I recently downloaded the free evaluation copy of Russ Croman’s StarXTerminator program – which basically does what it says on the tin. I also saw a recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on APOD and was once again flabbergasted at the absolutely dreadful EIGHT diffraction spikes around bright stars. So I thought I would try an experiment and see what StarXTerminator would do on a JWST image. I was expecting StarXTerminator to do a good job on removing stars but I was expecting it to leave a lot of the diffraction spikes behind. In the images above you can actually see what happened. StarXTerminator did an absolutely superb job on removing both stars AND diffraction spikes. A quick run of “Despeckle” in Photoshop really cleaned up the background and the “Spot Healing Brush” tool cleared up a couple of stragglers. I really think Russ should be in serious discussion with NASA on how to clean up their JWST images.
This is what Einstein was referring to of course when he came up with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox for Quantum Mechanics. I have written about this subject before and I even researched it for most of a Sabattical without coming to any definite conclusions. It still didn’t make sense to me. Then, maybe about a year ago, someone made a throwaway remark that made the whole thing crystal clear. The initial pair of particles created at time t=0 can be described by A SINGLE WAVEFUNCTION! And there is all you need to know. If the initial state can be described by a single wavefunction then it is absolutely no surprise whatsoever that if you measure a property of one of the particles at a later time t, then you can infer the same property for the other particle at the same time. There is no magic. There is no spooky action at a distance. Instead there is a single wavefunction which completely describes the situation. Now why this isn’t mentioned everytime there’s a discussion on the EPR paradox is completely beyond me.
Another pair of photomicromosaics (no focus-stacking). This time a Thyroid Gland (unknown creature) with 9 frames and a magnification of x20, and a Spinal Chord (again, creature unknown) with 19 frames and a magnification of x50.
In my different forms of photography there can be a vast range of exposure times used. For instance, in the solargraph image above the total exposure time is 6 months, or around 16 million seconds (16 x 10^6 seconds). The colliding water drop image, taken using an ultra high speed flashgun, has an exposure time of just 10 microseconds or 1 x 10^-5 seconds. The total range of exposure times from the shortest I do to the longest is therefore an almost unimaginable factor of 1.6 x 10^12!
The microscopy image for today, just assembled, is a 4-frame mosaic (no focus-stacking) x20 magnification image of Ascaria (hookworm). Cross-section prepared slide image.
A Helicon Focus 12-stack focus-stacked image of a Hydra at magnification x20. Not a particularly good stacking – it looks like it is going to take me quite some time to get as good as I was doing this a few years ago.
Here is a Helicon Focus focus-stacked image of a Lacewing – found dead on the mantlepiece – so no Lacewings were hurt in the taking of this image. Canon 5D MkII DSLR and L3000BHTG research trinocular microscope.
In order to show that the “dust” in the widefield Altair image really is tens of thousands of stars – I cropped the image in to Altair to show the enormous density of stars in this region. And yes – you’ve guessed it – this area lies within the Milky Way.
