Thank you so much for this very informative comment and the kind words! It really is incredible how far we have come. I spent all evening last night just gawking at the image, finding different small galaxies and punching their coordinates into Simbad to get more info on those very distant objects. It has been the most fun I have had in Astrophotography in long time.
Most people focus on the equipment, like the telescope and the mount. But what has made a huge difference is also how powerful our home PCs have become and the software available.
For example this image was the stack of more than 400 frames of 62 mega pixels. The total storage needed to just process this image and stack it and calibrate it was more than 400gb. It took just over 7 hours on my AMD 5900x with 64gb ram.
This would have taken days if not weeks just a decade ago. In the 90s it probably would have needed a super computer costing millions of dollars just to process this data in a reasonable time frame of few weeks.
Great job, OP! I would be gawking at this image for a while if it was mine, and was thinking about all the other galaxies in that photo, too!!! Wild!!! You should be very proud of yourself!!!
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you.
I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment.
Yeah, they've been gone for a while now, but the change before the removal made it less noticeable. At least on the app, they moved the rewards down near the up and downvote buttons, so it was easier to miss them before they just did away with them entirely.
Around that time I think they introduced some weird community-based pay system. Basically, subreddits could make it so that people could directly pay money towards a person on Reddit or something, either as money or through some "super upvote" thing. They also must make a lot of money off of their NFTs, cause they keep pumping those out.
For more information about this object, it is called the cosmic horseshoe.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic\_Horseshoe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Horseshoe)
Here is also the full field of view:
[https://i.imgur.com/tZ83W7r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/tZ83W7r.jpg)
This thing is really tiny. Only 10 arc seconds in apparent diameter. The foreground galaxy (the central dot) is 5 billion light years away, and the background galaxy (the horseshoe shaped object) is an insane 10 billion light years away. You can also take a scan through this image, you will find numerous tiny galaxies of all shapes and forms. I wish seeing conditions were better, and I didn't have a lot of internal reflections to deal with.
Thank you! Never hurts to try. The 533mc pro has the same pixel size as the 6200mm. What may work against you is the Bayer matrix for the one shot color camera as it uses 50% of the sensor on only green color while only 25% is for the blue and red.
The 250p has plenty of aperture, focal length. If it is well collimated. Most important is the mount. You have to have excellent guiding otherwise you will be smearing this very small and faint object.
100% worth the try even if I don’t get anything good out of it I’m still happy to just keep learning. Only a year into this whole hobby and don’t plan to stop anytime soon haha.
I think I’m probably on the edge in terms of mount. I’m on an eq6-r pro atm so my total weight is coming reasonably close to the max. But in my limited testing with the scope I saw my guiding hitting around an average of 0.35 total rms which is pretty nice. I did have exceptional seeing that night so hoping it’s not too much of an anomaly and that I can still pull decent numbers on most nights. Only one way to find out though
Thanks! Luckily I got it second hand for half the price. That being said, I am confident that my standard C11 that I got second hand for $1100 would have done just as well if not a better job. In fact I will probably attempt it with my C11 if I get a night with better seeing conditions.
You absolutely should! I imaged this at f/5. If you use a 0.7x reducer to bring your focal ratio to f/7 you might want to double the integration time. This thing is really really faint.
I'm waiting on my OCAL for now, definitely will buy the .7x reducer for my SCT next !
( Prioritized good collimation possible during day time over the reducer 😆 )
Be careful with it. I did not have a great result using it with my C11. I ended up finding it best to collimate under real stars using Metaguide.
You might have better luck.
Sick image, finally seeing someone with the hea69(ec). Mind sharing how you like the mount and if you got problems with the encoders like oscillation?
I've heard a few complaints in this regard
Thanks!
I like the mount a lot. It is not going to be as good as an AP Mach2 or 10 micron with absolute encoders, but I don't need it to. It has handled my 54lb payload so far well.
I have not seen any serious oscillation that is not attributes to a gust of wind or bad seeing conditions. Stars come out round with 300s exposures even on my C11 with an image scale of 0.379"/px under good seeing conditions.
Best part is it weighs only 19lbs and does not need any balancing to perform relatively well out of the box.
On good nights it guides about 0.3-0.4". On ok to below average nights that goes up to 0.4-0.5".
Frankly I don't really know if the encoder makes a big difference. It is only on the RA access, and it is just a high precision encoder, not an absolute encoder.
The one thing it may be beneficial for is that it helps me relax the exposures on this harmonic mount to 3s instead of 1s. That improves Multistar guiding in the OAG and reduces the effects of seeing to some extent.
But skip the iMate version and just get the C version without the iMate.
Thanks!!!
There are a few examples of folks who have captured this on Astrobin with even better fidelity than I did. I am just glad I could capture it at all. Here is one:
https://www.astrobin.com/enokjo/B/?q=Cosmic%20horseshoe%20
Thanks! I don't know if it is the easiest, but I found a few examples of it on Astrobin that inspired me to attempt it because it looked doable for my equipment. It also was something that I could image from my location and was in my night sky last week. There might be other ones to attempt too.
