£700 vs £7,000,000: Astrophotography Shoot Out

last month the seven million pound nicholas you male 4 meter telescope at kipp peak took this picture of spiral galaxy m106 which is 20 million light years away i know amazing isn't it now surely only an idiot just work could possibly think they could get something as good as that with something like this [Music] my 600 pound rig it's actually 700 quid since i've swapped out the amount but you know thereabouts and yet and yet according to the physics there might be a way and the reason is the atmosphere the wobbly atmosphere makes everything we see from earth look blurry take the moon for example if you look at it through a big scope you can see the atmospheric wobbles quite clearly and as soon as a scope gets above six inches the size of our red devil here the atmosphere is the critical thing the atmosphere is what holds all telescopes back even two kilometers up on the top of kitt peak there is still enough atmosphere above this giant telescope to stop it getting anywhere close to its full potential because even though its mirror is basically the size of this roof it's not overcoming the wobbly atmosphere the mind-blowing thing is that if we could somehow magically get rid of the wobbly atmosphere then our little six-inch scope here could theoretically match the resolution of the giant scope that sits on top of kitt peak and us amateurs have got a really clever way of overcoming the wobbly atmosphere that the big boys aren't employing 15 years ago nerds like damien peach she pioneered a way of getting past the wobbly atmosphere when imaging the planets the results are yeah and if we can do the same thing with galaxies then the world's army of amateurs can become a truly powerful force especially if we club together because on its own my scope will take ages to collect as many photons as what kit pete does but lots of scopes sharing data could get enough in one night so the technique is called lucky imaging all our hopes rest on it but potentially it can turn a cheap little rig like this one into an amazing million dollar telescope i know it does sound absolutely mad but this is what we're going for [Music] to match the resolution of the big scope we're going to need to transform our cheap scope into a super sharp astrograph this is an antique telescope we're going to need to somehow get more performance out of our budgeting mount i remember that it is fantastic and we're gonna have to go somewhere dark what the hell is it where i may or may not get attacked by aliens it's coming towards me and see whether our little six incher doing the lucky imaging thing come on can match the shot of m106 taken by the giant 7 million pound scope on top of kit peak really this is pretty revolutionary [Music] of course in order to do that we are going to need to make this scope optically as perfect as it can be and that all starts with getting the right mirror in the back of the scope now i've got three cheat mirrors to choose from hopefully one of them will be good enough it could be the original edmond scientific mirror that came with this 50 year old ebay purchase 50 pounds got it now i'm really hoping this american mirror isn't the best one because in the last video we chopped down the red tube so that we could bring to focus the faster f5 focal ratio mirror that lives in this shorter white tube because this mirror was hand ground in russia by the legendary optics company tau tau is supposed to make brilliant mirrors and if i was a betting man i'd bet on this one but it might be that high-tech robotically ground mirrors trump old-school hand-ground mirrors so i've gotten this modern mirror like the ones you find in most modern telescopes one that's been mass-produced in china's optical manufacturing mega city chang [Music] so three mirrors china america and russia three super powers in the telescope world let's find out which mirror is best hello yeah hi hello terry nice to meet you hi pierce is a master mirror maker and he and his gang at the camden mirror makers association can tell how good a mirror is simply by passing a light in front of it it is incredible that just a light bulb and a straight edge we'll show you deviations by sort of a millionth of an inch the foucault test is so sensitive it is ruined by even heat coming off a hand okay let's see if the russian mirror is going to live up to the hype tasting there's a big there's a nice little rain ridge around it take a look at this that's not good is it oh man the russian mirror has an imperfection [Music] a tiny ridge three quarters of the way out as far as i can tell it could be a fractionally overcrowded towards the edge and under coast towards the middle there's no way this russian mirror could take on the giant scope on kit peak let's have a look at another one shall we hopefully this robotically ground chinese mirror will get much closer to perfection [Music] [Applause] so it's very close to the edge but i think the edge is very slightly under corrected looks like modern mirrors ground out by robots are about as good as old-school mirrors ground out by hand neither of them are all four they probably both look as if they're about one-eighth wave accuracy taking on the giant scope with either of these mirrors would be a waste of time all right now we're clutching at straws because the only mirror i got left cost me along with a mount and the rest of the scope 52 pound spookily it has some links with a giant mirror they're both 50 years old and both were ground out in the tucson valley under the shadow of kipp peak that's the best one is it that's the smoothest one yes this looks