My scope’s been broken again lately so I haven’t had a chance to take any images. Fortunatley, I used a local astronomy club member’s C11 telescope (thanks Pete!) to take the following on Saturday night.
Equipment was a Celestron C11 telescope mount on Losmandy G11 equatorial mount, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Phillips Toucam Pro webcam.
Saturn was at opposition when this image was image was taken on Saturday evening 11:24pm MST.
Image taken with Celestron Nexstar 11 telescope, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Phillips Toucam 840K webcam. Still somewhat fuzzy, but my best thus far this year. Weather conditions weren’t great, thin haze, turbulence only fair maybe around 5/10. The sky was partly cloudy, 3 mph wind, and temperature 38°F.
Image of Saturn on Jan 24, 2007 about 11pm MST. After processing some moon images from earlier in the evening, I realized that the turbulence was much better than I thought as Registax was making only 1 and 2 pixel adjustments (about 3 or 4 pixels less than usual). The air wasn’t quite as steady as earlier, but stil quite good about 6/10. I had checked collimation earlier in the evening and it was pretty good, though in hindsight I should have tweaked it some and probably would have gotten better images.
Image taken from Louisville, CO with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Phillips Toucam 840K webcam About 2500/3000 frames aligned and stacked with Registax4. Sky was clear, turbulence 6/10, transparency very good, no wind, and temperature 30°F.
Here is an image of the Mercury transit in h-alpha. I had grand plans of imaging Mercury with the Toucam at fairly high magnification as it entered the sun’s disk. I spent some time figuring out the position relative to the new giant sunspot (which will probably be designated AR10923). Then I got the bright idea of planetary tracking Mercury with the scope. On the monitor it looked about right about 20 - 30 degrees or so below AR 10923. I kept watching, it was 12:12:40 MST and still no Mercury — panic as I should have seen it 20 or 30 seconds earlier! Fortunately, I had set up the A1010 refractor nearby and easily spotted it visually at low power. It took a minute or so to find it and then reset the capture software. The scope had the RA correct but the declination was wrong. I should have known better as I could have easily confirmed North/South.
Equipment was a Solarscope LTD 50mm h-alpha telescope and Phillips Toucam 840. One hundred seconds video at 15 fps. About 1/4 of the frames were removed because of high wind gusts jittering the view.
Below image of Mercury transit of the Sun taken at 12:40pm in white light.
Image taken with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, Celestron F6.2 focal reducer, and Phillips Toucam 840 webcam. Sky was clear, wind 10-20 mph, turbulence was poor (4/10), temperature was 82°F, transparency very good.
I was playing with my star chart program yesterday and noted that the planet Pluto moved enough over about an hour or so to be noticable. Since I’ve never even tried to find it before, I thought it might be fun to try. I was a bit careless aligning the scope and so I missed getting Pluto in the center of the frame by about 10 arc-min. When I’m carefull, I can usually get with 3 or 4 (should have used precision goto as well). I compared the frames this morning, identified some of the brighter stars in the field, and confirmed that it is indeed Pluto on the left side of the frame. First frame was taken around 22:55 MDT and the other at 00:49 MDT.
Equipment was my usual deep sky setup, Celestron Nexstar11, F3.3 focal reducer, and Stellacam II video camera (gain 9/14, integrate 128, medium gamma). Dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected. Aligned and stacked two sets of 10 minute video with Registax3. Sky was clear, temperature