Its the rc optical systems 20 inch at kitt peak visitors station.

whats special is that it has ion milled mirrors; no scratch and dig; no scatter.

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n3344.html

click on the picture to get full resolution. if you download this picture and adjust the contrast(down) and and brightness(up) you will see 90% of this galaxy noone has seen before.

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/m51rolfe.jpg

there is a whole archive to explore, I've found things nobody knows is there

Oh. I thought that this would be about the Vatican's telescope.

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You have demonstrated that at least two people know about it, yourself, and the person who created the site. Now, Tucker fan and I know as well. Your thesis is shot.

Those are some rather odd claims, vergentbill. Are you saying that by playing around with the contrast and brightness (not exactly advanced image processing), you have seen things that the webmaster and the astronomers have not seen?

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http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/obs...1337cremer.jpg
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/obs...83matthews.jpg

Nice pictures, so what. As Occam asked, what exactly is your point?

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Download them, open them photoshop is best. Pull the contrast down and the brightness up. You will see a planetary nebula that is not on the charts. In photoshop you can play with the "curve". You can boost the bottom end without blowing out the top. If you don't have photoshop. Is there a way to post pictures without a url? If not I could email them to someone who can.

If you started with a jpg, then you have already started with an invalid image. The jpg is optimized for viewing...not for information. jpg introduces anomolies into a picture.

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I checked with the telescope operator, these are on the original data. Jpeg stairstepping does not look like this. Can someone help me post these pictures?

Ok, in Microsoft Office Picture Manager I decreased the contrast and increased the brightness. I put the picture on imageshack.us (which you could use too). It now looks like a bad, washed out picture. What does this show?

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

put the contrast all the way down and the brightness all the way up
look in the lower right.

Ok; let's assume for the moment that there is something to see on the photograph.
Why do you think it is a planetary nebula?

Have you also asked the operator what other possibilites can explain this?

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You're kidding, right? This is a joke. Ok, attached is the photo. And no, that's exactly what happens when you do as described. Personally, I think its a polar bear in a snowstorm.

Now, why don't you do it and upload it to a hosting site and post it. Here, I'll make it easy... http://www.imageshack.us/

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Or maybe it's the Brown's vs the Bills, and should be in the NFL thread?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

No matter how good the optics are, you're going to run into theoretical limits. Under the same atmospheric conditions, a 30 inch will gather more light than a 20 inch, and both will have resolution limited by atmosphere (though there are a few tricks that can sometimes work around that). Are you suggesting that this scope is better than Hubble, or large earth based scopes?

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

No it shouldn't...

Browns vs. Bills will not be spoken of...

I would suggest its a whole lot better than my small earth-based telescope!

I think many of the published images we see from these telescopes and the HST are color enhanced and tweaked to an extraordinary degree to bring out details which are not otherwise obvious. By the time we see them, they're often brightly colored and contrasted but certainly not as they appear at the eyepiece nor even in the original pixels.

If I'm not mistaken the original formats are probably FITS, which is capable of carrying a lot of image information but most of the FITS viewers I have seen produce lousy images. (Probably because they're not color enhanced and tweaked.)


-Veeger

Of course eyepiece and pixel are inconsistent, since most modern research telescopes don't have eyepieces, and just have pixels. This is certainly true for the HST.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Go Browns!

In most image processing software, pulling down contrast gives an image of even color, a surface where every pixel is of the same value, that means that the resultant image would have no features what so ever. What would be more to the point was, since these images only have data in the lower half or third brightness levels, using something like the photoshop fuction "Levels" to expand these to the entire range of possible brightness levels.

There is generaly always loss when converting to JPEG, and these images do show JPEG artifacts quite clearly, JPEG unvariably messes up low contrast parts of images. Mapping the image data to another color or brightness range should be done on non-lossy images, JPEG is optimized for viewing, and not any future editing.

Also, most imaging formats generaly used have 8 bits of brightness, something that is fine for normal uses, but most imaging systems are capable of higher resolutions. I have not really used stacking software, so I do not really know much about them, but in theory it would be pos