Michael A. Phillips' Astro Blog: Neptune 2008-10-15

Friday, October 24, 2008

Observation logs

Planet

Origin:

ObservationManager - SolarSystem Catalog 1.0

Neptune rises 1st and is dimmer than Uranus.Unfortunatley this makes adjusting to an object much harder. Finding was not as hard as I was thinking it was. A simple Precise-GoTo got me within the ~60* FOV. I double checked against Stellarium and was amazed that there it was! I was even more amazed to see it as a smallish disk visually. It's very dim, bluish and small, but there it was! RGB settings: RG - 3.418sec exp ; 928 Gain B - 3.418sec exp ; 1024 Gain 90s capture time per channel at above settings. RGB x 4 iterations = 3 captures per 'session' x 4 sessions. Therefore each RGB channel gets 4x .avi's stacked together. Each 90s capture resulted in 24 frames x 4 'sessions' in total about 100 frames per channel, best ~75% used (estimate) Darks taken and applied in Registax Lum for moons settings: Clear Filter (IR/UV Block) - 3.418sec exp ; 1024 Gain ; 50% Gamma 58 frames total and ~30-40 stacked Darks taken and applied in Registax

SETI reference:

Red Shift 5 Reference:

Begin:	2008-10-15 um 18:45:00-05:00
End:	2008-10-15 um 23:30:00-05:00

Weather:	Forecast called for S 4/5 and T 3/5 Actual S: 4-6 T: 2-3/5
Equipment:	I used: Ubuntu 8.04 Linux and custom coriander 8" Celestron C8i SCT DMK 21AF04 2.5x PowerMate Astronomik LRGB filters True Tek Color Filter Wheel with visu diag Since the 3 day stretch of good seeing in early Sept, I have used the T61 Also used WinXP and IC Capture with the TrueTek Hand Controller for > 1sec exposures
Comments:	To get Uranus and Neptune I had to move exposures beyond 1 second. Currently the custom coriander 1.0.0 does not support exposures beyond 1 second. Even at 1sec and 3.25fps I was unable to get usable data. As quickly as I could I switched to WinXP and IC Capture for camera control. A reboot and install of drivers burned some time, but a valuable lesson in prepareness. I did try to leverage previous whitebalance exercises on Jupiter for Uranus and Neptune. I found tracking and alignment horrible, but since finding 6-7mag planets isn't easy, I decided not to re-align. More and deeper exposures would have helped the moon shots.

Observer: Michael A. Phillips Mr.

Site: Home