Just happened to notice that The Bad Astronomer is one of the photo credits for today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (a very nice Hubble Space Telescope starfield from the Large Magellanic Cloud).
Good for him, I didn’t know the name, but I saw the photo.
That’s a great site.
That’s realy cool stuff. I love those Hubble shots.
I’ve done quite a bit of astrophotography myself but, not having my own space telescope puts me at a disadvantage. 
I have a Hubble screensaver and background. Nothing so far beats what I’ve seen from that space telescope. But, I am constantly amazed at the capabilities of land based scopes too.
It lets all us urbanized folks know that there is alot more out there than Star Trek, football, NIN, whatever…
Wouldn’t it be nice if we get the whole world to turn off the outside lights for one night? Just to see the night sky. [sigh…]
Heh. Well, the story behind my role in that picture is long and probably not terribly interesting. I actually came in long after the observations were made. I did some preliminary work on it, and then we handed the whole kit-and-kaboodle off to someone else to tackle more thoroughly. It was my idea to submit it to the Hubble Heritage people, and they processed it to make it look pretty.
It’s a nice image. My job was to count stars in it, believe it or not. Eliot Malumuth (also cited in the APOD page) and I wrote some fun software to do that. As I recall, there are more than 40,000 stars in the lower left hand square alone…
Can you describe how that star-counting software works? I assume it works by contrast, but can you tell a bit about the user interface?
NoClueBoy, you mean you don’t have a space telescope yet? Hmmm… I’ll see what Santa can do for you next year!
Anyway, I think The Bad Astronomer should change his name to:
“The Pretty Good Astronomer On Certain Days When The Light
Isn’t to Bright Otherwise I Kick Ass” Astronomer.
Or not. 