extremely good this one as far as i see by the very gentle shadow it's probably spot on the mirror is so good all the society members want to check it out that's beautiful what you're thinking that's fantastic really that's really beautiful yeah it's like a henry moore sculpture whereas the other two are a henry moore sculpture which he let one of his assistants do and they didn't quite finish it properly right oh wow yeah really fantastic it is amazing incredibly this old cheap american mirror is good enough to give the four meter mirror a run for its money i just wish i hadn't butchered the scope this mirror lives in but um you know that's really nice do you know what i've done yes stuff i um cut the uh tube down to f5 because i assumed i'd be using an f5 mirror oh crap oh dear i could sacrifice actually if it was an antique telescope wasn't it well it was on ebay and no one bought it so it's still an antique telescope oh dear yeah but there we are what can we say looks like i've really stuffed up you're too impatient you didn't give yourself astronomy is a very slow subject you didn't give yourself time yeah mine oops terry clearly was not happy with me uh chopping up the antique mirror oh deer and by the reaction on everyone's faces when they saw that mirror and how good it was then uh i feel pretty bad too see you terry turns out i might have a shot of redemption nowhere you can probably hear it and put it back together if you've really had just totally destroyed it i've cut it too short can't you bond it back on again you can get all those super glues and things bond it back together just necessarily put a band around the outside just to keep it keep it trimmed yeah i think i'll do that it's much easier really if i can get hold of the bit uncle sam chopped off what do you want to do with this little bit no that's i don't need that then i should be able to repair the american scope hey man how you doing if i know you were coming i'd have done my hair yeah really good harry the wood thing is good i can't find your uh pizza tube though you haven't got the tube i think somebody's cleaned them out this is gone dude at this point in all honesty the mission is on the rocks but i ain't giving up i spent two months hunting down a replacement tube that was within budget and a month refining the tube with a fancy thin spider vein system but all this was in vain because then this happened sam you alright yeah kids found something oh yeah what you joking one minute wasn't there next minute was you read the next four months later it was oh man did you need it to be honest i am a little bit lost for words but i think we should now inform kitt peak that it's game on on the astro biscuit discord server there is a 3d printer factory channel and for the price of a few biscuits i was able to order up this hey rory here it is all finished all done so with any look you can get your telescope put back together best of luck mark mate thank you i love this 3d printing thing and look it fits now that our super sharp mirror has a home we don't want anything dampening its performance there's a blooming gray obstruction that sits right in front of the primary mirror it's the secondary mirror the secondary mirror's obstruction loses us resolution the light hits the obstruction and kind of makes ripples and the larger your obstruction the more ripples and the more blurriness is created normally you can't just check in a smaller secondary mirror because it won't be big enough to collect all the light from the primary mirror and some will spill out the front but now we've got a longer tube [Music] by the way thanks for the awesome graphics sam it takes ages for the light from the primary mirror to reach our secondary mirror which means the light cone gets really tiny which means we only need a tiny 35 millimeter wide secondary annoyingly though the longer tube means the camera has to get closer to the tube to reach focus and this tool focuser won't allow that to happen so we're gonna have to use this which isn't great so i'm using this really crappy focuser because it is short short enough to reach focus [Music] and finally to avoid unwanted internal reflections like what we got on the horse head last time out i'm painting everything that ain't a mirror black she's only gone and come back isn't she what a beauty and even though she's cheap her fantastic mirror and tiny secondary should make her razor sharp you better watch out kit peek because we're coming only we're not coming just yet because there's a few other sources of blurriness we need to fix first like the mount whose job is to spin in exactly the opposite direction to what the earth does a kit peaks mount is blooming awesome and suffers from almost no mount wobble having no mount wobble is what us amateurs dream of because if you imagine that this is a star and inside of the photons of the photons of the star are flying out and they're heading towards earth and they're heading towards the sensor this is the sensor on the back of our telescope you know like the camera well if you've got no mount wobble then this happens all the photons from the star end up going in one pixel my last map however wobbled by 1.4 arc seconds it's gone mad so the light coming in from a star would have hit the sensor like this i know it looks hokey but actually the amount of wobble relative to the size of the pixels is correct and this shows you clearly why mount wobble leads to blurry images my new mount though even though it's 25 years old is awesome it's got professionally tuned and it only wobbles by 0.8 arc seconds this is what happens with the new mount it's