Thursday, February 13, 2020

Europa puts a beauty mark on the Great Red Spot

Europa puts a beauty mark on the Great Red Spot




I was cruising facebook some weeks back and found one of those “On this Day” which had me wondering what happened.







So I went and checked my annual gallery for 2013-2014 and found it wasn’t finished and posted!😨
https://maphilli14.webs.com/jupiter



So, without ado, here’s my 6 year old post made of 3x derotated images with a composite single image of the shadow and moon.





Animation

WinJupos reference






Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Astrometrica tips for solving 1


I setup and tear down each session (because Trees! 🌲🌳) and as such I don't always get a good pointing model.  Normally I find my target galaxies etc and move about my night. Plate solving is good enough except when it comes to astrometry for MPC hunting.  I found some tricks to help myself out that I thought I'd share my new approach!

    1. Use plate solve - the one that works with SGP to find J2000 center of plate
    2. Pay attention to the 'Angle'
    3. Inside the Astrometrica settings you might need to 180 the angle to 92 in my case
    4. Now, once that's done, manually input the J2000 from PlateSolve into the beginning step of your finding routine in Astrometrica
    5. If it still fails after 2-3 attempts, do a manual find:
      1. Lower the magnitude and search for bright stars
      2. Line it up, moving and rotating
      3. Then turn the magnitude back up and pay attention to the parameters you input in case it still fails you have a better starting point next manual run or use those to refine your settings

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