Celestia Forums

Friends,

Version FT is so cool that I just wanted to check it myself. Please see this image of NGC 253 from Earth's orbit, compared with my first ever galaxy photograph, which I took last Saturday. The resemblance is impressive. Fridger, congratulations, once more. My wife asks when my pictures will be as good as Celestia's.

Regards,

Guillermo

EDIT: Solved the image problem. changed Fortunecity for my office computer.

I think the galactic central core is too bright and too big. We can clearly see concentric "shells" (or bands) around the galactic nucleus, and it doesn't feel natural. In my opinion, this effect should be reduced.

t00fri ?

BTW the image link only seems to work if you copy/paste it into your browser, clicking it gets a denial message instead.

Looks good though, brightness notwithstanding.

Cham wrote:I think the galactic central core is too bright and too big. We can clearly see concentric "shells" (or bands) around the galactic nucleus, and it doesn't feel natural. In my opinion, this effect should be reduced.

t00fri ?

In the next FT2 version we shall have the custom template feature implemented and Toti's more luxurious template "maker" will surely open new horizonts for creativity in this context!

Bye Fridger

abramson wrote:Friends,

Version FT is so cool that I just wanted to check it myself. Please see this image of NGC 253 from Earth's orbit, compared with my first ever galaxy photograph, which I took last Saturday. The resemblance is impressive. Fridger, congratulations, once more. My wife asks when my pictures will be as good as Celestia's.

Regards,

Guillermo

EDIT: Sorry, Fortunecity images do not get displayed here any more . Please follow the link...
http://members.fortunecity.com/guillermoabramson/celestia/ngc253small.jpg

Hi Guillermo,

that's fun isn't it! I checked virtually hundreds of our galaxies against images available in the Web.

Did you try Google's images mode, entering "ngc 253" or ngc253 ? You get lots of high quality images for comparison...

Cheers,
Fridger

t00fri wrote:Did you try Google's images mode, entering "ngc 253" or ngc253 ? You get lots of high quality images for comparison...

Sure, I did. I just wanted to share my first galaxy photograph, I am so happy with it.

I am sorry that the link to the image does not work as intended. I think something has changed in Fortunecity. But I was at home and couldn't upload to my office. I will try to fix it now...

Guillermo

Hi Guillermo,

your original CCD image looked very dark on my TFT screen. I have worked a bit on it and now it really looks VERY similar, indeed.

In particular the two well known bright stars just above NGC 253 obviously prove that the orientation is "spot on"...



You should definitely consider installing the 2 million star data base
that Grant (granthutchison) recently adapted to the new stardb format.
You find the stars at ML. The 2m stars go excellently together with our galaxies . What I like is in particular: whatever crazy galaxy you are looking for, they are now ALL there

I suppose you know how you can also observe well in Celestia from exactly your location on earth....

Cheers,
Fridger

t00fri wrote:In particular the two well known bright stars just above NGC 253 obviously prove that the orientation is "spot on"...

By way of this example, it is beginning to dawn on me what an incredible job you and Toti have done. I am *really* impressed. Really!

-rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:

t00fri wrote:In particular the two well known bright stars just above NGC 253 obviously prove that the orientation is "spot on"...

By way of this example, it is beginning to dawn on me what an incredible job you and Toti have done. I am *really* impressed. Really!

-rthorvald

Thanks "for the flowers", Runar

Since quite some time for me the following allegory was highly motivating to attempt this sort of task:

Celestia is like an expensive Hi-Fi set: Even the best electronics (<=>Celestia's engine) is not worth much if the loudspeakers (<=>textures) are mediocre and if the media for playing (star data, binary orbit data, galaxies , clusters, nebulae, asteroids...!) are lacking!

Cheers,
Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:your original CCD image looked very dark on my TFT screen. I have worked a bit on it and now it really looks VERY similar, indeed.

Thanks! The same night I photographed NGC 55 (my second galaxy) and it also looks nice, even the asymetry (a coincidence, I presume!).

t00fri wrote:You should definitely consider installing the 2 million star data base
that Grant (granthutchison) recently adapted to the new stardb format.