much much better but it's still not perfect and unfortunately this mission that we're doing is so tough that actually 0.8 arc seconds isn't good enough we really need to get our wobble down to below 0.5 arc seconds to stand the chance of matching the kick peak scope south of london in an undisclosed village in a shed at the bottom of an undisclosed garden lives the wobble killer david dave from dart frame hello the yoda of amateur mounts i brought you this it's not actually some sandwiches oh wow i remember that yes it is absolutely fantastic i only know about dave woods because the previous owner of my wonderful mount had gotten dave to tune it some years ago i'm such a lucky boy aren't i yeah so i've gotten a hold of this especially for the price you did you did well so can dave make a good mount even better this is what we call a buttermilk one so it's quite old this one dates around about 2006 so it's 14 years old yeah so the fact that you can run sub-arc seconds great obviously a new version this if we had a virgin mount to work with you'd be looking around about point four my old mount might not manage point four but dave might be able to get it close this is good one especially if you've got a sky watcher run the right voltage now i thought the right voltage was 12 volts being as it says 12 volts if you add just an extra volt or two that actually lowers all the spikiness that you get in your tracking errors that is an absolute golden nugget is is that just because the motors have a little bit more oomph and so when it comes across it actually increases the torque and it makes such a difference thanks mate that's awesome and thanks for tweaking my worm gear spacing fingers crossed it's gonna work the last thing we've got to do is the one thing that kit pete can't and that's overcome the wobbly atmosphere using the technique known as lucky imaging lucky imaging is so obvious that you'll be surprised that people haven't been doing it before instead of taking a handful of say five minute long shots like what i did when i shoot in the whirlpool galaxy you take hundreds if not thousands of much shorter say five second shots then you throw away all the shots that the atmosphere has made too blurry leaving just the nice crisp shots that just happened to have been shot during a moment of lucky atmospheric calm old-school ccd cameras aren't really very good at it but new cmos sensor cameras are these cameras have a really low read noise which means you can take loads of really short exposures and stack them on top of each other and get good results the exact model of camera i'm using was inspired by my nemesis this is the anti-biscuit a robotic telescope called stelina is actually pretty blooming good however the camera does benefit from being cooled down which can be done for under 10 pounds if you use a peltier cooler a computer fan and fix it all together with a 3d plastic thingy oh and a sock [Music] all right folks this is where it gets exciting [Music] this is my first ever my first ever astro car night [Music] i've had a tip-off about a dark geeky location surprisingly close to london church is there oh here we are this is going to be our home for the next 12 hours london is 20 miles that way the thing we're gonna shoot galaxy m106 will be appearing ah right where those trees are hmm it's cost me 700 quid that by the way and i know i've been very lucky with the mount and very lucky with the with this with the mirror as well but for 700 quid if she does what i hope she's going to be able to do with this lucky imaging technique then you know really really this is pretty revolutionary of course that's only gonna hold water if we manage to pull this off and there is no guarantee that we will win or lose i will however show you the result unfortunately setting up a telescope attracts clouds it's a bit like red rag to a ball and i'm getting the screaming ebg biz because i spotted someone walking past the church all right i'm getting in the car possibly locking the door [Music] there is one bit of good news though we're not shooting that way so the glow from london is mad happily though we're looking up there and it gets i mean the gradient of light is so extreme it's like i need my sunglasses almost at night to look that way but this way is dark and that's where the galaxy is and it's actually beginning to get clear i better get going let's go i gotta say this faker is a pain [Music] is the galaxy in the center come on oh look look there it is all right let's get phd two guiding so dave you're gonna be happy huh 0.6 rms error she's ready for battle let's see if the red devil can turn the world of astrophotography on its head the target is 23 million light years that way now we are going to begin this adventure come on red devil come on i'm kicking off by taking a thousand five second long shots i can see little bits of cloud inside the center core i mean i think we're getting stunning resolution already look how calm it is out there tonight really it's just perfect absolutely perfect [Music] at 2 15 this happens okay two very weird lights over there two very weird lights can you see them the lights are hovering very low on the far side of the field okay this is a bit spooky what the hell is it there are these two lights that are just like flying around you can make it up [Music] i really don't want to turn my light on now well there's one there now and the other's going up there i mean this makes perfect youtube material isn't it but i it's coming towards me so i did what any reasonable man would do and tried to hide underneath the dashboard i waited a bit and when i popped my