ajamesmccarthy posts
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Our sun in 230 megapixels
This is a massive mosaic made from over 100,000 individual images. By far my most ambitious solar project, and with orders of magnitude more detail than anything I've previously attempted. Zoom in and check out those juicy details!!
Happy Easter! Celestial Events in April
Hello and a happy Easter to all who celebrate it!April is deep in the heart of "Galaxy Season", since te Orion spur sets too early to do any kind of meaningful observations with it, and the milky way core doesn't rise until the wee hours of the morning. That means when you look up at night, you are looking ...
My most detailed lunar and solar shots combined
I'll also give you a look at how an image evolves, since I decided to keep working on this one after posting it here... take a look at the attached. A smoother transition between moon/sun I felt was in order, and made the contrast between the two halves a little more subtle. I'm not sure if it's better nece...
A collaboration piece- This is Thor's Helmet
A dying star shaping the vast clouds of an emission nebula sculpt this incredible scene. This is a combination of a friend's narrowband data and my color data. (My data is available to aspiring astrophotography patrons if you want to take a crack at processing this)
22 new Wallpapers from 11 different images. Let me know if you have any requests!
Thanks for your support! Been a slow month for me for imaging, a lot of equipment issues and bad weather making things a challenge. Either way, here are some new wallpapers, cut from the high quality originals from my latest images, including one that is 2 years old and previously only available as a paid wallpaper on ...
What's up with the sun today?
The sun has some nice little active regions and a few prominences, as seen in this picture I took today. Nothing too crazy, but it sure looks interesting. During processing, I composited it against a starry backdrop to show how it would appear in space if it weren't NEARLY as bright.
The Pencil Nebula from a 17" Scope
This is actually not from my telescope, but from one down in Chile. A few members of the astrophotography community are challenging astrophotographers to try their hand at processing the data from this telescope, and this was my image from the data. This was shot at nearly 3,000mm, so is highly magnified.What you'r...
The Horse and the Flame
The Horsehead and Flame nebulas are star forming regions of space located around the leftmost star of Orion's Belt. The Horserhead is rich in Hydrogen, which gives it such a vibrant red color. This was captured over a 2 hour period from my backyard.I find this area looks particularly stunning in just the Hydrogen A...
Lightpainting meets HDR photography: I call it "Luna in 2121"
This was done by Shooting the moon as usual, and then creating a special device (a mix of 3d printed parts with household items) to hold small lights in a circle, which was mounted on my equatorial mount and then spun in a circle. The images were combined digitally to create this view.
Celestial Events in March
Howdy Patrons! Winter is coming to an end, and along with it, the winter constellations. The coming months are known as "Galaxy Season" among as astrophotographers, because our night sky is pointed away from out own galaxy and out into intergalactic space, so that will be the theme of more of my images in the c...
The space station buzzing by Copernicus this morning at 3am
This was a unique transit for me- in addition to costing me all but 2 hours of sleep, it also is the first time I was able to identify a structural change in the ISS from my shots! Right now in prep for an EVA, solar panels are perpendicular to each other, where ordinarily both sets would be face on towards the sun The...
There is a 250k mile wide arc of plasma on the sun right now
Check it out with Jupiter for scale
Really pushed my equipment hard for the last 24 hours. Here's a 778 megapixel image of the moon
This composite image is the result of around 50,000 16-bit images, stacked and sharpened using a wide range of tools, to produce one of the sharpest images I've managed so far. The faintly visible portion of the unlit side as well as the starry backdrop are composited in as an aesthetic choice, as this more accurat...
The sun spat out a 100,000 miles long flame of plasma yesterday
This image is inverted to highlight the prominences at the top, one of which is a huge plasma stream being ejected into space.
How big is the moon? Here's a few images that show the moon to scale to a few Earthly objects
On the last picture, The countries are (roughly from left to right) Taiwan, Ireland, Jamaica, Fiji, Hawaii, Iceland, and New Zealand. All these are to scale, to give you a since of how massive the moon is.
Today's the day! Perserverence lands on Mars. I processed some hubble data to "celebrate"
I'm waiting patiently for the (hopefully) good news that Perserverence has successfully touched down on Mars, which will happen in about 4 hours. This image is A composite created from Hubble's Mars data and my own shot of the Milky Way Core.FYI, this hubble data is available to anyone. I downloaded it here: ht...
Image Salvage Operation: The Grand Conjunction
Many of you may have been following my Journey the evening of 12/21/20, when I was attempting to photograph a once-in-a-lifetime conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. An unforecasted wall of fog rolled in early, before the sun set, so sadly I did not have much to work with, and I assumed the evening was completeley ruined...
Happy Valentines day! Here's a quick look at the Pleiades
This was captured in about 40 minutes from dark-ish skies.
The sun yesterday. Unlike most of my shots, this one shows the corona.
The Corona of the sun was captured the day of the great American Eclipse, and superimposed into this Hydrogen-Alpha shot catured yesterday. The Corona is frequently shifting, so It probably doesn't look exactly like this right now, but it is a good reference for the relative size and shape of the sun's outermos...
How Orion looks to cameras in dark skies
This is the orion constellation- but it's hard to tell at first. You can see the bright orange betelgeuse in the upper left, and the belt about 2/3rds in from the left at the center. At the bottome of the belt is the horsehead and flame nebulae, and to the below right of that is the famous Orion nebula (which I rec...
A study of Orion
If you look deep into Orion's Scabbard, you will find a bright mass of stars hidden within a foggy envelope of interstallar gas. In long exposures, rich colors surface, showing the vibrant pinks and blues the burning oxygen and hydrogen emit. By blending data collected in true color and false color, I captured my m...
A different look at our moon
I've shared a lot of moon pics with you, usually focused on creating an image that reflects what your eyes can see (sometimes with colors enhanced of course). This time I processed the image with an inverted luminance layer to enhance the lunar texture, and show where the moon once flowed with magma (the brighter r...
New Desktop and Mobile wallpapers- Including from an image never seen before!
I included desktop and mobile wallpapers from my recent images, as well as a sneak peek at something I may or may not post- a unique way of processing a moon image to reveal the rich composition of the moon!Any requests for a specific size, etc, let me know!
Celestial events in February
I've been getting a bit stir crazy with the terrible weather I've faced in Sacramento over the last few months, so I plan on making trips to darker skies this month. This is a quiet period for celestial events- so I included some more challenging observations I would ordinarily have skipped. See if you're u...
Horrific weather right now... reprocessed a shot from a year ago when conditions were better, as well as a technical writeup on how this sort of thing is captured.
Since I can't bring you fresh original content right now, I thought I'd do a patreon- only write-up of the more technical details behind a shot like this. This is the pinwheel galaxy, one of the galaxies in our local group. This image was captured over many nights from my light polluted skies to bring out the f...
