Scientific Artist

Things certainly hotted up last night at the New Forest Observatory – not seen a display like this in over 10 years.

Needless to say, the photo was taken from indoors as it was just too scary to stand outside.

For the very first time, the New Forest Observatory is offering a portfolio of its finest deep-sky prints for you to purchase.

Full details can be found here.

The Canon 200mm f#2.8 prime lens gives remarkable performance for astroimages across the whole diagonal of a full frame sensor.  I am using the lens with a Canon 5D MkII (unmodified) which means that I can capture star fields quite well, but not the faint red emission nebulosity – and I have a massive field of view of 10 x 6.8 degrees to play with (where the diameter of a full Moon is just half a degree).

I also have a huge portfolio of faint deep-sky objects captured using the Hyperstar III – so I am now in the happy position of being able to grab huge star fields in one go using the DSLR and then filling in any faint objects using Hyperstar III data – a process called compositing.

The image below is a 10 x 6.8 degree deep-sky image centred on the Cocoon nebula in Cygnus.  Towards upper right we have open cluster M39, towards lower left is open cluster NGC 7209, and towards upper right is a large open cluster NGC 7243.  Trailing behind the Cocoon nebula we have the highly impressive dark nebulosity Barnard 168, one of the most high-impact naked-eye nebulosities in the northern hemisphere.

The combination of the 200mm/Canon 5D MkII and Hyperstar III data is going to feature highly in forthcoming deep-sky images from the New Forest Observatory.

This month’s image is a wide-field taken using the amazing Canon EF200 f#2.8 prime lens and a Canon 5D MkII DSLR.  Piggy-back mounted on the C11 I took 10 x 5-minute subs at ISO 400 and f#4 with an IDAS filter attached to the EF200.  As expected the Heart and Soul nebulae didn’t come out too well with the un-modified 5D MkII, but I am very pleased indeed with the nice round stars from corner to corner over a 10 x 6.8 degree field of view – something well beyond the capabilities of my refractors.  Looks like I will be using this rig for star fields and reasonably high resolution constellation shots.

Got today’s Earth Science Picture of the Day – EPOD – http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2013/09/navigators-companion.html -with an image of Polaris.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.  That is EPOD number 53 for me

This month’s Image of the Month is a stacked-focus photomicromosaic of a Dragonfly’s eye.  Even at a low magnification of only x20 the Dragonfly’s eye is still far too big to fit into a single frame using the Canon 5D MkII.  This means a mosaic has to be constructed from several individual frames.  In addition, in order to keep the whole of the eye in focus each frame must also be a focus-stacked series of images.  This means that taking a focus-stacked photomicromosaic as seen in this image is a painstaking business – but somebody’s got to do it

The Double Cluster and Stock 2 taken with a DSLR – sparkle version.

I recently bought Canon’s EF 200mm f#2.8 prime lens for some deep-sky imaging with the Canon 5D MkII.  To say I am highly impressed with this lens’ performance is a massive understatement – it is fantabulous!

Last night was “first light” for the EF 200mm and I imaged the Double Cluster region and the region around M31.  Note that the field of view is around 9.5 x 6.5 degrees and we have perfect round stars from corner to corner – this is AMAZING performance for a “daylight photography” lens.  It’s certainly more impressive than the refractors I use for the purpose – although at 200mm the focal length is a lot shorter and so the resolution is also quite a bit poorer.  That said – for wide-field deep-sky imaging I reckon this lens takes some beating.

The Double Cluster image was only 6 subs at 3-minutes per sub, f#4, ISO 800, IDAS filter.  The M31 image was just 10 subs at 5-minutes per sub again at f#4 but this time at ISO 400, again using an IDAS filter.

I am highly impressed with the performance of this lens and have a huge list of objects now on the whiteboard waiting to be imaged by this little beauty

Today I managed to get my 50th Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) posted

Thank you Jim for continuing to publish my work.

Science and God

Oh dear, that old Chestnut again, can anything new be said on the subject?  Probably not, but then again, as we are now in the 21st Century, perhaps it is a good time to re-assess the situation.