head up it had vanished cool that did get me that got me it's gonna take many many many nights for the red devil to catch as many photons as kit pete's giant mirror not that it'll make a big difference imaging the core which has loads of photons coming from it anyway but the faint outer edges of the galaxy that's when you need more photons so i'm going to let it run till dawn and i'm going to come back to this field as often as i can so night night everyone night night thing that's rustling in the bushes high night ufos i'm going to bed and night night red devil what amazing job you are doing honestly i think this is really going to be something special oh 5 a.m [Music] could it be our friends have returned that's jupiter it's not a ufo [Music] still probably worth getting out of dodge quickly before farmer balimo mows over our barlows the next night wasn't looking quite so good now it's not looking great right now if you look out the window i don't know if you can see the windscreen anyway it's raining i had to wait until two in the morning before the skies cleared oh nothing like sitting in a field on your own by a graveyard with a pretty cold cup of tea [Music] the night after that the skies were clear but i was so tired i didn't notice that the red devil was a bit out of collimation and i had to throw everything that i shot that night away i've got like six hours worth of data here which isn't great and it's way less than what kit pete got even so it's actually turned out pretty well here it is if you compare it with kit peek's shot you can see that kit peaks galaxy is way brighter but we knew that and the thing is there's only one kit peak but there's hundreds there's probably thousands maybe even tens of thousands of amateurs and many of us have got reflectors like this red devil and if we club together we'd be able to match kit peaks photon cap and we'd be able to get the outer edges of the galaxy beautiful and sharp just like what kit peak has the real question is can we match kit peaks resolution and that's what this test is about and that's what we're about to find out traditionally even big amateur scopes like this one have fallen short let me show you this trevor jones from astro backyard shot this beautiful shot from his light polluted backyard he's doing very well here you can even see the little hydrogen jets sprouting out which is amazing just shows what you can do from an urban location even so trevor's big scope was unable to compete with kit peak in terms of resolution and that is kind of like the standard resolution that you're going to be able to get doing everything perfectly in the old way of doing things let's find out how much more detail lucky imaging buys us the only place we're going to be able to see whether my low photon count shot in place we're going to see if it matches kit peak is in the core on the left we've got the standard way of doing it in the middle our lucky imaging technique and on the right kit peak we're gonna focus on the dark dust clouds that are circling the galaxy's core about here is where astro backyard shot the resolution starts to fall apart and as far as i'm concerned we're still good to carry on let's go in a bit further shall we and please do me a favor and try and ignore the absolutely astonishing red hydrogen alpha jets in the kit pete shot because those are photon count dependent let's just concentrate on the dark clouds i have to say it's looking astonishingly good that that is incredible as far as i'm concerned i honestly can't tell you which one is sharper it's so exciting fellow nerds we could be at the dawn of a new golden age of amateur astronomy where we capture things that even the professionals struggle to get we can match the resolution of multi-million dollar scopes the next step is to see if we join forces whether we can match the giant scopes photon count too yeah it's game on if we club together then we've got ourselves a humongously powerful amateur telescope a big amateur telescope big project though big project [Music] as we speak the very beautiful and talented geeks and ryan from the astrobiscuit discord server are setting up a platform where we can coordinate and share data and you can join us right now by clicking on the link to the big amateur telescope below so please please please please share this video to anyone who you think might be interested so that we can get this big amateur telescope working and if you want to find out what kind of level you need to be at what kind of kit you need to join in then please check out my website and don't be fooled the sharpest telescopes aren't necessarily the most expensive so links below but an 8-inch f4 or even a 10-inch f4 would be amazing and if you do want an incredible mirror then why not look at orion optics uk these guys make mirrors as good as my old edmond optics and if you mention astro biscuit in the special request section then i will get commission and i need every penny i can get at the moment which is why i want to say a massive thank you to my patrons especially felix and fabio thanks guys thanks all patrons big thanks to the super clever nerds on the astro biscuit discord server it's a lovely lovely community please come and join us onechap has even managed to build a community astrograph which can be piloted from the server huge thanks to richtenstein for doing the incredible music his album is in the link below and here are a selection of astro biscuits best videos and maybe a big company could sponsor the big amateur telescope this was a good one wasn't it despite the fact that i got properly schooled by the mirror guys all right laters

