Wednesday night the clouds were starting to roll in for the start of five days of clouds so I grabbed my Canon SX50 HS with 1200 mm equivalent zoom and leaned against the car to get this shot. I was impressed by how much detail was there. I tweaked it a little in Photoshop, blackening the background and bringing out some details on the surface. Look how the rays from Tycho in the south can be seen across vast distances.
Uranus and Neptune October 10, 2015
Saturday night was very clear and steady so after the CAAS meeting I set up my camera to capture these two so called “ice giants”. Everything worked well from tracking, to focus, to imaging. Unfortunately they are both dim and small so there is little detail to show but as you can see they both show disks and similar colors. I’ve placed Uranus on the left and Neptune on the right. Both images are to the same scale, prime focus in a 2350 mm focal length SCT. Uranus was taken at best 50% of 500 100 ms frames while Neptune was taken at 250 ms. Of course, besides similar color the obvious difference is size. Both are almost identical in true size but Neptune is farther.
Lunar Eclipse 9/28/2015
First it was cloudy and then it was cloudier. My plan to image it from start to finish went bust. But I still had a good time. The first pictures were taken at 1/100 second, with the ISO set to automatic while the last one was a full one second. Truth be told the clouds give the events some character but we had too much of a good thing.
