learningastrophotography

[learningastrophotography]

Radio Observing

This week we have been working on radio observing. Radio observing is a subfield of astronomy that uses radio waves to study things such as a planet's temperature, heat transport, and radiation. We specifically observed the moon and virgo A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy. These images look fairly similar, but the first is a radio image of the moon and the second is virgo A.

To make these, we used the 20 meter telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. The mapping pattern we used is a horizontal raster map. Here's what the path looks like!

There was a slight problem with my data- when looking at the frequency of my moon image there was a huge spike, indicating another source of radiation that was definitely not coming from space. To fix this, we processed the image in Skynet, where we omitted the part of the frequency with an outlying source of radiation. And voila! Our first photos in the radio were complete.

As I mentioned earlier, we can use these radio images to tell us a bit about temperature and radiation, which we worked on in class! Using a formula we figured that the moon's subsurface temp is 276.4K. We also figured that we are looking at absorbed and thermally re-emitted light rather than reflected sunlight, because we took radio images of the moon at two separate phases; and we did not notice much change with the moon phase, indicating we are not looking at reflected light.

[learningastrophotography]

Hi astro friends! I am taking an astrophotography class at UNC and learning how to take images through a robotic system of telescopes called skynet. I have some experience with astrophotography using my camera, but operating robotic telescopes is pretty new to me and I am still learning how to operate this system. 

Our first project was focused on photographing the moon. I originally approached this assignment using a telescope called NSO, based in Vermont. However, the pointing of the telescope is a little off- whoops! Hopefully this can be fixed soon as this telescope has a huge scope of field.

Even though this photo is wonky- I still think its pretty cool! You can see the maria (dark spots on the moon, which are molten lava fields) really well, as well as all the beautiful craters.

To remedy my half moon problem, I borrowed the work of my classmate, Chris Crow! He  photographed the moon using a different telescope called PROMPT-5, based in Chile. The problem with this telescope is that its scope is much smaller, so to make this image I actually combined an array of 25 images in our image processing software, afterglow. In order to do this, I first used the alignment feature to get all of the images in the correct order. Then, I used the stacking feature to combine the filtered images on top of one another- this creates a colored image. In place of a red, green, and blue filter; we used H-Alpha, OIII, and U in order to make a color photo of the moon.

You can see here when I stacked the filters there were some spots the telescope skipped over, making this semi-patchwork like image of the moon. To remedy this, we have patches provided by our professor to fix this problem. This is the final image!