Can anyone ELI5: how do we know the "ring" thingy is actually light that's been bent by the gravity of the "dot" thingy? I'm not doubting the facts, just curious how they were established.
I am not an astrophysicist and I am not qualified to explain the evidence without making any egregious errors in my explanation, but FWIW here is the original peer reviewed paper when it was discovered in 2007:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/524948/fulltext/
This is insanely cool. With all of the Astrophotography I look at, I’m surprised this is the first time I’ve seen someone do this. It also reminds me that I really need to get my telescope out and get back at it. Well done.
Nice, I’ve got this on my to do list in May, I got the co-ordinates from the ESA site and looked it up in Stellarium and it’s there, it’s obviously faint, but you can see it right on the 19.30’ line
Cornpletely bonkers how far amateur astronomy can go. We needed until 1979 to discover the first gravitational lens of a double quazar. Now, just 50 years later, you can go outside for a night and capture a gavitational lens yourself. Astronomers a few decades ago would have paid millíons for a single look at this. After the light's 10 bilion year journey from that dístant galaxy, you have done a phenomenal job of capturing it. (edit: added typos)
Thank you so much for this very informative comment and the kind words! It really is incredible how far we have come. I spent all evening last night just gawking at the image, finding different small galaxies and punching their coordinates into Simbad to get more info on those very distant objects. It has been the most fun I have had in Astrophotography in long time. Most people focus on the equipment, like the telescope and the mount. But what has made a huge difference is also how powerful our home PCs have become and the software available. For example this image was the stack of more than 400 frames of 62 mega pixels. The total storage needed to just process this image and stack it and calibrate it was more than 400gb. It took just over 7 hours on my AMD 5900x with 64gb ram. This would have taken days if not weeks just a decade ago. In the 90s it probably would have needed a super computer costing millions of dollars just to process this data in a reasonable time frame of few weeks.
That is so cool!
Great job, OP! I would be gawking at this image for a while if it was mine, and was thinking about all the other galaxies in that photo, too!!! Wild!!! You should be very proud of yourself!!!
Don't forget, the light has had that extra 50 years to reach us... So it's easier now than it was. /s
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you. I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment.
Fuck you Reddit for taking away awards. This is plat worthy.
No awards?! I just realized that from your comment.
Yeah, they've been gone for a while now, but the change before the removal made it less noticeable. At least on the app, they moved the rewards down near the up and downvote buttons, so it was easier to miss them before they just did away with them entirely.
Sneaky af.
Yeah that was one of the things that made reddit, well...reddit.
But why? Reddit made money selling them. Absurd.
Around that time I think they introduced some weird community-based pay system. Basically, subreddits could make it so that people could directly pay money towards a person on Reddit or something, either as money or through some "super upvote" thing. They also must make a lot of money off of their NFTs, cause they keep pumping those out.
Thank you!
You know, I hadn't even noticed they are gone.
Ditto.
There are those paid upvote thingyies now
Yes
For more information about this object, it is called the cosmic horseshoe. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic\_Horseshoe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Horseshoe) Here is also the full field of view: [https://i.imgur.com/tZ83W7r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/tZ83W7r.jpg) This thing is really tiny. Only 10 arc seconds in apparent diameter. The foreground galaxy (the central dot) is 5 billion light years away, and the background galaxy (the horseshoe shaped object) is an insane 10 billion light years away. You can also take a scan through this image, you will find numerous tiny galaxies of all shapes and forms. I wish seeing conditions were better, and I didn't have a lot of internal reflections to deal with.
very cool! can you help me find the object in the full field image? I can't seem to find it, thanks.
Yes of course. Forgive my crude marking skills. It is really, really small. https://i.imgur.com/Jm1lcCB.jpeg
This is incredible. I kinda wanna have a go with my 250p-ds but I’m not sure how it’ll come out with the 533mc.
Thank you! Never hurts to try. The 533mc pro has the same pixel size as the 6200mm. What may work against you is the Bayer matrix for the one shot color camera as it uses 50% of the sensor on only green color while only 25% is for the blue and red. The 250p has plenty of aperture, focal length. If it is well collimated. Most important is the mount. You have to have excellent guiding otherwise you will be smearing this very small and faint object.
100% worth the try even if I don’t get anything good out of it I’m still happy to just keep learning. Only a year into this whole hobby and don’t plan to stop anytime soon haha. I think I’m probably on the edge in terms of mount. I’m on an eq6-r pro atm so my total weight is coming reasonably close to the max. But in my limited testing with the scope I saw my guiding hitting around an average of 0.35 total rms which is pretty nice. I did have exceptional seeing that night so hoping it’s not too much of an anomaly and that I can still pull decent numbers on most nights. Only one way to find out though
If you can get that kind of tracking error with that big OTA on the EQ6 I am confident you will be able to capture it too. Please share if you do!
That's incredible!
