We finally had some clear skies again and I had the scope out and got a few decent images.
This was the best of the lot, IC 1318B, sometimes called the Butterfly Nebula. It’s about 4,000 light years away and is an emission nebula. Emission nebula are caused by intense ultraviolet radiation from a dying star that ionizes the interstellar gas around the star.
It’s been a rather dull time around here with me more or less laid up because of first my hip and then my back. But my back is almost normal and while the hip is still giving me some issues it’s getting to the point where I might be able to get back on the bicycle in a week or so. Damn that’s been frustrating.
But meanwhile life goes on, right?
I got bored and was fiddling with Photoshop and came up with this black and white image of a stag standing in the woods and then found a plack with a sort of illuminated frame around it that I picked up for the heck of it at Walmart or Hobby Lobby and hadn’t used, and thought engraving that image on the plack might be interesting so I tried it using the Vision Pro and that’s the result over there on the left with the frame lighted up.
Bad lighting but you can get the basic idea. I though it didn’t turn out too bad. I sent that photo to Kyle and Sarah down at the pub and they claimed it so it has a home already.
I do wish there was some kind of retail market for stuff like this locally, some shop that would market arts and crafts from local crafts persons on a consignment basis or something like that. If I were about 10 years younger and had a bit more ambition I’d be tempted to do something like that myself.
Meanwhile the gardens are growing like crazy.
We’re already harvesting onions and small beets and MrsGF just thinned out the carrots and we have a whole dish full of baby carrots we’re going to be having for supper tonight.
The celery up there is looking amazing and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I can resist snipping off a few stalks for snacking or salads.
Even the “Stump Garden” is looking good.
The weather has been clear today so I’m hoping we’ll have clear skies tonight so I can get the telescope out.
One of our kitties, Charlie, loves to go outside. We put a harness and leash on her and she has great fun exploring the gardens. But one of the local cardinals took exception to her presence the other day and actually flew down into the lilac to yell at us.
Ooo, he was upset! How dare I bring a cat out into his territory! He kept giving me an earful until finally Charlie had enough and we went back inside.
Got this one yesterday evening.
I’m still not entirely sure how all of this post processing stuff works because the results I get after processing are often much, much different than what I’m seeing in the original images. For example, here’s what the original image looked like before processing.
I’m still very, very impressed with the results from this scope even before processing the images. I’m getting better images with this little scope than I ever saw with my huge 11″ Celestron
… at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. I somehow managed to entirely mess up my right hip and only now am I getting back to normal. I could stand or sit, but transitioning between those two situations caused such excruciating pain I could hardly stand it. The consensus was I severely strained or perhaps even tore some muscles in there somehow. Going to the bathroom was pure torture because sitting down on the commode or standing up after sent a pain through my hip that made me want to weep. And I could forget completely about getting out on the bike.
So even though it’s now early summer and absolutely beautiful out there and the gardens are thriving, I’ve been more or less cooped up in the house being more grouchy than usual and not having enough ambition to do much of anything.
Anyway I’m about 80% back to normal now. I’m at the point where I might try taking the bike out for a run around the block in the next day or two just to see how it goes.
Another thing that had me grumpy is that except for the first night I had the new Sestar 30 Pro telescope, every single freaking night we’ve had has been overcast. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating it is to have a brand new telescope and having cloudy weather every single night? Arrggghh!
But now, finally! We had clear skies early last evening and I was able to get the scope out…
Well I say able to get the scope out. And it was out, but I was sitting inside comfortably at the kitchen table having a snack while running the scope from my iPad. If you’ve ever had to endure dealing with clouds of mosquitoes, freezing temperatures and the other inconveniences of using a visual telescope, you can imagine just how amazing it felt to be running the scope comfortably from inside the house. It almost felt like, well, cheating, somehow. And I suppose some amateur astronomers will claim that it is. Spending hours outside in the dark, having your blood sucked dry by mosquitoes in the summer, or trying to keep your fingers and toes from freezing in the fall and winter, is, according to some of them, part of the “joys” of amateur astronomy.
