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Not sure how many people here are into Amateur Astronomy. This is a neat project if it works as advertised.
Amateur astronomers worried that Big Astronomy would render them obsolete can relax: the kinds of techniques used to create huge virtual telescopes are now being applied to the huge collections of astro-pics published on the Internet. As keen astronomy-watchers know, the effective aperture of telescopes can be expanded by linking multiple instruments in different parts of the world. In radio-astronomy, this is the principle behind the Square Kilometer Array, and the same techniques can be applied to optical telescopes.
What's different about the proposal in this paper at Arxiv is that its authors, led by Dustin Lang of Carnegie Mellon University (along with David Hogg of New York University and Bernhard Scholkopf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany) is that they want to correlate and combine the vast store of astronomy images that amateurs publish on the Internet.
The top row shows some of the input images Lang used to create the final composite. The final tone-mapped consensus image, bottom right, shows debris from the galactic cataclysm that isn't visible in any of the individual source images.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:10PM
The results are very nice. Not up to par with the big telescopes, but still getting very nice detail not usually obtainable as a lone amateur. The results may improve considerably when a group of amateurs decides to make a coordinated imaging effort. If they all calibrate the recordings, then the result will improve further. I look forward to a brand new class of cosmic images with fantastic detail.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by umafuckitt on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:24PM
The whole point is that this in effect is a coordinated imaging effort. Frankly, the quality of the M51 shot is quite close to the HST image [robgendlerastropics.com] in terms of seeing the faint stuff. This is reasonable, since amassing large numbers of amateur shots is similar to taking a very, very, long exposure. Where the technique falls short is in resolution: this approach is not the same as a large array telescopes. The mirrors on each scope are small and they're not linked. They are all hobbled by atmospheric distortion. Consequently, this approach will always get its ass kicked by larger instruments and those with adaptive optics or in orbit.
(Score: 3, Informative) by BsAtHome on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:49PM
The paper writes that they need to adapt the images separately to make the compatible. The "long exposure" trick by combining images only works if the images can be summed in a consistent way. The paper describes the enhancement algorithm they use to make the images compatible, including spatial resampling.
The discussion starts with: "We have proposed a system that can automatically combine uncalibrated, processed night-sky images to produce high quality, high dynamic-range images covering wider fields." If that does not qualify as uncoordinated, than what does?
My point being, if you have camera spectral and spatial calibration values before you sum the images, then the convergence will improve and the result will improve too. That combined with the described method makes the result even more spectacular.