The Scruffy Astronomer

  This is an image I got remotely. I was in Melbourne, and the observatory is in Central Victoria. It's Sh2-308, which is unofficially known as the Dolphin Head nebula. Can you see it? Because I don't own the observatory or the equipment, I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but this was the rough procedure. I use an all-night script to get data from the facility. In this case, I got about 40 short exposures in red, green and blue, and a heap of long exposures in Oxygen and some in Hydrogen. The background is an HOO palette, where the Oxygen is mapped to the green and blue pixels on your screen, and Hydrogen is mapped to red. I've put the nicely-saturated RGB stars over the top, as HOO stars are yucky.

  White knuckles It seems that everyone is getting into remote imaging these days. If you have an automated rig in a dome, you don't actually need to be present to make it work. I mean, what's the difference between sitting at a computer two metres from your rig and sitting at a computer 200 kilometres from your rig? The software is the same, the images are the same. You know I'm going to tell you what's different. Security.  Imagine something goes wrong. Suddenly your computer screen goes blank. You don't know if the power has gone out, and if it hasn't, you don't know if your mount is about to mash your expensive camera and filter wheel against the pier. Worse, the dome is open to the elements and there might be a rain storm coming. There's really no alternative but to drag yourself to the car and make a two hour journey out to your remote site. But astrophotographers do it. My state's astronomical society is piloting a couple of locations. A few y...