A small sample of the 70+ LT images submitted to the Gallery. © 2017 Göran Nilsson and Wim van Berlo.
An album of over seventy spectacular pictures made from LT data has just been added to the LT Picture Gallery. Follow this link to the new album on Flickr.
The pictures were made by taking archived greyscale IO:O data that had been observed through effectively red, green and blue filters, and combining them in various ways to produce colour images. Most of the original data had been requested over the years by UK schools via the National Schools' Observatory
This skilful post-processing was performed by Swedish amateur astrophotographers Göran Nilsson and Wim van Berlo.
Göran is a professor in animal physiology at the University of Oslo, and Wim is a physics and mathematics teacher in Stockholm. Both have been interested in astronomy and astrophotography for some time; Göran even built his own observatory in the Swedish countryside in 2014.
Living so far north has its drawbacks however when it comes to astrophotography in the summer. "During a four month period, from May through August, the sun hardly sets below the horizon, and it doesn’t get dark," says Wim. Göran, situated even further north, has the same experience: "The long light summer nights make astrophotography impossible for several months," he says.
To have something astronomy-related to do during this time, the two decided to use their growing astrophotography skills to process exposures that were freely available from the Liverpool Telescope's Data Archive. Together they sifted through all available data for each of the objects they chose, stacking and combining the frames. Göran used the program Nebulosity for stacking, following up with Adobe Photoshop for final contrast enhancements that reveal hitherto unseen fine detail. Wim performed the same tasks entirely with the single package PixInsight.
The result is over seventy stunning full-colour pictures of famous and some not-so-famous astronomical objects. We are certainly delighted with the pictures, and thank Göran and Wim for allowing us to host their work on our website.
Useful links:
