I’m just wrapping up the Astronomical League’s Lunar Observing Program with two observations to see the Moon within 72 and the 48 hours of new. Photos are not required but why not?
Here in descending order are the Moon and Venus and the Moon from Wednesday the 18th when the Moon was 32 hours from new and then the same from Tuesday when it was 52 hours from new. See how thin the Moon is and if you double click either picture with Venus and you can see it’s gibbous phase.
I went up to the RRO Friday evening, arriving just at sunset. Now that it is September, that is about 7:35 rather than 8:28. My goal was to shoot Saturn before it starts getting too low. By the time I set the 9.25″ SCT (aka Night Ranger) it was dark enough to start looking at Saturn if nothing else. Saturn is just past the meridian at sunset now so it won’t be long before it will be too low to try to image.
I started with the color 120MC that I have ignored lately and took a couple series of images at prime focus (f/10 2345mm) before switching to the monochrome 120MM with a red filter. Both cameras are 2.4 megapixels but since the color divides that into red, blue, and green the monochrome is higher resolution. Also, the red filter can help reduce atmospheric shimmers. After a few series at f/10 I decided to get out of my comfort zone and add a 2x barlow and shoot at f/20. This of course meant 4x the exposure and increased chance of shimmers in the image. Nevertheless I think it turned out okay.
The first image is the color at f/10, you can tell cause it is in color. The other shows a fair amount of detail if I say so myself. Some of the concentric rings in the rings might be processing artifacts but I don’t think the belts in the atmosphere or the polar hexagon are. Those are legitimate.
When I got done with Saturn, the Moon was too bright to work on some Astronomical League observing programs so I decided to shoot the Moon too. I went back to f/10 but kept the red filter. I just wandered across the surface looking for interesting features.
Copernicus and Eratosthenes region
Mare Crisium Region
Mare Frigoris region with Plato
Plato and Sinus Iridum region
Tycho region
Clavius Region
Gassendi region
I was able to take these images of Venus and Mars Saturday night. The goal was Venus with Mars being way past its last opposition of about 9 months ago and now only about 3 arc seconds across.Venus on the other hand is close to one arc minute across and will only get larger for a few weeks before passing under the Sun and entering the morning sky. Venus was shot with a red filter and even so each frame was a quarter of a millisecond. It was the best 20% of 10,000 frames. Mars was best 20% of 5,000 frames with no filter and each frame was one millisecond. Last night Mars was about 6 magnitudes (or 225x) dimmer than Venus. Both were low in the west and seeing conditions were awful. Also seen but not imaged was Uranus, which was pretty close to Mars.
