This is my quest: to follow that star ..

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• Cloudmakers Astroimager

Astrophotography Cameras. Canon, Nikon, and Sony are the leaders of the DSLR camera market when it comes to astrophotography. The brand you choose can have a huge impact on your future equipment options. AstroImager is a powerful, but easy-to-use image-capture application for astrophotography. It can be used as a client to any remote or local INDI server with any supported CCD, filter wheel, or focuser. The built-in drivers support the following hardware: ATIK Titan Mono and Colour. M 5 (NGC 5904) - globular cluster in Serpens Caput. Roughly 160 light years in diameter and 25,000 light years from us, Messier 5 is the only Messier object in the constellation Serpens Caput (Latin for 'head of the snake').

Last update: 12/25/08

Astro Imagers' Sidebar

The stars: distant suns. This site reflects the culmination of mypersonal quest to become an astroimager - an amateur astronomer whoseavocation is to capture images of the celestial wonders that pass overour heads, largely unnoticed, every day. Thus, this is the triumph of myquest to photograph the distant suns of our Universe - a sun quest.

This journey began with the construction of an observatory in the NewMexico desert, far away from the lights of major towns and hugecities. This resulted in theBunker Ranch Observatory.There you'll find pictures, descriptions, and accounts of the processof building the observatory, and information on the equipment used totake the images herein.

Your monitor should be adjusted in contrast and brightness so that all 21grayscale levels below are discernible. You may have to lower the roomlights to succeed at this. (Hint: use the 'brightness' controlto change the levels of black, and the 'contrast' controlto change the levels of white.)

Night Gallery (Picture, if you will, a dark sky ..)

We begin with the first astrophoto taken with the BRO's major instrument,a 400mm (16') Hypergraph.This is M13, the famous globular cluster in Hercules,in a 30-minute exposure with a Pentax 67 camera loaded with Ilford 3200film. Note the well-known 'X' across the center of the cluster.

Globular clusters (so-named for their roughly spherical shape)are very old; they were, in fact, the first large structuresto form at the birth of the Milky Way Galaxy about ten billion years ago.There are about 60 of theseclusters in a roughly spheroidal pattern co-centered with thegalactic disk.

An average globular contains perhaps 100,000 stars; M13 is rather largerthan that, containing several hundred thousand. One estimate even placesthe number of stars at over a million.

Below is the first color image taken with the observatory's STL-11000XMCCD camera. This is an LRGB composite of 5-minute images of the Flameand Horsehead Nebulas in Orion. The camera was attached to a Borg 125EDoperating at f/4 for a focal length of 500mm.

The glowing clouds here shine by fluorescence from the ultraviolet lightemitted by the hot blue stars in the area. The 'Horsehead'visible against the red cloud is a dark dust nebula that is absorbing thered light from the cloud.

Astroimager Definition

Here is another color image of the same area, taken with the same camerabut a different telescope. The telescope used for this image is a TakahashiBRC-250, which is twice the diameter of the Borg 125ED (so it gathers 4 timesas much light), but also 3 times the focal length (so the'magnification' is 3 times higher). You'll note that there is morevisible detail here; you'll also note that my image-processing skills haveimproved somewhat over the previous image ..

The Bunker Ranch Observatory's blog has an article onhow this image was made.

The yellowish and reddish clouds in this image are huge clouds of hydrogengas inside the Milky Way Galaxy. The colors are different due to differingoverall chemical composition, with the red being more pure hydrogen. Theseare, of course, far thinner than the water-vapor clouds in Earth's atmospherethat you're used to seeing;the hydrogen clouds contain only a few dozen atoms in the volume of anaverage-sided room.

This is an image of Comet Holmes -- a small comet out by the orbit of Jupiterthat came to fame with a sudden outburst of gasses that increased itsbrightness by more than a million times, and made it an easy naked-eyesight in late 2007. This is a short exposure designed to capture detailsof the comet's nucleus, within the faintly visible halo that was stilleasily visible as it grew larger than the Sun.

This image was taken with a Borg 125ED configured at 500mm f/4, with anSBIG STL-11000M CCD camera.

Again taken with the Borg 125ED and the STL CCD camera,here is a short (one-minute)exposure of the North America Nebula (NGC7000),demonstrating that a CCD camera cancapture images with far shorter exposure times than film (with some helpfrom a bit of digital image processing).

