Two Day Old Moon August 4, 2016

I’m starting a Moon Observing program with the Astronomical League.  Today is the first day, yesterday could have been the first day except I couldn’t find the Moon in the haze.  I found it tonight though.  Here it is zooming in.Two Day Old Moon August 4, 2016 August 2016 1217 Two Day Old Moon August 4, 2016 August 2016 1226 Two Day Old Moon August 4, 2016 August 2016 1223

Mars & Saturn 6/11/2016

After a few middling shots of Jupiter with the color ASI120MC, I decided to go gray with his brother the monochrome ASI120MM using color filters. Mars was first and I chose red since it supposedly shows more detail with a red filter.  I stuck with prime focus as the seeing wasn’t good enough for a barlow. I think things turned out pretty good.  This is a stack of the best 20% of 10,000 3ms frames.Mars_20160611_Red_3ms_20pct_of_10000

Next up was Saturn, I stuck with red because it was in there. I was so impressed I stuck with red. I did later try a light blue filter but it blocked so much light I went back to red.  There was so much detail I may just switch to monochrome with a filter wheel. The two cameras have the same number of pixels but since one is color it effectively has a third the pixels of the other.  This was a stack of 20% of 4000 37ms frames, note the exposure was almost 10x that of Mars.

Saturn_20160611_Red_37ms__20pct_of_4000

Now check this out, here is how Saturn came out after stacking with no other refinements. When I saw this I knew I was on to something.Saturn straight from stacking

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