Month: March 2024

One Giant Leap

On By Site StaffIn Hardware, ProcessingLeave a comment

We are pleased to report that the Cosmoscope has recently acquired an instrument from Starizona in Tucson, AZ. Both the optics and display software are manufactured by ZWO Co., Ltd, out of the town of Suzhou in Jiangsu province in China, making for an affordable first system for the Cosmoscope.

The optics of the new system are said to be the equivalent magnification of a 1200 mm telescope on a full-frame 35mm camera sensor. That is, the field of view is very nearly one degree wide – roughly pinkie finger width at arm’s length. This makes the instrument suitable for not only many common deep space objects, but also for lunar and even solar imaging.

This small instrument will debut in the Cosmoscope’s remote outreach missions and is likely to remain mobile on its carbon fiber tripod rather than permanently mounted on a pier in a dome. After becoming familiar with the instrument, Cosmoscope staff hope to become proficient in Open Broadcaster Software, a suite for switching video and images to be “broadcast” live on YouTube.

It will be obvious to some readers that the online presentation may be considered similar to Slooh, or other subscription-based telescope access websites. Cosmoscope services are intended to remain free, and broadcasts will be presented live via YouTube, with staff taking requests on object selection via live chat and providing context where possible. It should be emphasized that staff are interested amateurs, only, and hope to learn from audience members as well!

Images will be “stacked” in real-time for live YouTube guests, with every frame increasing the contrast and resolution of the image as time goes on. At any given time of year the sky targets that are bright-enough for such real time viewing are limited, and so further processing will be accomplished in the open source Siril image processing suite and possibly in commercial software as such demonstrations become appropriate.

We look forward to presenting images from first light in this space very soon. Thank you for your interest!

Images from ZWO website. No infringement intended. We’ll replace with our own original images, soon!

Image Processing Example

On By Site StaffIn ProcessingLeave a comment

Improvements in camera sensors have obviously helped to enable amateurs (or small non-profs) to obtain compelling images using otherwise traditional telescope designs. The Cosmoscope’s primary telescope is a simple apochromatic triplet design. This means that there are only three glass elements before the digital sensor, but those elements are designed to keep the lenses from creating a “rainbow” effect, like a prism, separating colors as they go through!

The biggest improvements in the past 30 years have been to software processing of images. Pictures with little difference between the dark of space and the illumination of nebula, for instance, can have the contrast increased in strategic ways to reveal the detail that would result from more light; either through longer exposure or a larger telescope.

We’ll discuss this further as time goes on and interesting examples accumulate, but we couldn’t help sharing this simple demonstration from Cosmoscope staff. The first, blue image is a publicly accessible .jpg of Halley’s Comet, captured on film in 1986. This image accompanies numerous articles at NASA’s site, and countless other educational websites. The next is the very same data, color balanced and contrast increased. There was no addition (other than painting out the “hairs” you see on the original slide! Let us know what you think!

Image courtesy NASA
Same image with balance applied (then cropped to be a square. You’ll recognize this as the background to our logo!)