Indeed. The image has been done with the 1M stars installed. (The 2M was still downloading...)

t00fri wrote:I suppose you know how you can also observe well in Celestia from exactly your location on earth....

Indeed. Thanks anyway.

Fridger, Toti, speaking of coincidences, I have seen that the Milky Way looks very close to the real thing. I mean, in the direction of Centaurus-Crux-Carina (one of my favorites places to watch and photograph) there is an increased brightness, almost in the right positions. Are the arms of the spiral properly oriented to give this effect, is it a coincidence, or is it just my will of seeing a pattern where there is only randomness? (Of course, there is increased brightness and width in the direction of the galactic center, but that would happen for any orientation of the arms.) (And, when I say "orientation" I mean the phase of the arms within the plane of the galaxy, not the orientation of this plane in the sky, which is easy.)

Guillermo

It's strictly happenchance. If you go outside the Milky Way and look back at it, you''ll discover that the model has only two arms. The real thing has at least four and probably many fragmentary arms in the outer regions.

selden wrote:It's strictly happenchance. If you go outside the Milky Way and look back at it, you''ll discover that the model has only two arms. The real thing has at least four and probably many fragmentary arms in the outer regions.

I dont think that Guillermo's observation is necessarily accidental. It is easy to find out what part of the galaxy we are conspicuously seing from Earth in Celestia: THE BAR! The brighter part one notices is one end of the bar where the arm starts off and thus the bar + the arm give the intensified view! Since the spiral and the bar is correctly alligned the effect of the bar could well be conspicuous, IRRESPECTIVE of whether the Milky Way has four fainter arms (SBbc) or just two strong ones (SBc). Obviously from Earth, you could never see all four arms since they are about in one plane hiding each other partly...

Bye Fridger

Sorry, I should have been more verbose

I was assuming he meant that he was surprised by the precise locations of the brighter blobs in the anti-center direction. Although it's not surprising that the anti-center is dimmer and narrower than the center of the galaxy, I was also assuming that you didn't try to place blobs at the locations of the various brighter (nebular) regions in the Orion and Perseus Arms.

But I know what happens when one makes assumptions

Guillermo,

since I am also a very longtime amateur astronomer (with a 8 inch Celestron Schmidt Cassegrain telescope): what kind of CCD did you get ( apparently it's all new?)?

Cheers,
Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:since I am also a very longtime amateur astronomer (with a 8 inch Celestron Schmidt Cassegrain telescope): what kind of CCD did you get ( apparently it's all new?)?

Hi. This was taken with my Meade LX10, it's also an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain, f/10. The equatorial alignment was rather crude. The photos were taken afocally, through a 32 mm Pl?¶ssl, with a compact digital camera, a Canon Powershot A60, which has a 2M pixels CCD. The shots were 15 sec at f/2.8, and 20 pictures were stacked with Registax, and slightly processed with Paint Shop Pro (a little fiddling with the histogram, probably as you tried). The original image is like 1000 pixels wide and more detailed, I shrank it a lot to put it in the composition. The photos were taken from my balcony in Bariloche (pop. 100k), a fifth floor with an unobstructed view of the city lights.

I am putting up a web page with my astrophotos, some recent, some older. I have had the Meade for several years, and I bought the Canon last year in the USA, where I didn't have the telescope. Then I returned and immediately traveled to Italy for several months, so I just started with this technique last month. My other telescope is a German one, you know, a Bresser 114 mm f/4, very fast, very wide field, extremely portable.

Regards,

Guillermo

Im afraid that I cannot find any topics refering to this 'Version FT', does it spruce up the galaxies of Celestia as in your screenshot? If so, perhaps I would be interested in downloading this.

Sitting Duck wrote:Im afraid that I cannot find any topics refering to this 'Version FT', does it spruce up the galaxies of Celestia as in your screenshot? If so, perhaps I would be interested in downloading this.

Sitting Duck,

See this topic: http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8111, on this very forum. There, the authors of this version announce the release of FT 1.1, and you will find a link to the downloads. It renders the galaxies very nicely. You can download either a Windows installer, or the complete source code that you may compile yourself under Linux or Windows.

Guillermo

1000 apologies, for the search function gave me no results!!

thanks