My First Post...An introduction and a few of my images

[bernhardhubl]

Hello Peter,

Wonderful images!
Excellent work!

best,
Bernhard

[Makuser]

Hi Peter. It's great to have you join us here on TSS. And that was a very nice introduction from you too. You have a wonderful gallery of images and all have wonderful colors and nebulosity details, and the lunar capture was just fantastic. Thanks for sharing these with us Peter and I hope to see more of your work on here again soon. Welcome to the forum Peter and the best of wishes on your superb astronomy adventures.

[Thefatkitty]

Hey Peter, great images and welcome to TSS! Your good friend pointed you in the right direction; thanks for all that and welcome aboard

All the best,

[MariusD69]

Welcome to TSS! Very impressive images. Great work, Peter!

[mikemarotta]

I've just heard about The Sky Searches from a good friend of mine. I thought I would introduce myself, my name is Peter I am very passionate about astronomy and astrophotography. I have quite a bit of equipment ...

Stunning pictures, very pretty. We have a local aficiado and former club president who sets up at art fairs and sells prints.

I do have to admit to deep ignorance about what you are doing. I trust that other astrophotography people, the boffins, mavins, and wranglers all understand what you said, but even with googling the key terms, I am in the dark. I know that it is a bit of work for you, but if you read any peer reviewed publication you will see that all special terms are defined the first time that they are used. I liked your Moon, but what is

"HDR of the Moon imaged with The Tak Epsilon 180ed asi2600MC osc"

high definition resolution?... Takahashi [I got that, of course] the Epsilon 180 ed would be an 180-mm Extremely Low Dispersion glass refractor, an apochromatic [ok] and then it goes down the event horizon... because an OSC is a ZWO or something and I know ZWO as a brand of camera but what is an OSC? Surely not an oscillator? Optical Scanning Collimator? Optical Survey Camera?

I am just asking because as attractive as the images are, it is hard to know what is real and what is art. Like your M31 with its enhanced reds: are those in fact red stars or are they main sequence stars with their red wavelengths enhanced for effect? Why not keep the red giants and turn everything else into a ghost image so that the targets are mapped? Would that be informative?

Sorry to have to ask but my interests are in theory and history and the history of theory, how we came to believe what we know today. The camera is a subtle recording device and you seem to have solid facility with yours.

Thanks for sharing your work.
Mike M.

[petershah]

I've just heard about The Sky Searches from a good friend of mine. I thought I would introduce myself, my name is Peter I am very passionate about astronomy and astrophotography. I have quite a bit of equipment ...

Stunning pictures, very pretty. We have a local aficiado and former club president who sets up at art fairs and sells prints.

I do have to admit to deep ignorance about what you are doing. I trust that other astrophotography people, the boffins, mavins, and wranglers all understand what you said, but even with googling the key terms, I am in the dark. I know that it is a bit of work for you, but if you read any peer reviewed publication you will see that all special terms are defined the first time that they are used. I liked your Moon, but what is

"HDR of the Moon imaged with The Tak Epsilon 180ed asi2600MC osc"

high definition resolution?... Takahashi [I got that, of course] the Epsilon 180 ed would be an 180-mm Extremely Low Dispersion glass refractor, an apochromatic [ok] and then it goes down the event horizon... because an OSC is a ZWO or something and I know ZWO as a brand of camera but what is an OSC? Surely not an oscillator? Optical Scanning Collimator? Optical Survey Camera?

I am just asking because as attractive as the images are, it is hard to know what is real and what is art. Like your M31 with its enhanced reds: are those in fact red stars or are they main sequence stars with their red wavelengths enhanced for effect? Why not keep the red giants and turn everything else into a ghost image so that the targets are mapped? Would that be informative?

Sorry to have to ask but my interests are in theory and history and the history of theory, how we came to believe what we know today. The camera is a subtle recording device and you seem to have solid facility with yours.

Thanks for sharing your work.
Mike M.

Wow Mike where do I start with this... Firstly Thank you for taking the time to comment.

To be honest with you because I was posting so many images in one go I didn't want to fill the whole introduction with too much detail in fear of sending everyone to sleep.....These are all just pretty pictures that have been processed using my own workflow and techniques. The same as everyone else's images. They will always be open to interpretation as location sky conditions, equipment limitations all play a part. Even then if the same set of data was given to someone else to process you would still see a significant difference in the end result. That said everything is real and nothing artificial was added to the data.

All of these terms used are very common and for those who do not image it really doesn't matter if you understand them or not. The terms OSC just stands for One Shot Colour...referring to the Bayer matrix of the Sensor...in other words not imaged with a mono camera. HDR simply stands for High Dynamic Range and is on virtually every mobile phone as a capture setting. It just brings in different brightness's into a range where the computer monitor is able to see them easily.

As for M31 the red is again real and although imaged in H-alpha actually belong to something called ERE or Extended Red Emission which includes a broader bandwidth than the what it was actually imaged in....I am not clever enough to tell you about it so that you will have to look up.

No need to apologise Mike I should be apologising to you as my interests are all about the art and apparently somewhat more selfish so never consider those with deeper interests.

Thank you again for your comments

[carastro]

Hi Peter,
Great to see you on here, they are going to love your images and input.
Was it through me you heard about this forum?

Carole

[petershah]

Hi Peter,
Great to see you on here, they are going to love your images and input.
Was it through me you heard about this forum?

Carole

Hey Carole Great to see you here...wasn't you, but shame on you for not telling me about The Sky Searchers really looks like a great place to be......BTW Was David Phillipson @Galileo who mentioned it to me yesterday

[Bigzmey]

Thanks for joining TSS, nice introduction and beautiful images, Peter! Looking forward your expert contributions to this forum.

[petershah]

Thanks for joining TSS, nice introduction and beautiful images, Peter! Looking forward your expert contributions to this forum.

Thank you, looks like a very active community looking forward to contributing.

[MartinF]

Welcome! Those are some really impressive images! My only critique is that it is unfair that I don´t have the same equipment... or an observatory!

[jthommes]

Great images Peter! Nice to see you here. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.