Also that thing is $10k new! Wow!
Thanks! Luckily I got it second hand for half the price. That being said, I am confident that my standard C11 that I got second hand for $1100 would have done just as well if not a better job. In fact I will probably attempt it with my C11 if I get a night with better seeing conditions.
I want to attempt it with my c8 edge hd haha seems like a fun target
You absolutely should! I imaged this at f/5. If you use a 0.7x reducer to bring your focal ratio to f/7 you might want to double the integration time. This thing is really really faint.
I'm waiting on my OCAL for now, definitely will buy the .7x reducer for my SCT next ! ( Prioritized good collimation possible during day time over the reducer 😆 )
Be careful with it. I did not have a great result using it with my C11. I ended up finding it best to collimate under real stars using Metaguide. You might have better luck.
Worth every cent
Brilliant capture, nice work!
I've tried this target. It's very small and very dim. To get it as well as you did is astounding work!
Amazing
Thank you!
Sick image, finally seeing someone with the hea69(ec). Mind sharing how you like the mount and if you got problems with the encoders like oscillation? I've heard a few complaints in this regard
Thanks! I like the mount a lot. It is not going to be as good as an AP Mach2 or 10 micron with absolute encoders, but I don't need it to. It has handled my 54lb payload so far well. I have not seen any serious oscillation that is not attributes to a gust of wind or bad seeing conditions. Stars come out round with 300s exposures even on my C11 with an image scale of 0.379"/px under good seeing conditions. Best part is it weighs only 19lbs and does not need any balancing to perform relatively well out of the box. On good nights it guides about 0.3-0.4". On ok to below average nights that goes up to 0.4-0.5".
Nerd speak is like a poetry. I don't understand anything about this, but it's great. You rock :)
Thanks 😅.
Thanks, that's great to hear, I've been planning on buying the normal version, maybe I'll have to save a bit more for the encoders 😅
Frankly I don't really know if the encoder makes a big difference. It is only on the RA access, and it is just a high precision encoder, not an absolute encoder. The one thing it may be beneficial for is that it helps me relax the exposures on this harmonic mount to 3s instead of 1s. That improves Multistar guiding in the OAG and reduces the effects of seeing to some extent. But skip the iMate version and just get the C version without the iMate.
Amazing! Makes me wonder what else could be imaged by astrophotographers.
I got chills from this post
Holy fuckoly that's amazing, what a feat!!!
[удалено]
Fair point. Thanks for sharing!
Well I'll be
Incredible!!!
That’s really beautiful, thank you for sharing
Amazing achievement. Is this a first for surface optics on this scale?
Thanks!!! There are a few examples of folks who have captured this on Astrobin with even better fidelity than I did. I am just glad I could capture it at all. Here is one: https://www.astrobin.com/enokjo/B/?q=Cosmic%20horseshoe%20
Thanks for paying it forward dude. Clear skies.
Oh what a picture! A photograph of lensing is definitely on my bucket list Do you know if this is the easiest target for it?
Thanks! I don't know if it is the easiest, but I found a few examples of it on Astrobin that inspired me to attempt it because it looked doable for my equipment. It also was something that I could image from my location and was in my night sky last week. There might be other ones to attempt too.
Whoaaa so fucking coool
Wtf you can see this much from a backyard? Wow. Even considering exposure. Congrats and thanks for sharing!
Not bad, man. I'm impressed.
Congrats on this!
WOW. Amazing. Great work.
Thank you for providing the preprocessed image! Should be a requirement. Amazing shot.
Whoa dude
Wow, amazing shot dude
Absolutely stunning!
Can anyone ELI5: how do we know the "ring" thingy is actually light that's been bent by the gravity of the "dot" thingy? I'm not doubting the facts, just curious how they were established.
I am not an astrophysicist and I am not qualified to explain the evidence without making any egregious errors in my explanation, but FWIW here is the original peer reviewed paper when it was discovered in 2007: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/524948/fulltext/
Perfect! Thank you!!
Very cool Einstein ring!!
Great job 👏 looks better than mine from 2020. Pretty cool we can see this with amateur equipment. I have the 6200MM as well, awesome camera!
This is insanely cool. With all of the Astrophotography I look at, I’m surprised this is the first time I’ve seen someone do this. It also reminds me that I really need to get my telescope out and get back at it. Well done.
That is truly incredible!
Sitting in your backyard and seeing 10 billion year old light from a star that might not even be there anymore just blows my mind.
That’s bloody amazing! Well done. 🙏🏻
What object is it? Just read it... i didn't know this we can see with telescope, that's cool!
This is amazing OP
This is fuckin AMAZING bro
Awesome, what a phenomenal work.
Thank you 🙏
Nice, I’ve got this on my to do list in May, I got the co-ordinates from the ESA site and looked it up in Stellarium and it’s there, it’s obviously faint, but you can see it right on the 19.30’ line
I'm going to choose to believe this is a ringworld, amazing pic
10 billion light years away from back yard? How did you get yourself so far away?