Can you picture the battered Galileo leaving the interrogation by the Inquisition muttering under his breath “And yet it moves”?  I can, very clearly, even though it is very likely that he never said those words at that time.  Whilst on the subject, do you know how long it was before the Roman Catholic Church (i.e. the incumbent Pope) actually apologised for this travesty?  We had to wait until the 31st October 1992 before Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how “the Galileo affair was handled”.  Better late than never I suppose.

Do “scientists” show any more tolerance or understanding towards Religious people?  Far from it, the last decade has seen plenty of venting from several individuals who believe their own Godless view of the Universe is the “correct” way to look at things.  Many “scientists” also express the opinion that as we learn more and more so the need for a God appears to be required less and less.  Those with these opinions are of course very amateur “scientists”; those working at the forefronts of Cosmology fully realise that we are a long way from any real understanding of the Universe we live in, and that a God (or Gods) could help us out in explaining some of the more cerebrally challenging details.

As I have mentioned in posts elsewhere, it is a rather ignorant Religious person who has no time for science, because like it or not, that’s the way the world operates.  Likewise it is an equally ignorant “scientist” who discounts the spiritual side of Homo Sapiens, because again, like it or not, that’s a level on which (most) humans operate.

The reason I have called this piece Science and God and not Science and Religion is quite simple.  I have said all I am going to say about Religion above, Religion is not the issue here, God is.  Religion is a mind-construct of Homo Sapiens.  Religion and associated concepts such as Heaven were created, as Kryten so brilliantly observed in Red Dwarf, “to try and prevent you guys from going nuts”.  I have no time for any religion whatsoever, purely man-made constructs cannot give any “true” answers to the God question.  They do seem however to be really good forums for pitting Homo Sapiens against Homo Sapiens.  But not having any religious interests does not equate to having no interest in the existence of a God (or Gods).  The God question is extremely interesting.

Does God exist?  Even Kurt Gödel wrote a piece trying to answer this question, so I guess it must be important.  The corollary of course is, if God exists, then what exactly is God?

I can be wrong right from the off on this one, but my “feeling” is (yes I am a member of Homo Sapiens I work with feelings as well as with numbers) – my feeling is that what we as a race call God is the Absolute Infinite.  So that is going to be my starting point, if you disagree with that, then it is pointless reading any further to get any God answers.

If God is the Absolute Infinite, the Ein Sof, then I think we are entering very interesting territory indeed.  Why?  Because I don’t believe there is ANYTHING in the physical Universe that is infinite.  I don’t believe there are an infinite number of photons, quarks or neutrinos.  Our Universe it appears is finite in size and contains a finite amount of stuff within it.  So everything we know (or ever will know) in the real physical world appears to be made out of finite quantities – Q.E.D. we won’t find God in the physical Universe.

Where do we find Infinities?  The only place I know of where we find Infinity and infinite quantities is in mathematics.  Now that’s strange.  We use mathematics to explain the real world to a high degree of accuracy, and we even carry out integrations over infinity to give answers that correspond to realities in the real world – and yet infinity does not seem to be part of the real world.

So am I saying that God is Mathematics?  No I am not.  But can you see that Mathematics might give us a clue as to what God actually is?  The Absolute Infinite was contemplated by Georg Cantor as an infinity that transcended the transfinite numbers.  It should be noted that Cantor equated the Absolute Infinite with God!  Cantor believed that the Absolute Infinite possessed mathematical properties including the reflection principle which states that every property of the Absolute Infinite is also held by some smaller object.  It is sad to relate that Georg Cantor, along with several other famous mathematicians/physicists who dared to venture into the realm of the infinite encountered severe mental problems which led to death.

We are now coming to the end of this piece.  How is it possible for a finite Mind to contemplate and work with infinite quantities?  I suppose the trite answer is that it cannot and it leads to madness and death, which in itself is extremely interesting observation, because as we all know “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad”.  But now consider the reason our finite minds can work with the Infinite is due to the reflection principle, so that every property of the Absolute Infinite is also held by some smaller object – ourselves for example!

I therefore believe it is possible for us “smaller objects” to know “the Mind of God” – but the quest is fraught with danger!!