Wild life in the city is amazing. Yesterday a Tiger Swallow Tail butterfly graced us with its presence for a few minutes, in the middle of Houston. I took the opportunity to play with the Sony 70-200 f/2.8 and Sony A7RIII and improvised, a few pictures in my front yard, all hand held. In macro,Continue reading “Tiger Swallow tail”
Category Archives: Photography
Objects moving in the sky
When close to both their perhelion and to Earth, comets can have a fast motion relative to the background sky. This is also the time when they are the brightest. If using very fast optics (the C11 + hyperstar, at f/2 for 280mm of aperture is well suited), it is possible make a video ofContinue reading “Objects moving in the sky”
Taking a picture of the most luminous blazar flare ever recorded.
A blazar is an active galactic nucleus with a relativistic jet (a jet composed of ionized matter traveling at nearly the speed of light) directed towards the observer. CTA 102 is a blazar-type quasar discovered in the early 1960s in the constellation Pegasus. It is also one of the two great false alarms in theContinue reading “Taking a picture of the most luminous blazar flare ever recorded.”
Simeis 147, the Spaghetti nebula
Simeis 147, also known as the Spaghetti Nebula or Sharpless 2-240 is a supernova remnant in Taurus. It was discovered so late (1952), because it’s dim. I was curious to see what was possible on the low end from my site with the Borg 55 and a H-Alpha filter. So here it is. I haveContinue reading “Simeis 147, the Spaghetti nebula”
Orion H-Alpha mosaic
This is my first H alpha mosaic, using the Borg 55. It was acquired over the winter of 2018-2019, and one of the goals was to image the Barnard loop (Sh 2-276), a supernova remnant. The mosaic is centered on the horse head dark nebula (Barnard 33). https://erellaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Barnard33.jpg
Colorizing old black and white pictures with deoldify
I was looking for a cool Machine Learning project, using Python, of course, and either PyTorch or Tensor Flow, since it’s what the cool kids are doing those days. I have also always had an interest in restoration of old pictures, and sometimes colorizing them, which is a very tedious & time consuming project ifContinue reading “Colorizing old black and white pictures with deoldify”