2015 Solar System Bests!

Every year since 2008 I have assembled my own images in a mashup format.  Inspired by +Mike Salway  (http://www.mikesalway.com.au/) I have tried to pick the best images I took of planets during the calendar year.  A couple of years ago I got into comets and asteroids and have been trying to contribute to the Minor Planet Center's research (http://astromaphilli14.blogspot.com/p/all-michael-phillips-observed-asteroids.html).  My previous best of's are all here:

http://maphilli14.webs.com/annual-solar-system-bests


This year found a drop off in imaging from 71 nights in 2014 to 33 in 2015.  While I have a growing addiction to my favorite video game +Destiny the Game I also know that this year was the rainiest and cloudiest I've seen since moving to North Carolina in 2003.  Last year was probably busier because of the Mars opposition. This year the slack of one less planet would have been taken up with additional Deep Sky work, but those partly cloudy nights just weren't worth the effort.  Perhaps with Mars a partly cloudy night may have been worth a peek through some thin clouds but not faint fuzzies.  For those wondering I keep my astro logs in a great open source program called Observation Manager


Ok, on to this year's image, 1st with labels.... full resolution (1920x1200) on imgur

...and for you wallpaper weenies like me, the unlabeled version ... full resolution (1920x1200) on imgur.  I tagged the image

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Multimedia by Michael A. Phillips is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This year still had no Mercury or Pluto but I did get Eris. Which is seen in the lower right taken on three consecutive nights in early October.  I was amazed at how bright it is to have only been discovered in 2003!    Here's an animation in gifv format...

Here's to a decent 2015 and let's get more clear skies in 2016!  

Happy New Year!

Mike

Bright spots on Neptune

Back in mid July of 2015 it was brought to the attention of several amateur astronomers like myself that there are bright spots on the cloud surface of Neptune.  A request was made by professionals to help observe these spots in red or narrowband IR.  I have had a string of poor weather and didn't have a chance until mid September.  On September 20th, I had some moderate conditions to try.  My method was to shoot wide field with the CCD as seen here.  I've superimposed an high-res RGB image on top to help identify Neptune.  The brightest and closest 'star' to Neptune is about the 7 o'clock position (lower left) and is actually the largest moon, Triton.

If you read the stats, Neptune was 241.3 light minutes away at the time of this photograph.  That's just over 4 light hours away.  For fun here's a size comparison via the wikipedia page.

At that distance Neptune is only 2.4 arc minutes in size and the top image that I took is fairly close to what you might see in a moderate telescope at medium magnification.

After some wide-field CCD shots, I put in my high-res planetary camera and took some LRGB as well as Infra-Red (742nm) shots.  Here's the aesthetically pleasing composite consisting of all 5 filters that also includes a Triton.

Finally for the detail oriented here's the full layout, including the sub channels used in derotation.

Also here's the alignment reference from the Neptune Ephemeris Generator (http://new-pds-rings-2.seti.org/tools/ephem2_nep.html)

Thanks for reading and please do some well wishes for more clear skies for me, they've been far and few between.

http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KRDU/2015/9/30/MonthlyCalendar.html?&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=

If anyone is interested all source tiffs, sharpened files and WinJupos measurements are on my public Google Drive share located here  and contained in a 30+MB .zip file - > https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9dWDZG-h1gvZ2tGdUNKTWQ1eE0/view?usp=sharing