Channel: Astrobiscuit

Views: 271,868

Keywords: deep space lucky imaging, astrophotography, hi resolution astrophotography, astronomy, astrobackyard, newtonain, secondary obstruction, CMOS sensor camera, galaxy M106, Nicolas U Mayall, kitt peak observatory, lucky imaging, short exposure astrophotography, star wars, astrophotography shoot out, kitt peak, edmund optics, orion optics uk, budget telescope, cheap astrophotography

Id: 4rCyC3_YIME

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheForgetfulMe]

Fun video. Watched it this morning.

[u/N2DPSKY]

I scoffed when I saw the title, but I enjoyed the video quite a bit. I love the humor. Well done.

[u/DonJbari]

He’s the best in the game in my opinion love the fact that all his videos don’t revolve around 5k+ rigs and try’s to make do on a minimum budget and show people that anyone with any budget can get into the hobby. Also his commentary is top level, could easily see him doing a BBC show

[u/Joesdad65]

Does anyone else see an ad for chicken biscuits? I don't think it's a coincidence.

[u/Capt_Johnville]

Been watching him since December, was the one that kicked off my interest in the hobby. His videos have very nice quality and editing, plus the humor adds to the unique feeling. Thumbs up!

[u/imahole69]

I love this guy discovered him last year in may before he even had 10k subs i love the guy and his content and he is an inspiration to push my gear to the limits cause if he can do it so can i and its so good seeing an astrophotography youtuber do something different FOR ONCE

[u/tolmoo]

Oh hey I was actually in this one

[u/DarkMain]

So the guy that made Autostakkert (The software planetary imagers use for lucky imagining) actually does his DSO images using the same technique.

http://www.astrokraai.nl/viewimages.php?t=y&category=7
The site is very out of date (the last image he posted in the DSO section was way back in September 10th 2016) but it goes to show that this technique was viable 5+ years ago.

He uses a much larger scope (16" dob) and I believe its on an EQ platform but overall the technique is the same. (LOTS of short exposures).

[u/kingcon35]

Glad to see Astro biscuit posted here his videos are great!