Saturn 4/26

After a disappointing evening last night with the clouds, tonight we had a decent evening to photograph.  I shot some video using the 70mm and the 114mm reflector.  I believe the reflector is not collimated properly.  The focus was bad, and inward and outward focus was not correct, with a lot of coma and distortion.  However I'm somewhat pleased with the refractor images.  Here they are:

 The first 3 were captured using Sharpcap, the other 2 were captured in WxAstroCapture.  Apparently I dont have the saturation in the 2nd program quite right, they were very "green", I touched them up somewhat in photoshop.  It is interesting however, as to the difference in sharpness.  I did not touch focus whatsoever between the 3rd image and the 4th and 5th.

I'm glad the weather finally broke to the point that I was able to photograph.  Everything appears to be working pretty well, the dew heater did its job, as the car windows were covered in dew, and so was the unheated parts of the telescope.  It didnt take long for the dew to settle, but the lens was nice and dry the entire time.

Dew Heater & the Clouds

Went out and found a clear sky, so I packed up the telescope and set it up for another Saturn shot.  This time, I swapped the scopes on the mount and attached the 70mm to the mount.  Finished the dew heater tonight, and built some cradles for the 2 refractors over the weekend. to make it easier to swap scopes.

The stuff worked perfectly, the dew heater is warming things up nicely, possibly too nicely.  I'm going to have to build some kinda controller, which wont be too difficult.  I powered the heater directly off of a 12V battery, and it was getting much too warm.

Anyway, with it all set up, I found Saturn, inserted the barlow, and did some fine focusing, and just as I was ready to shoot, Saturn disappeared from the screen.  Looked up and a massive wall of clouds moved in from the west.  This has happened to me more than I can count.  It has been raining continuously for the last week with the exception of one evening, and when I saw stars tonight, I got my hopes up for some nice Saturn photos.  If I had another 15 minutes, I would have pictures here instead of me sitting here rambling and complaining about the weather....

Oh well, such is life in Northeast Ohio!

New Infrared Blocking Filter

Received an infrared blocking filter on Friday, and waited for the first clear day to try it out.  I really wanted to try photographing the moon, but being it is waning, it rises too late now.  Saturn has always been difficult for me, so I figured I'd try Saturn again with the filter.

The transparency was bad, but the planet was visible.  I couldnt detect too much variation with the seeing.  As always, the haze illuminated the area around the planet, and as you can see from the various images the rings are not very well defined.  However, take a peek at the body of the planet.  It seems there is much more contrast with the IR block filter installed in the camera.

This is the result of the stacking (198 frames).

After some green removal in photoshop, then some wavelet sharpening, and the elimination of the gray background in iris, this is what I came up with.

I  then thought about splitting the RGB by saving the image as a .fit, loading each in Gimp and converting each to a jpg.  The results of the 3 monochrome images representing each of the colors is presented here:

This is the red channel

This is the green channel

This is the blue channel

Notice how dark the NEB appears in each of these images.  I dont think I have ever resolved the NEB to this extent without the filter.  It will be interesting as to the effect of the filter on the moon and other planets when I'm able to photograph them.

Gassendi

I believe this to be Gassendi and Mare Humorum.  Unfortunately thats what happens sometimes when you just look around on the moon looking for what would look like a good picture.  Thing is, I had to look on my wall map, and as best I can tell, the crater on top is Gassendi.  It is near the terminator when the moon is 11 days, 10 hours old.

Eudoxus and Calippus & Montes Caucasus

Here is another image in my mountain range series, Montes Caudasus, including Eudoxus and Calippus.

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Plato & Montes Alpes

4/13 I took a bunch of video of different areas of the moon.  This one is of Plato  and Montes Alpes.  Cassini crater and Aristillus are also shown in Mare Imbrium

 [Logitech Webcam C160]
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