Monday, October 29, 2012

Some recent photos of Jupiter taken pretty quickly

I'm not using advanced photo or gathering techniques for these.

They were single images taken and most processed with a $6 iPad photo processing app.

There were taken through the c14 at HJRO and are examples of what can be done when your taking a quick image, with little advanced processing techniques.

Many photos of Jupiter that amateurs take now are of a better quality than these below, because they are using webcams and recording to AVI movie files. They then process these movie files using stacking software. Some use advanced cameras for astrophotography and take movies and stack them as well. The photos below were taken with a Digital SLR or my iphone.

One photo 3 below, was a still of the back of the Canon EOS T1i while it was attached to the c14 with a t mount and using live view at 10x. This would simulate a 20x Barlow lens on a 3911mm focal length (c14) lens setup.



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Sunday, October 21, 2012

Solar and lunar observing to start around 6pm today Sunday at HJRO

I might be running a little late, but my goal is to open up HJRO at about 6pm.

I want to observe some large sunspots that are on the the sun right now.


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Friday, October 12, 2012

HJRO will be open tonight Friday.

We will be open for observing tonight.




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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Three stills from Eduardo's video. . . HJRO from above.

Three stills from the video taken yesterday by Eduardo at HJRO.

Mike was inside fixing the solar scope.




The Flamewheel hexi-copter can sure get up there.

Below you can see the middle school parking lot, the place for visitors to park when you come by HJRO.



A still from further up notice the remote controlled helicopter is way above the light post looking down.





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We had a visitor bring a helicopter and video camera and take video yesterday at hero

Greg Ozimek, Mike Stamey, Tim Campbell, Tony Godin and his son, Ben Miller and his two sons showed up at the observatory to see the helicopter and meet Eduardo.

Everyone who showed up had a fun time watching the remote controlled hexicopter (six bladed helicopter) fly around. Those who showed up also had a great time talking with Eduardo.

Eduardo sent this edit of the video he shot with the helicopter. See link below. A nice birds eye view of the observatory.

(As you can see Eduardo could add a very dynamic video element to anyone's promotional or commercial video.). He will be offering that as a service in the future, but no word on prices yet. He'll likely be showing a demo in the future and I'll have contact information for anyone who things they would like to enhance their video product from this very special perspective.

(He told me he knows a guy who had some of their wedding video shot from one of these as well. I'm not sure how that was done or what shots were used, it certainly sounds interesting. I actually shot an outdoor wedding myself some years back when I was doing wedding videography and it was in a park. They had a really long procession and walk and this would have been something very interesting to see from a birds eye perspective.)

It was cloudy yesterday, so unfortunately nobody at the observatory was able to observe stars or other objects with good results. Tim Campbell directed the telescope to M13 but the clouds were not thin enough allowing us to see it. Tim also brought by a nice little capture device for the observatory that should work nicely with the Stellacam.

We briefly looked at the sun through the Meade and safe solar filter but clouds hindered the view. Some visitors who stopped by with their parents looked at a far away radio tower through my binocular telescope.

The helicopter was fun to watch, and flew well even in fairly windy conditions. There is all kinds of interesting electronics and fail safe systems on that helicopter. Eduardo flies it really well, under remote control. He actually flies it blind without a live video feed from the helicopter, yet frames the shots very nicely from the ground. There is a live video feed upgrade that he can add to it in the future. My friend Tony, said he was impressed at how fast the helicopter could climb. As you can see on the YouTube video it can fly pretty high and give impressive area views.

Most shaking in the original video can be processed out as you can see in the video as well.


(Here is a brief email and link Eduardo sent to us.)
--------
Hi again guys.
Finally I uploaded a short video to youtube. Many of the scenes were not really providing much so I trimmed it a lot.
Here’s is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzts2DrzKSU

I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks
Eduardo


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