Artefact: Virtual Astronomy

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About Artefact: Virtual Astronomy

How to use digital artefacts to carry out virtual astronomy in the comfort of your own home:

Take a photo with your lense cap on if you have a digital SLR, or a timer photo of the depths of your sock-drawer if you have a camera that doesn't allow this. It may help if you take other steps towards getting a totally black image.

Open up your apparently black image in photoshop or similar editor and use 'levels' or whatever your exposure control is to crank the brightness up all the way until sparse constellations of artefact stars appear. Zooming in on these will reveal, if you are lucky, colourful nebulae and galaxies among the monochromatic stellar and quasistellar objects.

Crop these objects tightly (they will only be a few pixels across) and enlarge them (or crop them with the crop dimensions and dpi set big) then tweak the brightness further.

If you are feeling creative you might like to name your discoveries, alternatively leave others to make suggestions.