star Nebula This is an emission (the red part) and reflection (the blue part) nebula. It's relatively bright for a nebula with visual magnitude of +6.
The bright star at the center of the blue reflection nebula is AE Aurigae, it's the star responsible for the ionisation of the gas in this nebula. AE Aurigae is what's known as a runaway star, those are star that moves at high speed compared to their surrounding environment. They are the result of gravitational interaction between stars or stars being ejected by nearby supernovae. In the case of AE Aurigae, it was probably ejected due to gravitational interaction, its path has been traced back to the Orion Nebula from which it was ejected about 2 million years ago.
The moon was nearly full and somewhat close by when I took the photos, so it was a bit tricky to process them. As a result, the reflection part of the nebula was not as visible as I would have liked but I think the overall result is not too bad.
Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 6x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 3h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.
Tried applying the Ortonglow script in PixInsight to give the nebula a bit more depth, but I don't like the halos it gave around the bright stars on the left.
For those not in the US wanting to search for dark skies near you, this website is quite useful.
The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States
I was able to see and take pictures of the comet C2023/A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) ! This comet will be visible in the night sky probably for the next week or two, it's currently visible both with a pair of binoculars and with the naked eye. Since it's visible very early after sunset, it's a bit difficult to spot for now, but in the coming days it's will gradually be visible later in the night and thus easier to observe.
This comet is one of the brightest in the last few years so it should be quite easy to observe.
I hope you all get a chance to see it, it's magnificent
I've worked in a chemistry lab, they had a room with all the analysis and purification equipment. There was a constant noise due to the various pumps (vacuum, solvent, ...) and valves. After just a few days working there I could telle exactly with machin was doing what task and at what point it was in that process just based upon the noise they made.
Picture of IC59 and IC63. This is a pair of nebula located near the star γ Cassiopeia, the big star at the bottom, which is responsible for making the nebula glow. Both nebula are composed of ionise hydrogen responsible for the red colour (especially on IC63) and colder dust/gas responsible for the blue colour (most visible on IC59). γ Cassiopeia can make taking photos of those nebula difficult due to the halos it produces, I did my best to limit its impact during processing, but there is still a faint blue halo around it. IC63 is also known as the Ghost of Cassiopeia due to its shape, it was discovered in 1893 by the German astronomer Max Wolf.
Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each filter (LRGBHa), total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Details of both objects: IC63
IC59
Finale got around to processing the photos of M33 I had taken at the end of august. M33 is a spiral galaxy about half the size of our own galaxy and located about 2.7 million light years from earth. This galaxy has a rather high rate of star formation resulting in numerous ionised hydrogen regions (the red irregular blotches inside the galaxy), some of those being notable enough to have been included in the NGC catalogue or the IC catalogue.
NGC 588 NGC 604 (Example of some of the notable nebula in M33)
On of the first recorded observation of this galaxy was possibly done by Giovanni B. Hodierna before 1654, it was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1764 who added it to his catalog (hence the name Messie 33).
information on the photo - total exposure time : 1h48 min using RGB and Ha filters - camera : ASI294 mm - telescope : Newtonian 150/600 with 0.95x coma corrector - photo edited with pixinsight
For those using PixInsight for treatment/edition, I recently discovered the scrips created by Seti Astro (https://www.setiastro.com/pjsr-scripts), Blemish-Blaster was quite useful to remove the halos from my Ha filter and What's In My Image helped with the identification of nebulas. If you had not heard those scrips, you should check them out.
Perseus double cluster, had still some time left at the end of the night after the main sequence of photos and before dawn so I took the opportunity to capture about 25 minutes of photos of the double cluster. This is a pair of open clusters of stars (NGC 884 left and NGC 869 right), both are composed mostly of young blue giants and a few red giants in NGC 884. Both clusters have most likely formed from a single gas cloud and are only separated by a few hundred light years. This pair of cluster is relatively bright and can be viewed with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars in dark locations, in those cases, the clusters appear as nebulous region, with a couple of stars resolved with binoculars.
A quick and (very) dirty mosaic of the H alpha photos I had already taken for the three major components of the Cygnus loop.
I wanted to have an idea of what a future mosaic of this target could look like (probably won't be able to do better than that before the end of the year or next summer unfortunately)
Thought I could post it here while I finish processing newer photos.
Photo of NGC 7000 / the North American nebula (southern part), the bright star on the top left corner is ξ Cygni. Might rework it later since this one still has a bit too much gradient/haze due to the full moon when I took the photos. In most cases, emission nebula are the result of gas clouds being ionised by the high energy UV radiation coming from very Hot (and often massive) stars/star cluster. In the case of NGC 7000 the star(s) responsible for most of the ionisation was an unknown for quite a long time, it is only in 2004 that the star responsible for the ionisation was located. This star (actually a binary system according to later publication) known as J205551.3+435225 is located behind the dark region of the nebula (bottom right corner of the photo) which explains why it was only recently identified.
(My best guess of the position of J205551.3+435225 in my picture according to what I can find in the original publication and in the SIMBAD database)
One last thing, that star was later nicknamed Bajamar Star, which comes from the original Spanish name for the Bahamas island.
Photo of Pickering's triangle (also known as Fleming's triangle) and NGC 6979 / NGC 6974 (the more diffused clouds at the top center/left). This is the third part of the Cygnus loop / veil nebula, this part of the supernova remnant is fainter than the previous two parts of the loop I photographed. This explains in part why it was only discovered by in 1904 by Williamina Fleming (whereas the two writer part were discovered in 1784 by William Herschel). Williamina Fleming was a pioneer in stellar classification, she worked with other women at the Harvard college observatory. Their work in star classification resulted in the Henry Draper Catalogue, an extensive (225 300 stars in the first edition) classification of stars with their position and their spectra. Williamina is also credited with the discovery of 59 nebula (including the famous hors head nebula) more than 300 variable stars as well as (with Henry Norris Russell and Edward Charles Pickering) the discovery of white dwarfs (the remnants of dead sun-like stars).