Comet 103P/Hartley Motion Animation Oct 8, 2010 (!!17MB GIF !!)

I'm still struggling on how to process the comet against a static, but separately processed stellar field.  Here's a cool effect, 2 minute sub exposures times 32 quantity.  Spanning ~100 minutes of time (small dithering time in between each sub and some tossed subs).

Warning, this file is 17MB

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!

Jupiter with Europa Transit near opposition

Seeing was good initially, poorer later, but I'm still sorting out the captures.

And another from later, where you can see Europa a bit better, as it's closer to the edge.

Deep sky work catchup #1

Be sure to click all thumbnails to see the larger view!

Super duper old one from 2009, but recently reprocessed and never posted

Old one from May

M3

From the All nighter...

M5

M4

M12

M24 - neat area near the galactic core with dark lanes

M26

NGC 6755/6756

M71 - This one came out best, not sure why?!

Happened upon M2 and wasn't on my list!

Fall 2010

Crescent Nebula (This was a tough target, even at 2+ hr)

Simple 30min M8 Lagoon Nebula

The whole of lower ecliptic is rarely above the trees in my primary observing location, so this was about it for a single night.  I really worked the processing with some tips from the fine folks at Cloudy Nights!

Click the thumbnail to see the full size

Check out the rest of the Messier 'Sprint' I'm working on while Akule is built!

Nice view of Jupiter's GRS and Jr!

Don't forget to click the image for a larger view!  This is from night 3 of 4 and the seeing wasn't quite as good as the night before.  Still, always nice to catch the Great Red Spot.

And don't forget to look at the rest of this season here: http://maphilli14.webs.com/jupiterbymikephillips.htm

Megan and Dad's Catch!

We were relocating a lizard from our unfinished storage to the creek near the main road and found not only tadpoles, but also small fish (not caught) and CRAYFISH! I had no idea they were happily living in the creek in my back yard!

Tape30-2010.06.19_10-15-44.dv.mpg