When I downloaded Russ Croman’s “Star XTerminator” for a free trial – one of the first images I tested it on was the JWST image of the Pillars of Creation. So I have no idea why it took me several months before trying it out on the original Hubble image. Yer ‘tiz.
This is a star reduced Pleiades image (reprocess) using a 30-hour dataset (40-minute subs) taken on the Sky90 array with M26C OSC CCDs.
The star at centre is SAO 132035 a (very red) s-type star lying just to the east of Rigel. As per usual there’s a nice blue star close-by to the bright red star
Another reprocess of the Rosette data – all the Hyperstar data was overlaid on all the Sky90 data using Registar and a mean/median mix.
The brightest star in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere.
Sometimes, when all you want is an impactful star image – you find Nature conspires against you. The 3 bright stars running diagonally from bottom left to top right in this image are the Belt Stars of Orion. Bottom left next to the Flame nebula is Alnitak, in the middle is Alnilam, and top right is Mintaka. As you can see, they all sit in a bright field of nebulosity.
I am thinking about publishing a book which is just on stars – no galaxies, no nebulae – just stars. So that is single bright star images, clusters, asterisms and small constellations. I just had a quick look through some of my more interesting bright star images, gave them a bit of a dust-off, and came up with the above. Just posted to see what they look like.
Top to bottom we have – Sirius, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Deneb, The 12 Brightest Stars, Altair, Vindemiatrix & Vega.
Out of all my bright, single star images, I think this one is my favourite. Sirius – the brightest star in the sky. Two-frame (vertical) mosaic with camera in landscape mode. 3 x Sky90 refractors and 3 x M26C (non-Trius) OSC CCD cameras. Each frame is 90-minutes of 2-minute subs (so that’s actually 270-minutes of actual exposure time per frame).
Just received some very sad news that my high-speed videographer friend Tony Allen passed away last week.
We had a fantastic day in Tony’s studio in Oxford (quite a few years ago now) taking high-speed flash (stills) shots of water-filled balloons being shot by an air pistol. The high-speed flash was triggered by the sound of the pistol firing and we used the open-flash technique to capture the shot.
On a couple of the shots when I looked at the capture on the camera screen it looked like we had the flash trigger timing wrong as the balloon was still intact. But then a closer look at the image gave the stunning result shown above. You can see the pellet to the left of the balloon is still (remarkably) contained within the intact balloon. I like to say we got the flash synchronisation spot-on for this shot – but it was in fact pure fluke.
That was a great day Tony that I shall always remember fondly.
One of the brightest, reddest stars in the sky – the Garnet Star – Mu Cephei – in the nebula IC1396. A star reduced reprocess.
