Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Saturday, October 3, 2015

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

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

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Asteroid Trifecta with animation.

I've got the bug, the bug of observing minor planets. I think it started with the pass of Eros in 2012 (http://astromaphilli14.blogspot.com/2012/02/asteroids-eros-and-tyche.html) When treating my images I found another little drifter, faintly moving through . I was hooked! I thought I had discovered something. Turned out the classic case of what's new to me was something already discovered in 1886 but whatever. In learning more since then I've struggled with getting the hang of things. After upgrading from a DSLR to a CCD I found myself reinvigorated. With some recent clear skies and a bit more patience and some growing discipline I have observed this group of three asteroids; (1530) Rantaseppa, (4478) Blanco, and (4687) Brunsandrej. All within the same FOV for my scope and camera of 37.5 x 28.3 arcmin. Then in an effort to get a +Minor Planet Center designation I found them again a few days later, all still 'apparently' together.

Using Astrometrica to measure position and magnitude you will see the number designation followed by the magnitude in parentheses.

NOTE there are MANY other asteroids in this fov as there are most, but my 2min subs in the 14" didn't quite make out the fainter, say mag18-20+ objects. Not yet!

Night one - 20140221

Full field

(1530) Rantaseppa

(4478) Blanco

(4687) Brunsandrej

Boring! it was fun to see, but on Night 2

Night TWO - 20140224

In this video you will see an animation of the three asteroids moving over the course of 23:27 to 23:45 EDT or just 17 minutes of movement!

Easiest to click the direct YouTube link and make fullscreen HD (http://youtu.be/rpSW-wN1NS4)

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

WinJUPOS Image Measurement Tutorial

WinJUPOS Image measurement basics

http://astromaphilli14.blogspot.com/2014/02/winjupos-image-measurement-tutorial.html

Sit back and click WATCH IN HD (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/91449?hl=en)

If you have a fast Internet connection, you can change your settings to make sure videos always play in HD qualities when they’re available:

Go to your Settings page
Select Always play HD on fullscreen (when available)
Click the Save button

Project homepage: http://jupos.org/

Other based tutorials: http://www.grischa-hahn.homepage.t-online.de/astro/winjupos/tutorials.htm

Navigation shortcuts: http://alpo-j.asahikawa-med.ac.jp/Latest/WinJUPOS/winjuposcuide_english.html

Keyboard operation when the position of the circle is adjusted by hand
       Arrow keys ---direction buttons for moving the outline
       PgUp ---increases the size of the outline
       PgDn ---decreases the size of the outline
       N --- rotates the outline clockwise
       P --- rotates the outline counterclockwise
       Backspace --- rotates the outline by 180 degrees

GETTING STARTED in WinJUPOS: Review ephemeris here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJf-XvVVC0c