Yeah, sure it is…
I got some neat images despite the fact that it wasn’t even fully dark yet when I started this. Last night was the shortest night of the year so at about 10 PM or so when I started it wasn’t even completely fully dark yet.
Let’s start off with this.
That’s a globular star cluster designated as M 13. It’s the great globular star cluster in the Hercules constellation and it is an astonishing thing when you discover what it actually is. Globular clusters are groups of hundreds, even tens of thousands of stars tightly packed into a tiny, spherical group. In this case several hundreds of thousands of stars packed into an area less than 145 light years across. Exactly how many stars are in there isn’t known but it could be as many as a half million.
Above is M 51, the Whirlpool galaxy and its companion. That this one turned out this good surprised me a bit because even though it was high in the sky, near the zenith, my conditions here at the house are horrible with light pollution so bad you can almost read a large print book sitting in the backyard at midnight, plus it wasn’t fully dark yet. All things considered I’m pleased that it turned out this good.
The one that really surprised me was this one, though:
That’s NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Nebulas like this can be a pain in the neck to image in light polluted locations like mine so I was surprised I was able to capture anything at all. That this not only showed up but even shows some color was a bit amazing to me.
Now let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to take that same image of M51 up there and run it through some AI filtering and see what happens. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to turn out because this is the first time I’ve tried this.
Hmm… I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I don’t believe for a moment that there was enough information in that original image of mine for the AI to come up with what looks suspiciously like an image that was taken with the Hubble from NASA. I’m suspecting that instead of enhancing the image it’s sucking up data from NASA’s telescope database and adding it in.
Let’s see what it does with that nebula
Hmm, again, I’m not sure where it’s getting the data from to do this because I don’t believe there was enough information in the original image to get these kinds of results.
Anway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share the new images from the scope.
OMG the horror… Every single person involved in the production of this abomination should be locked up before they can commit further atrocities. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening to this — this thing. It sort of resembles, well, the nearest comparison I can come up with is Alvin and the Chipmunks on a particularly bad batch of acid singing lyrics written by someone with a smaller vocabulary that my cat and who was told by a cynical marketing agency to “Just write whatever crap you can come up with” and was about 3 martinis into a 4 martini lunch. About halfway through the first track I wanted to wash my ears out with bleach.
Yes, you too can experience the horror of the Smurf’s All Star Show for just $1 at the Hilbert St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I mess around with laser engravers/cutters and my two machines are both from a company called Wecreat, the Vision Pro and the Lumos. Wecreat recently came out with some very significant new galvo style lasers under the Lumos model name, the Lumos Flex and the Lumos Ultra. The Ultra is way outside my price range, about $3,500. But considering it’s a UV and MOPA laser all included in one package, that’s an extremely good price.
It was the Flex I was interested in. It’s a significant upgrade from my mine. I had a 3W infrared laser and a 10W blue diode laser in mine. The Flex looked like it was exactly the same as mine but with a new laser head that replaces the IR laser with a 15W fiber laser and upgrades the blue laser to 15W.
The blue laser upgrade is significant, but it’s not so much more powerful that I’d really be tempted by that. It was the fiber laser that made things interesting. Fiber lasers generally produce enough energy to cut metal. And they’re capable of doing some very interesting tricks like 3D embossing. They’re pretty slick stuff. And yes, I wanted one but fiber lasers have always been way outside of a price I was comfortable with. Wecreat wants about $2,000 for the thing and I’d already dropped way too much money this year on laser equipment.
But then I was reading the fine print at the end of the hype/advertising for the Flex and noticed a brief mention of the fact that my original Lumos could be upgraded to the Flex by simply replacing the laser head module, and for half the cost of the complete Flex. Now I was interested again.
