Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Monday, December 28, 2015

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

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

A very UNFAIR comparison of CCD to DSLR!

This is a very **UNFAIR** comparison of CCD to DSLR! It's unfair because of the following.

Differences

Taken on different nights
Guiding methods - 50mm finder guiding on DSLR and OAG for CCD
Coma corrector on CCD, NOT used on DSLR
2x2 binning on the CCD, native iso6400 on DSLR

Similarities

Same telescope, +Akule my custom 35.6cm f/4.5 Newt
Similar processing routine

Also of note, the image scales are quite different and were somewhat difficult to line up. I got 'close enough' and stopped getting precise alignment. I don't think this a valid or fair comparison but a nice contrast to both style of cameras.

Here's a three frame animation comparing.

1) RGB via the DSLR only

2) Lum via the CCD and no filters at all

3) A standard LRGB combination of the filterless CCD as lum and the one-shot color as RGB.

Here's the DSLR ONLY

Here's the filter-less CCD 'lum' shot only

Finally the LRGB combination

Perhaps it not even a comparison at all, but the lack of clear skies and poor planning had me running over the same objects within a week's span or so and having used different cameras got me hankering for a comparison even it wasn't like for like

Hope you enjoy and feel free to comment or critizice!!

Friday, June 5, 2015

Speaking of spring clouds and rain, here's 3 planets in one night to make up for it all!

Be sure to get to the bottom of this for something unique that I've never done before!

Weak spring astronomy weather, shoot three planets to make up for it. YES!

I shot Venus, then Jupiter and finally Saturn. I'll lead off with Jupiter since it's not as big as it used to be and well past peak.

Sporting a view of the little red spot, this is probably my last view for the year. Although.... it's proximity to Venus might allow me a few more tries if the weather clears back up.

Rest of this spotty season here - https://plus.google.com/photos/+MichaelAPhillips/albums/6110337235125938065

Previous Jupiter seasons here - http://maphilli14.webs.com/jupiter

Next up is a pretty nice looking Saturn. At a low altitude of 37° altitude, this will be hard to beat this year. The rings have opened up to 24° since being edge on in 2009

The rest of 2015 is here - https://photos.google.com/u/0/album/AF1QipMDzUOnk6T0QJnWMeivPCpLE3TwLgN6oK7dqLed

You can view all years of my own photos of Saturn here - http://maphilli14.webs.com/saturn

Finally and oddly the first photo of the night is Venus. This image is in false color, comprised of Infra-red as Red, UltraViolet as Blue and Green is a 50%/50% blend of those two. I used the UV as a lum al-la this technique (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOeog89qnPY&feature=youtu.be)

All my previous Venus' - https://plus.google.com/photos/+MichaelAPhillips/albums/5856527934636955329?banner=pwa

Now to reward you for all your hard reading! In the past I've shot Venus over a short time period but have not really gotten a chance to show the winds move the clouds. Here's a short, two frame animation showing the cloud movement over just a few 10's of minutes.

Thanks and clear skies!

Saturday, November 1, 2014

October saw some great clear skies -- Part 1

This month was full of many clear days. I took advantage

First up is NGC 100, which according to http://cseligman.com/text/atlas/ngc1.htm has "a mere apparent size of 6.2 by 0.6 arcmins." It is also described as "exceptionally elongated galaxy, with a very small nucleus in comparison to its overall size. Such galaxies are sometimes called "superthin" galaxies." Nearby is PGC 1509358 a 17.9th mag galaxy.

Also in the lower left is UGC00219 a bright 15.5mag at a distance of 240,700,000 LY

Come poke around the full 1:1 resolution here

Next up is NGC 7814, another edge on galaxy. The one sports a nice dust lane and in contrast to the above galaxy, NGC100, this galaxy, NGC 7814 is a spiral. It "is sometimes referred to as "the little sombrero", a miniature version of Messier 104." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_7814) Edge on galaxies are very fun and the reddish orange core might be slightly exaggerated in this photo unintentially as I had a color balance issue.

Here's a link to the full 1:1 resolution

In the high res photo, the most astounding thing I've found to date is SDSSJ000302.45 or PGC3377433 in another catalog. At mag 20+ this tiny galaxy has a measured recessional velocity of 115421 km/s in converted distance it's 5.3 BLY away!!! WHAT?!!

Between the galaxy NGC7814 and the three bright starts to its right is the faint galaxy in question. Here's a closer look.

Labeled

Unlabeled

Blink Animation

Finally up a a face on galaxy and part of the Messier catalog, M74. It's two main spiral arms make it a Grand design spiral galaxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_design_spiral_galaxy ).

Full res here!!!

My full album of all galaxy photos - https://plus.google.com/photos/+MichaelAPhillips/albums/5825355202588613809?banner=pwa

All deep sky photos are here - http://maphilli14.webs.com/mike-s-deep-sky-photos

All photos are taken with my custom 14" f/4.5 Newtonian ()

Monday, September 29, 2014

Uranus and 5 moon animation

Taken over the span of 36 minutes on September 28th, 2014. I was able to image; Titania (mag. 13.9), dimmest Miranda (mag. 16.5), Ariel (mag. 14.4 ~Pluto's brightness), Umbriel (mag. 15.0) and Oberon (mag. 14.1).