This is another one-minute image from the Borg 125ED and STL CCD camera -the Pleiades (M45). This is a fairly young association of stars that wereal born together out of the same gas cloud. The haze (blue in color images)around the starsis a dust cloud that the stars are passing through, unrelated to the gascloud where the stars were born.

Everything came together one night in November of 2008 -- the sky wasn'tthe blackest, and the seeing wasn't the steadiest, but the equipment alldecided to give me a break and work to perfection for oneshining moment. The result was this image of M33, a nearby spiral galaxy.

This is a composite of five 15-minute exposurestaken with the 400mm (16') scope, with some minimal imageenhancement to bring out some of the fainter detail. The full-sizeimage is large, but, I think, worth a look.
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And now for some more color - this is the Borg 125ED and STL CCD camera again;but here we combine four 20-minute images (one each in white, red, green,and blue light), to get a shot of the Rosette Nebula (the nebula is designatedNGC 2237; the open cluster of stars inside the nebula is NGC 2244).Note that this imageis only 1/4 the size of the original in width and height; that means theoriginal image has 16 times more data than seen here!(Well, actually, it's worse than that, because the original is 16 bits perpixel while this is only 8 bits per pixel. So the original really has 4,096times the data of this image - 4 times the resolution both horizontally andvertically, and 256 times the color information.)

AstroImageJ
ImageJ for Astronomy

The latest version has many features to enhance astronomical image processing, especially for photometry. These include a versatile image display, time-series stacks, a link to Astrometry.net for adding coordinates, built-in AstroCC to set and time and place, links to Simbad for object identification, and exoplanet model fitting. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux by downloading an installation package . After installation, the built-in Help->Update option keeps your version current.

Cloudmakers Astroimager

• Runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS
• Provides an interactive interface similar to ds9
• Reads and writes FITS images with standard headers
• Allows FITS header viewing and editing
• Plate solves and adds WCS to images seamlessly using the Astrometry.net web interface
• Displays astronomical coordinates for images with WCS
• Provides object identification via an embedded SIMBAD interface
• Aligns image sequences using WCS headers or by using apertures to correlate stars
• Image calibration including bias, dark, flat, and non-linearity correction with option to run in real-time
• Interactive time-series differential photometry interface with option to run in real-time
• Allows comparison star ensemble changes without re-running differential photometry
• Provides an interactive multi-curve plotting tool streamlined for plotting light curves
• Includes an interactive light curve fitting interface with simultaneous detrending
• Allows non-destructive object annotations/labels using FITS header keywords
• Provides a time and coordinate converter tool with capability to update/enhance FITS header content (AIRMASS, BJD, etc.)
• Exports analyses formatted as spreadsheets
• Creates color images and with native ImageJ processing power
• Optionally enter reference star apparent magnitudes to calculate target star magnitudes automatically
• Optionally create Minor Planet Center (MPC) format for direct submission of data to the MPC
• Recently added when you update to the daily build after installation --
• Nearby eclipsing binary star identification from expected depth versus light curve RMS table for TESS follow-up
• Delta-magnitude versus RMS plot
• Enhanced contrast controls
• Annotations are retained when placing apertures
• FITS header search feature

An article on AstroImageJ appears in the Astronomical Journal (2017). Additional details on the user interface are available through astro-ph in reference 1701.04817v1. The User Guide may be downloaded here.

Comments, requests for help and new features, and bug reports should be posted to the AstroImageJ Forum.

AstroImageJ is ImageJ with astronomy plugins and macros installed. It includes tools based on the Göttingen ImageJ astronomical resourceswith additions we find useful.Because it was necessary to modify the original ImageJ code to enable some of these features, this package should be installed inits entirety.

AstroImageJ is open source software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.It incorporates ImageJ components which are in the public domain. Download intel others driver.

• Open Access article from the Astronomical Journal (2017) -- AstroImageJ: Image Processing and Photometric Extraction for Ultra-Precise Astronomical Light Curves
• Expanded version of the AIJ article on astro-ph with explanations of many functions
• Download an installation package of AstroImageJ - then update to latest version and features after download with Help->Update
• Forum for AIJ users
• Most recent User Guide for AIJ
• Resources for ImageJ and Java