I sent an email to the company and said “Hey, how can I get one of these upgrade modules?” And they wrote back and said “send us some money and give us about 2 weeks to build one and we’ll get it to you in about 3 weeks.”
And well here we are, 3 weeks later and it is now in my hot little hands. It took all of about 3 minutes to replace the old laser head with the new one, download a new version of their Makeit software, and away we go.
I haven’t had much of a chance to do more than fiddle with it a bit because I’ve been busy with the old unit making a batch of humorous drinks coasters that need to get finished up. But I’m going to have time to put it through its paces this weekend and I’ll let you know how it goes. The bit of fiddling I’ve had a chance to do indicates that it has a heck of a lot of potential. I entertained myself for some time cutting holes in thin sheet metal and engraving things on various bits of metal I had laying around before I had to get back to work. Long enough to see this thing is going to be a hoot to play with.
It’s going to take some time to figure out the exact setting I’ll need in order to get it to do what I want. But once I figure that out this thing is going to be very useful indeed.
Roses
Every year we think this dopey rose bush in the front yard by the sidewalk has finally died, and every year it surprises us and somehow manages to come back. This year I was sure it was dead. When MrsGF pulled on one of the branches something like 3/4 ths of the rootball came out, completely rotted away. I was sure it was dead. Only no, it isn’t, somehow.
I have no idea how this thing manages to survive. Amazing plant. Just saw the first flower of the season and it’s absolutely loaded with buds.
Cats and Backpacks
MrsGF got me a new backpack to carry stuff when I’m out on the bike, but the cat seems to have fallen in love with it. If I put it anywhere where she can get at it, she’s immediately sitting on it. Cats are weird.
I just had to share this one.
I got this photo entirely by accident the other day when I happened to be holding my cell phone when this little guy turned up. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten a halfway decent photo of one of beautiful little birds.
I had a chance to get outside with the SeeStar last night shortly after dark and got some surprisingly good images. Here are three.
That’s M81 up there, that fuzzy blob just left of center. The more slender cigar shaped blob to the right of center is M82, another galaxy. The long streak you see to the right of M82 is from a satellite that streaked across the frame while the scope was making the image.
But a bit about the “M” designation first. It is the abbreviation of the name Messier, an 18th century astronomer from France. He published an astronomical catalog of about 110 objects that are now known as Messier objects, abbreviated as just M. Messier’s obsession was comets. He was fascinated by these fuzzy, blob like “visitors” and hunted for them whenever he had the chance. But he kept finding a lot of things that, with his primitive observing equipment of the time, looked like fuzzy blobs just like comets, but weren’t. Unlike comets, these objects did not appear to move, therefore they weren’t comets. So he started to chart these comet-like objects so he and other astronomers wouldn’t waste their time thinking these things were comets. The final catalog he published had 103 such objects listed, and eventually researchers discovered he’d found several more so now we have some 110 Messier objects. The objects in the catalog were not ones he studied scientifically, he thought they were annoyances, really.
The Messier object catalog and the “M” designation of these objects is still used even by scientists today because they are some of the brightest and most easily found deep space objects out there, and they are among the most popular targets for amateur astronomers.
Messier had absolutely no idea that when he was looking at M81 he was looking at a massive galaxy about 12 million light years away. In fact M81 and M82 are actually part of a whole group of galaxies known collectively as the M81 group.
M81 is a large, grand spiral type galaxy and is the home to a massive central black hole. It is relatively bright at my location this time of year and it is almost directly overhead, making it an ideal target at my extremely light polluted home.
It is called Bode’s galaxy (or sometimes Bode’s Nebula) because it was first discovered in 1794 by an astronomer named Johann Bode, not Messier, and was later included by Messier in his catalog.
