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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 11d

C/2025 A6 Lemmon tonight

Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 17d

Flight 11 Starship from the ground and from the vehicle itself. Note that you can see the same "pleated" effect on the exhaust in both pictures. Ground picture is a single frame from the Blackmagic camera on an 11" Celestron NexStar GPS telescope.
#spacex #starship

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 21d

Here's a 34 frame stack. Stacking loses the turbulence in the exhaust but improves the grain. You can even just start to make out the front flaps in the silhouette.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 21d

Here is my 4K telescopic tracking footage of #SpaceX Starship from Florida during flight 11 last night!
youtu.be/Kspmn3YUqpI
The vehicle and exhaust were illuminated by the sun while twilight was fading here in Florida, the perfect timing for a gorgeous "jellyfish" effect!

SpaceX Starship Flight 11 From Florida!

YouTube video by Astronomy Live

youtu.be

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 22d

#SpaceX Starship engine shutdown as seen with an 11" Celestron NexStar GPS in Florida tonight. Full 4K video coming soon.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 22d

Thank you to @flightclub.io for your trajectory data that enabled me to track Starship during a beautiful sunlit launch as twilight faded here in Florida! 4K footage coming soon!

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 28d

In hindsight I should have debayered it myself after doing artificial dark subtraction, but I started with the de-bayered product. Rookie mistake.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 28d

It is

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · 28d

Really nice work. I also covered the Phobos thing in my live stream but I only went off the raw images for the navcam. I'll be linking to your side by side here if anyone doubts it's Phobos.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 6

That isn't 3I.
youtube.com/live/QKls2xP...

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Captured by Mars Rover!

YouTube video by Astronomy Live

youtube.com

Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 5

You weren't kidding about the hot pixels. I did my best to calibrate and stack based on the orbit and astrometry of the images, there is some degree of cometary motion over 10 minutes and the result now has the nucleus as a still fuzzy but better defined single motion blurred line.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

KAI-2020CM I believe? Ironically it's the same CCD in my SBIG deep space camera, but of course it's not optimized for that on Mastcam.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

Fantastic work here putting together the data from Perseverance of 3I/ATLAS.

Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · Oct 4

Last night, NASA's Perseverance rover looked up at the night sky once more, to capture interstellar #comet 3I/Atlas flying by the red planet.

The distance was "only" 0.2 AU or 30 Mio km, far closer than the comet ever got to Earth. 🔭 #3IAtlas

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

That makes sense. I'm used to much higher focal lengths and longer integration times.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

Interesting ok, I might run them through astrometry then, I have a script to take the astrometrically solved frames and align them by polling JPL HORIZONS for the coordinates of the comet from the observer position at the imaging time.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

Did you align the stack based on 3I's orbit or just the raw images without alignment?

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

I sadly no longer have mine, but to be fair I don't really have room for it. I remember the day I bought it there was someone trying to haggle the store owner on the price of an LX200 by saying he didn't need the eyepiece that came with it. The owner wasn't amused lol.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

I had the 6", but I really only did lunar photography with it. I only had the basic clock drive too.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

I agree! I missed out on it, I only had a Newtonian on a clock drive EQ mount in the late 90s, but I would see guys manually guiding at star parties and I always wanted to try it. I love the zen-like state of it and being a more active participant in taking the photo.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Oct 4

Just got my negatives back from my latest roll of manually guided film astrophotography. For some reason trying to post these pics on the bird app got my account locked and labeled for "inauthentic behavior." Hard to get more authentic #astrophotography than manually guided #film.

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Sep 28

By combining old tech (film, manual guiding) with new techniques and tech (bracketing exposures for HDR, AI denoising, generalized hyperbolic stretching), I was able to produce this film HDR of Orion and the Running Man by combining 60 minute and 10 minute exposures.
#astrophotography #filmisnotdead

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Sep 27

I have rolls of Kodak Ektar 100 to try this winter. Much less sensitive so it will require longer exposures, but it also has much finer grain. Although I could theoretically autoguide, I do enjoy the challenge of manually guiding. No electronics except the illuminated reticle!

Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Sep 27

The film used was CineStill T800, which I'm told is the same emulsion as the Amber 800T I used previously and that does seem to be the case. It has great response to hydrogen alpha light, but it is grainy. Here's a 30 min shot of the Bubble nebula from the same roll.
#astrophotography #filmisnotdead

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Sep 27

Here are the scans of my latest film photos! This was my first roll testing an off-axis guider for guiding through the same scope as the camera. Andromeda was a 30 min exposure and Orion was a 1 hr exposure, all manually guided so I'm really happy with these results!
#astrophotography #filmisnotdead

Background subtracted and contrast adjusted Andromeda galaxy

Background subtracted and contrast adjusted Orion and Running man

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Astronomy Live @astronomylive.bsky.social · Sep 20

I think you can get sub lon and sub lat from JPL HORIZONS system.
ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app...

Horizons System

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ssd.jpl.nasa.gov

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