Last night was the peak for this year’s Perseid meteor shower and the weather was reasonably kind with only occasional cloud until 2AM when it clouded over.
I’ve got a lot of photos to sort through but this image came from one of the longer exposures aimed at capturing the star background. A single 90 second exposure at ISO1600, f/3.5, 18mm.
Looking through the images I collected last night revealed 6 meteors, 2 aircraft & a lot of satellites. I’d taken 10 90 second images of the area around Cassiopeia which were stacked to provide the background. The images with meteors trails were then selected and using painted selection masks superimposed on the background using Photoshop.
Next time I will acquire the images slightly differently. Downloading them to the laptop results in a considerable time lapse between images. Capturing jpegs directly to the camera flash card with the camera locked on repeat would minimise the chance of missing meteors.
Comet C/2009 R1 (McNaught) is currently travelling through Perseus, low down in the pre-dawn sky. I managed to get a single 60 second exposure from New Mexico on GRAS-14, a Takashashi FSQ 106ED with an SBIG STL-11000M-ABG camera. The comet is currently 177 million kilometres from Earth and makes it’s closest approach on 15th June at 170 million kilometres.
I’ve had to remove a substantial background gradient on this image as this was just before dawn and it’s binned 3×3 to reduce the image size.
Got back from my first Spring star party on Sunday afternoon having arrived Friday evening. The event was wonderfully cloud free with a lack of aircraft contrails as well; something to do with a volcano in Iceland!
While the skies were clear there was more sky glow than I remember from the autumn event. On the first night there was a lot of moisture in the air with dew dripping off every surface pretty much from nightfall but on the second this didn’t start being a problem until after 2am, by which time I was thinking about bed.
On Friday I had problems getting the AstroTrac to track at all well but this had resolved itself by Saturday and I concentrated on Mars in M44 and M13 in Hercules. 24x 2 minute exposures at ISO400 through the ZenithStar 70.
M13 to follow.
Saturn is back in the evening sky. Having shot some three colour video sequences of Mars on the Celestron 9.25 I switched to Saturn which was just rising out of the murk at about 20 degrees elevation. The rings are just beginning to open out after last year’s edge on aspect and with the planet higher in the sky as it approaches opposition it should be favourable for imaging.
1500 frames each of red, green and blue video were stacked and combined for this image.
Once the cloud departed on Friday evening we were left with a pretty clear and still evening. Syrtis Major on Mars was clearly defined in the eyepiece of the club Celestron 9.25 so I attached a filter wheel with webcam and Astro Engineering x4 ImageMate for some pictures. All the videos were about 2000 frames long at 10fps and about half the frames were rejected during processing.
Eris was first discovered in January 2005 during further analysis of images originally taken at the Mount Palomar observatory in 2003. Initially called the Tenth Planet, it was reclassified, along with Pluto as a Dwarf Planet in 2006.
More massive than Pluto, it is currently at a distance of 96 AU (3 times the distance to Pluto) but it’s highly elliptical 557 year orbit will bring it as close as 37 AU. Along with some of the comets it is one of the most remote objects in the Solar system.
This two frame animation shows two pictures taken 24 hours apart. Eris appears to move about 21″ in this time (about 0.88″/hour).
With Jupiter so prominent in the evening sky it’s hard to take pictures of anything else. Saturday night was clear and I stayed out to image the moon Io crossing in front of the planet. Unfortunately, a fundamental error meant I inadvertently left the f/6.3 field flattener on the telescope and didn’t notice until I’d packed up at 12:30 and this has spoiled what otherwise may have been reasonable images.
Best of the lot is this one, an RGB composite of about 700 frames of each colour.
My first opportunity to photograph a moon shadow on Jupiter occurred on Tuesday evening as Calisto moved out from the planet just after dusk. The ’seeing’ was pretty bad so I used the 9.25″ Celestron without the x2 barlow and used the IR filter again. This f/10 combination enabled me to keep the individual exposures fairly short with a 10 fps framerate (the IR filter doesn’t let a great deal of light through!).
The final image is a stack of about 1500 frames (from an original video of 2300 frames). The Great Red Spot is also visible just to the right of the shadow.
Friday night was forecast to clear before midnight so I made the trip over to the observatory to setup the Celestron 9.25″. Right on cue, the clouds cleared (first time that’s happened in a long time) and I got quite a few 3 & 4 minute videos with the webcam and a narrow band IR filter (742nm). This is the result from the last video of the evening at about midnight, 800 frames stacked in Registax 5 with some additional processing in GIMP.
This image shows more detail than I’ve captured before and I put this down to the better than average seeing and a slight tweak to the telescope collimation. Jupiter is very close to opposition and has an apparent diameter of almost 50 arc seconds at the moment. The Great Red Spot is just creeping into view just below the equator on the left hand side.