If you can see M81, you can almost certainly spot M82 as well right away. It is also about 12 million light years from us and is part of the same group of galaxies. M82 is seen edge on and is sometimes called the Cigar galaxy. It is an extremely interesting one too because it is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. It is generating new stars at a rate that’s 10 times that of the Milky Way. It is believed that the reason why is that M82 had a close encounter with M81 in the past, and gas it sucked up from M81 along with the gravitational disturbances the encounter caused are responsible for this.
Both M81 and M82 are relatively easy to see. A decent pair of binoculars will let you see at least a couple of small, fuzzy blobs at a dark site. A good telescope will show them in much more detail, of course.
Now we come to M97
That’s M97, also called the Owl Nebula. Not a very impressive image, I know, but that I could get an image of it at all from this location is a bit astonishing.
M97 is an entirely different kind of object. It’s a planetary nebula about 2,000 light years away. It’s called the Owl Nebula because some people who observe it under high magnification and large telescopes claim that it looks like it has two dark “eyes”. Personally I think they knocked back a few too many Schlitz (real astronomers drink Schlitz, of course. Or Grain Belt. But now that Schlitz is shut down they’re going to be stuck with Grain Belt.) before they started observing but, there you go.
That I was able to get an image this good with just a 4 minute exposure with this tiny telescope astonished me, frankly. When I computer enhance the images I can even see the two dark “eyes”.
The last object I imaged is M57, the Ring Nebula.
This is another planetary nebula and I was amazed the image turned out at all because the scope was aimed just off to one side of a street light that really should have ruined the image completely. It’s about 2,000 light years from Earth and while relatively bright and easy to see in even a fairly small scope, trying to get an image of it with the conditions I have here was a bit astonishing.
I am extremely pleased with the Seestar so far. After working with the 11″ Celestron for so long, getting results like this from a scope not much bigger than a hard cover book seems almost like magic to me. If I’m getting results this good from my terribly light polluted location here, what will the results be like when I get it out to a relatively dark site like my sister in law’s farm? I can’t wait to try that.
Very first photo with the Seestar s30 Pro telescope taken literally 15 minutes after unboxing the scope and setting it up on the driveway in the backyard, using the included solar filter. Showing the currently visible sunspot groups.
That’s the ‘scope itself over there in the photo on the left charging up on the kitchen table. Yes it’s tiny, about the size of a thick hard cover book, and weighs about the same.
I have to admit that I’m a bit in awe of this little beast. A telescope this small, this cheap, with that small of an aperture, should not be this good.
You can be darn sure you’re going to be seeing more images from this thing in the near future.
Solar Update: Well it’s almost 7 days now of running the house completely off grid and I’m still a bit surprised that this is all working so well. For the first couple of days I was very anxious, kept checking the system all the time, worrying about the numbers, waiting for something, anything to go wrong. But it didn’t. The EG4 12000XP has been just loafing along, easily handling everything we’ve been running. It’s internal cooling fans never even had to ramp up above a whisper. We’re only using about 20% – 25% of our battery capacity over night and we’re making enough solar power to not just run the house during the day but to recharge the battery bank by noon at the latest.
I’ll probably switch back to grid this evening before we start to use the battery because we’re supposed to be looking at rainy weather now for a couple of days. I hope it comes soon. We need rain very badly.
And to add to an already very pleasant day, I managed to snag a photo of this little guy just a short time ago when I was out on the front deck. There were actually two of them coming to the feeder in the space of just a few minutes.
Garden update
The gardens are all looking good after a slow start. Some of the stuff looks like it got hit by frost judging from some of the leaf damage I’m seeing, but all of our plants made it through and are looking pretty good.
You’ve no doubt noticed the liberal use of #10 cans around some of the plants. That’s a trick MrsGF has been using for decades now. The cans help protect the young plants from light frost, being battered by high winds, and especially from those stupid rabbits. Once the plants are strong enough and well established enough, we pull the cans off. By that time they’re usually too mature to be tempting for the rabbits.
And to finish things up for this time, how about a cat holding her favorite carrot?
grouchyfarmer 