First here is the untouched animation showing Uranus at the same exposure of 1sec.

Next I added the color and properly exposed Uranian disk. I shot at a nominal focal length using the 2.5x powermate and the soon to be older Flea3 camera. Next time I'd love to get the QHY and 5x Powernate!

Also relevant, my 4 year old sounded out Uranus to...

YOU

RAN

I love it!

Also the fact i can image down to 16th magnitude at this focal length has me wondering about splitting Pluto and Charon!

Friday, June 27, 2014

Mars 2014 ANIMATION!

Using 7 processed and derotated source images from 7 different nights as seen in the labeled WinJUPOS map

Using Photoshop to feather out the seams, this map used for the final animation

A brief and related tutorial on processing Mars is here:

Akule Planetary Equipment H/W

Type: Custom Home Built Newtonian

Aperture: 356mm (14")

Focal Ratio: f/4.5 - 5x TeleVue Powermate at f/26 / 9,315mm EFL

Primary Mirror: Carl Zambuto 14" f/4.5

Camera: Point Grey Research Flea3 - FL3-FW-03S1M (monochrome)

Color Filter Wheel: True Technology UK (Tru-Tek) - SupraSlim with Visual Wide Wheel (built in diagonal)

Filters: Baader Planetarium LRGB Telescope Filter Set

Filters: Astronomik ProPlanet 742 IR-pass filter

Filters: Astrodon-Schuler UV filter

Images: http://imgur.com/a/0znBY#0

Blog: http://maphilli14.webs.com/apps/blog/?view_type=1

Akule Planetary Processing S/W

OS: Lenovo W530 (Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit)

Acquisition: Torsten Edelmann’s Firecapture

Processing: AutoStakkert 2 -> AstraImage -> WinJUPOS -> PhotoShop -> Gimp

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Time lapse Europa transit

This is an 11 frame sequence where each frame, of red only, consists of 10sec or 400 - 500 frame stack. Each frame is taken back to back so, 11 frames x 10sec per frame = 110seconds or just shy of 2 minutes of rotation time. Each of the 10 motion frames are displayed for 100ms or 0.1sec, the last one is held for 1second. This means that 10frames x 0.1sec = 1second of time per 'spin'

So, long story short, in 1second you'll see nearly 2 minutes of Jupiter's rotation, that's over 100 times normal speed.

What's really interesting is how far the moon and shadow move in only 2 minutes. This is taken with my Celestron C8, 2.5x PowerMate and PGR Flea3. EFL ~ 5080mm or f/25. The stacking and processing was done at 2x up-scaled and the final rendering in Gimp gets rescaled back to 1.5x or 150% sized.

ENJOY the FULL SIZE HERE!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Fun with dancing Saturnian moons

Ful RES:

And animation!

And facebox labels!

Capture notes:
Seeing makes the rings quiver and nowhere as good as a few nights ago. I still have not touched the focus or collimation, but did capture Regulus in Red. My regular routine 1/15s per channel (still all channels full gain). Initially the fps were set wrong as I work the kinks out of this setup. That was not as bad as it sounds, I lost some frame per channel, but it was only 180s per channel. Fixed for the 2nd run at 300s per channel which is what I really like on Saturn especially with variable seeing. Seeing degraded towards the 3rd cap, despite more cooling between 2 and 3

Observer	Michael A. Phillips Mr.
Site	Home
Begin	2009-05-30 um 21:00:00-05:00
End	2009-05-30 um 22:21:00-05:00
Seeing	3 (fair)
Optics	C8i
Eyepiece	PowerMate (V=812.8)
Filter	Astronomik LRGB Color
Camera	DMK21AF04
Sitzung	2009-05-30 um 21:00:00-05:00

References

Sessions: 2009-05-30 um 20:30:00-05:00

Begin:	2009-05-30 um 20:30:00-05:00
End:	2009-05-30 um 22:30:00-05:00

Weather:	Seeing: 7/10 Transparency: 3/5 Forecast: Initially, 4/5 for both, but recently clouds crept in, which didn't appear at all in dusk. I hope the seeing holds!
Equipment:	Ubuntu 9.04 Linux and custom coriander on Lenovo T61 (Cepheus) 8" Celestron C8i SCT Lymax Cat Cooler DMK 21AF04 2.5x PowerMate Astronomik LRGB filters True Tek Color Filter Wheel with visu diag
Comments:	Bad drift even after a rough leveling of the tripod and auto-two star eq align. I didn't check the errors per axis, but I can't survive the drift without a reposotion of Saturn after 1 - 2 minutes, which is only annoying as I've yet to get scope control in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty jackalope in Kstars/Indi. Took a break from Saturn imaging ~2140 for re-cooling of scope... not sure it helped, but back imaging at 2202

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Observer: Michael A. Phillips Mr.

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