M45 wide field and 100% crop

The result of stacking after processing, but before cropping. Processed to enhance the stars.

There is still some vignetting despite the use of flats, and some banding from the sensor is visible as I stretched the image to pull out the nebulosity.

The stars were trailed due to poor alignment. "Fixing" them in Photoshop has helped, but they are still not round.

M45: The Pleiades

The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, number 45 in Charles Messier's catalogue of nebulae is a well known asterism and nebula in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull) and is visible in the autumn and winter skies. I took this image at the end of last year in Langkawi in Malaysia.

Olympus ZD-150/2 lens @ f/2.0 on E-620. Kenko SkyMemo-R mount. Pre-processing in IRIS, post-processing in Photoshop CS5.

I'm still learning how to process images. It's hard.

Things are Awesome

So a couple of weeks ago I was sitting have breakfast and browsing the web on my iPad, when the (free!) 3D Sun app decided to interrupt to tell me about a large Coronal Mass Ejection on the Sun. I then switched to this app and was able to see photos of the Sun, in various wavelengths including X-rays. These photos come from STEREO, which allows us to see more than one side of the Sun. I was also able to download videos of the CME.

Think about that. I got notification of a huge event (and I mean huge - many times the size of the Earth) on the Sun that we didn't even know about until relatively recently. I'm not some astrophysicist at NASA or another national space agency, I"m not even a researcher in astronomy in general. I'm just a guy with an app. An app that allows me to see videos in fecking X-rays of the Sun. The views from the telescopes on two spaceships are automatically combined to form an image on a globe that I can rotate and look at as a 3D object. All of this while sitting at home drinking coffee and eating toast.

How awesome is that?

I am typing this on my new (shiny shiny) MacBook Air, while my Roomba (a robot) is hoovering the apartment. The Roomba  does this everyday at 8:00am and then goes back to its charging bay ready for the next day. You probably didn't stop to think about the "browsing the web" phrase in the first sentence. From my computer I can keep up with events and current research from all over the planet, see videos and photos from that people I don't know from all over the world. Likewise I can easily share photos and videos. In addition, I have available to me a large portion of the world's knowledge (for good and bad). I can do all this while enjoying a coffee without leaving my chair.

How awesome is that?

Not only can I do all of this, I can look forward to a much longer, healthier and happier life due to improvements in medicine and healthcare.

This is a few examples of "teh awesome". This is the best time to be alive.

Yay for science, yay for engineering, yay for geeks.

We're screwed when Peak Oil kicks in, though.