Posts - Page 123 of 244 - JamesDixon.us

July 16, 2016July 22, 2016

7/16/2016 Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter

It was a hot and muggy night. And there may have been chiggers too. Its for sure the air was not as tranquil as I hoped. However, I was able to capture these images of three of our neighbors.All images where taken in red light with my monochrome ASI120MM. In reverse order from how the shots were taken, Saturn was the star of the evening with detail showing in the rings and the belts in the atmosphere.and I think I might be able to make out a little of the polar hexagon. Mars is getting farther away quickly and so is smaller than a month ago. It is also now showing a gibbous phase instead of the “Full Mars” of a few weeks ago. I was able to get some detail but Mars always leaves you wanting more. Finally, Jupiter is past its prime for the year. Getting lower in the west every day it suffers from more air. It was lower than the other two and that is saying something. Also it doesn’t record as well in red light for some reason. Note the two large storms on Jupiter. I’d say one was the Great Red Spot but it should not have been there when the shot was taken so I don’t know what they are.

June 11, 2016December 16, 2020

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.

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.

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.

June 8, 2016December 16, 2020

Jupiter & Hand Controller Wednesday night

The seeing looked good for Wednesday and I hadn’t tried to image since Memorial Day weekend and I had a new hand controller I was itching to try so I set up scope in the backyard and shot Jupiter. The seeing wasn’t as good as I hoped, it never is, but I managed to get this shot. The smudge in the upper right is Callisto which will be transiting Jupiter shortly. Despite the seeing I was able to get some detail. Mars and Saturn will be up later but I can’t see them from my backyard so they can wait. Maybe Friday.

Regarding the hand controller, some of you may remember my scope has had pointing problems for a while. After an alignment it would get way off. It would usually track okay but goto sucked when it acted up. I thought maybe if I updated the firmware that would help. I contacted Celestron for their opinion because they are the experts. The guy I talked to thought otherwise and felt I might need to send the mount in. “What do they know?” I thought. I bought the cables and connectors needed to update the firmware and was able to do that and it seemed to help a lot. But then at that last imaging session it started all over. So I threw the dice and gambled $100 that it was still the controller and bought a new one. Tonight I set up, I couldn’t see Polaris so I got it level and lined the mount up with where the compass in my phone said north was and entered the time and location and did a one point solar system alignment. Jupiter. Even with the lazy alignment it slewed to within a half a degree of the target. I centered and aligned and it tracked really well for the next hour till I turned it off. Drift shows up really well when imaging at f/10. Yay!