Example of how advanced amateur astronomy can work

Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:56 am » by **Tertiusgaudens**

This is a link to the Sun Page of a German guy I went to school with. Even as amateur sun researchers were amazed about his sun pics he started making more than two decades ago.

Have a look for yourself:

http://www.unigraph.de/

Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:08 am » by **Epicfailure**

yes funny thing is, it is amateurs that are discovering all the anomalies on planetary surfaces well beyond the "professionals" in the field... look at shoemaker levy, and the recent Jupiter Comet strike, and the Jupiter belt change was discovered by a amateur too, the recent "storm" on Saturn was again discovered by an amateur.

Amateurs are just as good as the professionals in my opinion on astronomy and viewing capabilities, I think it is unfair to call these people "amateurs" when they are the ones making most of these impossible to imagine discoveries in our immediate universe, that and they don't take a 6 figure income to do the same thing they can do in the comfort of their backyards as a "hobby".

Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:13 am » by **Tertiusgaudens**

Yeah, exactly...

Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:21 am » by **Stratosfear**

It's one of the few scientific areas left that amateurs can make important contributions to.

Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:21 am » by **Gunzenbomz**

Epicfailure I'm with on you on your post. Shoemaker levy in 94, when 7+ parts of a meteor rammed into jupiter made my life's knowledge of space nearly complete. It produced explosions larger than Earth!

Amazing..I had always wanted to see a huge explosion & it was mentally challenging to realize for sure that Earth could well be struck by an object & the surface life would be knocked back to organisms living deep within the crust.

Tertiusgaudens, good share. n1

Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:39 pm » by **Ghost32**

Nice Post! I have been waiting for one of these threads.

I have been an amateur astronomer for several years now. It is very hard to get good images of distant objects in space and I give a big thumbs up to any amateur that sticks with it and does not give up on it.

Here are 6 of my best images so far that I have taken I hope every enjoys them.I have so many images of the moon its not funny, I will put specific information about each image and observatory exposure settings that I used to make each of these.I mainly us galaxy cameras but some time I will use a constellation camera to capture entire constellations and sometimes I also use a cluster camera to capture large star clusters. All images except the zoomed in image are in the .BMP format.

This 1st image is of the Moon.
Object Type SSBODY
Object Name The Moon
Exposure Time 60 ms
Filter Type ND3 Neutral Density
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
Taken with a Galaxy Camera with a dark frame using a neutral density filter at a 60ms exposure time. This image is around 3.07 megabytes.

Object Type MESSIER
Object ID 13
Object Name The Great Hercules Globula Cluster
Exposure Time 180000 ms
Filter Type Colour
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Galaxy
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
Taken with a Galaxy Camera using a dark frame and a color filter with an exposure time of 180000ms.This image is 3.10 megabytes.

Object Type MESSIER
Object ID 31
Object Name The Andromeda Galaxy
Exposure Time 150000 ms
Filter Type BVR
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Galaxy
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
Taken with a galaxy camera using a dark frame bvr color image filter with an exposure of 150000ms. This image is 3.07 megabytes.

Object Type MESSIER
Object ID 7
Object Name Ptolemy's Cluster
Exposure Time 60000 ms
Filter Type Colour
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Galaxy
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
Taken with a Galaxy camera with a dark frame and color image filter using a 60000ms exposure time.This image is 3.07 megabytes.
(you will notice that 60000ms was a little to long because of the over exposure and color bleeding of the 3 central brightest stars)

Object Type SSBODY
Object ID SATURN
Object Name The Planet Saturn
Exposure Time 35 ms
Filter Type Colour
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Galaxy
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
This image was taken with a Galaxy camera with a dark frame and color filter using a 35ms exposure time.This is a 3.10 megabyte file.

Zoomed In Saturn Image (It's very distant) Same settings as above.
This is a 2.67 megabyte image.

I ghost32 took these images as amateur astromer volunteer so of course I have to post the comment below sorry.

All images created by the Bradford Robotic Telescope are Copyright © University of Bradford.

:ghost:

32

Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:45 pm » by **Frankenstein**

Amateur astronomers also advanced digital astro-photography by first of all adapting webcams to attach to telescopes and then later on advancing the first digital SLR cameras to take astro photographs.

Also the amateurs created and modified open source software to make is so they could stack multiple short exposure shots into a large exposure photograph because their tracking systems are not usually as good as the expensive ones.

This has helped to bring down prices on all of the equipment as well, so that now a good scope is well within the reach of most families.

Mon Feb 28, 2011 5:20 pm » by **99socks**

I think the difference between professional and amateur astronomers is that the amateurs haven't been brainwashed into the "official" explanation of everything by the scientific community....