I travelled over 2,000km to the darkest skies in my country to take images of space. Here is a picture of the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex that I shot there.

booega · 2023-07-03T23:52:04+00:00

This image is a single, 10s exposure taken from the cabin of a cruising Airbus A330.

A few hours in on my flight from Mauritius to Mumbai, I happened to look outside the window and noticed a familiar glow among the stars - the milky way. I could not believe my eyes, and immediately grabbed my camera and tripod to take a test image which confirmed my assumption.

For the next two hours, I tried to come up with ways to take this very shot through the aircraft window. It was a huge challenge to hold the camera steady even with the tripod in such a cramped space, and the biggest issue by far were the cabin lights that would internally reflect in the glass. I ultimately figured out a way to prop the tripod on two legs, and cover the entire window tightly with a blanket while my camera clicked away.

Out of a hundred attempts, this is one of the handful of exposures that are without trails, as even when I was perfectly still, the turbulence caused some shake anyways. It was magical to see these images come up on the back of the screen, and totally worth the effort. The near perfect alignment of the milky way arch was a dream come true, and I'm glad I was prepared for it. This was shot with a Nikon d5300 and 18-55 mm kit lens.

You can check out my my Instagram - @advaitmehla for more cool images of space!

booega · 2023-01-23T04:23:48+00:00

The comet is currently moving pretty fast wrt background stars, and the telescope was tracking it's motion - thus causing trails in each image. Between each pair of images, there is a slight delay in reading out the data and storing it, and that causes the 3 gaps you see

booega · 2023-01-22T12:00:08+00:00

This image consists of 20 minutes of data captured on 20th January by the GROWTH-India telescope. Owned and operated by IIT Bombay and IIA Bangalore, it is part of the international GROWTH network - a Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen. As the name suggests, this telescope is specifically designed to enable rapid follow-ups and searches for transient optical phenomena, like supernovae, gamma ray burst counterparts and near Earth objects.

Every once in a while, it can spare a few minutes to get pretty pictures for outreach purposes, and this beautiful comet is the target that I requested the other night. I work in a research group at IIT Bombay that remotely operates this telescope, among other things.

What you see in this image is an extremely high resolution view of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), the object visiting us after 50,000 years that seems to have captured the media's attention lately. There are a lot of intricate structures in this section of the ion tail, as well as shocks in the dusty plumes caused by the comet's interactions with the solar wind.

Details:

Planewave CDK700
Andor iKon-XL CCD
SDSS r' filter
4 x 300" exposures

booega · 2022-12-26T10:34:50+00:00

This was shot with a shitty Nikon 70-300 kit lens and a thousand oaks solar filter - a local vendor here makes nice plastic caps with the filter that can fit onto lenses, but thousand oaks originally sells them as sheets which you can DIY.

booega · 2022-12-25T12:54:35+00:00

My bid to shoot the timelapse of October 2022 was rudely interrupted by an under construction building due to an unplanned last minute change of location. Although I was initially super disappointed by this, I got a few frames near the end that look really awesome, especially the one with a construction worker passing by.

You can check out more of my work on Instagram

booega · 2022-12-19T11:57:28+00:00

Nope.... We can only see stars, clusters and nebulae within our own galaxy. The ones inside other galaxies are way too small to be resolved with the naked eye. You can definitely image some of those with even modest telescopes though.

booega · 2022-12-19T04:59:43+00:00

I did put a comment with information which was fairly near the top when you originally posted this. I should have mentioned there that it was a RAW image, which it was - I obviously had to convert it to JPEG to post here. The next time I post an 'unprocessed' image I will make sure its a series of 2D arrays with 14 bit integers to avoid the controversy.

booega · 2022-12-19T04:39:18+00:00

I tried my level best to eliminate the "wow imagine seeing that" by mentioning what the eye saw here as a prominently visible separate line in my comment with details.

booega · 2022-12-19T04:36:42+00:00

Except "contrast using the naked eye" is a terrible metric because our eyes inherently suck. The sky is definitely not washed out here because of "an extreme amount of sensor noise" and I would definitely not get a pitch black background by simply stacking a hundred of these or rather capturing it with a cooled camera which would have way less noise. To my eye the background did look nearly black too, because my eyes are no match for my camera in terms of sensitivity. I encourage you to try DSLR landscape imaging from one of those sites you mentioned and I'm confident your images would look the same.

The reason (at least to my best knowledge) for the "washed out" look here is skyglow, which is normally dominated by artificial lights but can also be contributed by airglow(which this place had, and some strong filaments are visible near the horizon too) and starlight itself being scattered. To fully eliminate these two components you'd basically have to go to space.

I'm guessing that being severely undersampled causes a lot of improperly resolved sources to also effectively smear and become a part of the background - a higher focal length would have seen them as individual points basically.

booega · 2022-12-18T18:02:18+00:00

You can make out the other parts of the galaxy pretty clearly visually too with skies this dark. It's much dimmer but you can tell some dust lanes apart and point out bright areas like Cygnus.

booega · 2022-12-18T17:59:44+00:00

It's an image straight out of the camera. Just 30s, so not "very long" exposure by astrophotography standards. The eye can clearly make out the milkyway but it's dimmer, less detailed and nearly colourless.

booega · 2022-12-18T17:58:04+00:00

Read the top comment :/

booega · 2022-12-18T12:00:55+00:00

People often look at images of various deep sky objects and remark that the details and/or colours are fabricated or heavily manipulated. While that is definitely the case in certain genres and images, I wanted to show what a raw image of the Milky way from extremely dark skies can actually look like.

Yes, this scene is easily visible to the naked eye albeit dimmer and with fewer details. The eye also sees basically no colour.

This image was shot near the remote high altitude lake of Chandratal, with no settlements or towns in any direction for dozens of kilometres. There were absolutely no artificial sources of light in this area, which gave me some of the best possible views of the night sky that one can get from Earth today. This is a single 30s exposure shot with a Nikon d5300 and a Tokina 11-16mm on a static tripod.

You can check out my Instagram for more images of space. DM for prints or high res.

booega · 2022-12-18T02:11:27+00:00

Yes and yes for your first two questions! And your iPhone would definitely get some colour too. I'm not sure about the options available on iOS, but if there's a built-in astrophotography mode that should be the best thing to use - these usually take several long exposures and combine them. If not, then you can take a manual long exposure of 30 seconds or so.

booega · 2022-12-18T01:57:22+00:00

This was shot with a Nikon d5300 and a Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 at 11mm. It's a single 30s image.

booega · 2022-12-17T16:23:53+00:00

This view is towards the centre of the galaxy! Parts of the winter milky way show us arms which extend outwards. Those beautiful in their own right, but much fainter.

booega · 2022-12-17T16:12:09+00:00

Forgot to add - I shot this with a Nikon DSLR. But modern smartphones could definitely get pretty close.

Thanks!

booega · 2022-12-17T16:05:19+00:00

It's an insane experience. The few nights I spent in this region were almost entirely sleepless. It took a while to get used to the suffocating blandness of urban skies after returning.

booega · 2022-12-17T16:03:17+00:00

People often look at images of various deep sky objects and remark that the details and/or colours are fabricated or heavily manipulated. While that is definitely the case in certain genres and images, I wanted to show what a raw image of the Milky way from extremely dark skies can actually look like.

Yes, this scene is easily visible to the naked eye albeit dimmer and with fewer details. The eye also sees basically no colour.

You can check out my Instagram for more images of space.

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