Remember when we used to wait a week for film to get developed from the observatory?

I dug out some old prints from the 2002 Leonid meteor shower and compared them to a stack I just took with my DSLR. The new ones show way more detail and color, you can actually see the dust trails. What's the oldest astronomy photo you've managed to improve with modern gear?

3 comments

3 Comments

williamprice12d ago

Saw a piece about someone reprocessing old Voyager data with new software. They pulled out details from those 70s probes that were basically invisible on the original prints. Makes you realize how much we missed back then, just hiding in the noise. My own attempts are way more humble, just cleaning up some grainy shots of Saturn I took as a kid with a film SLR. The rings look like smudged chalk in the old version, but stacking the scans brought out the Cassini Division. It's wild what you can rescue.

robert_jones12d ago

Stacked 20 old Jupiter shots, @williamprice, and saw the bands clear for the first time.

thomas8323h ago

Wow, we were basically blind back then!