Basically my final project

I’ve always been interested in astrophotography, but never understood your typical Nikon camera. In high school I was introduced to astrophotography by using a CCD camera with different filters inside it. That stands for charged coupled device and is the primary way astronomers image things. CCD cameras are good because they have different filters inside them so you can control the amount and type (meaning spectra) that the camera is absorbing. CCD cameras also collect all the light photons so astronomers really like them.

I had three main goals for my project. The first was to learn how to use telescopes with CCD cameras. The second was to learn how to analyze the data from the telescopes to make the pretty colored pictures you see here. My final goal I haven’t achieved yet is to get a certificate for completing a log book of 110 Messier Objects.  

The first two goals I achieved by using the 21in telescope on campus and the 61in telescope on Mount Lemmon. My mentor and I would go to the telescopes and spend either a few hours or an entire night doing research and collecting data. We would attach the camera to the telescope like you would an eye piece, then find our object and focus it. That was always a bit of a challenge. Once we had it in focus we would take generally 3-6 30 or 60 second exposures with each filter. After we had collected our data I would then use a computer program to combine all the images. In order to do that, I took all the red filter pictures for example aligned them so all the stars matched up, and then stacked them. This allowed me to have the “best” red filter picture because stacking them would cancel out any noise or bad pixels or other things we didn’t want. Once I had the “best” of each color I would do a color combine. This is the same as stacking all the images, but I had to manually put in how much of each color I wanted to be seen. Getting the proportions right was one of the more difficult and frustrating parts of the project.

This is similar to the two videos we watched in class about remake and remix culture. I got to pick and choose which pictures I wanted to use and how I wanted to use them. Adjusting the brightness and contrast of the picture was similar to an artist adjusting the frequency or pitch or their samples. I combined multiple images while remixers, combine many parts or many songs. My result was a true color image, while their result was a new song. Luckily for me, I did not have to worry about any copyright issues because all of my data was original and my own. Original is used in a loose sense here. It is not original in that it is new or special. Hubble has already imaged everything I have, better than I have. Many other amateur astronomers have done the same thing. My data is unique to me. It is original because I had to go to the telescopes and physically get the data and create the images. No two images of an astronomical object will ever look the same. My colors may be different than another astronomer’s because they chose different proportions. Just like a remixers song will never have anything like it because they all use different choices in pitch and songs. Even two red images taken seconds apart will be different because the sky moves, the atmosphere constantly fluctuates and pixels change. Remixers and I both used already existing art to create something new and unique for our audiences. Below is the poster I made with all the pictures I took. This does not include the ones where the color combine did not work properly. Under the "M51: 61inch" title you can see the red, blue, green and luminance images along with the end result. These are like the pieces of songs that make up the new song.