Sometimes astronomers just can't make it out to observe

There will be a student solar event at HJRO during this Tuesday. I'm not sure how many Faac members will be able to help. Some won't be able to make it due to health reasons or work obligations.

It's really clear out right now. Kind of cold. Good for imaging.

I've been working on video editing today and we have a medical appointment tomorrow here in this house, so I can't plan on being out and observing tonight. The skies are great. It's cold out however.

I may go out and observe and do a bit of imaging anyway. Now that most of my brief video editing is complete for this band video I shot earlier this summer. I've been putting off editing for a while with other distractions.

I feel like going out and imaging a bit at HJRO to get some deep space long exposure test images and also to get a glimpse of Ison in an image or visually. This would be at 5am however and I've spent a lot of the evening watching cooking shows on Create tv and doing a bit of video editing.

I'd like to get a nice image of comet Ison, but it's further away from Mars and the Leo triplet so I can't get those images in the same wide field exposure. I might be able to get some test images of jupiter to play with as well.

I've been spending about half my free time reading up on computer mounts or thinking about building a tracking mount for my binoculars. Kind of like a dobsonian tracking platform, but this would be for a tripod. How would you create a tracking platform for a tripod. Well I have some ideas, but one thing is likely, it would need to have q positive tracking gear, kind of like a typical gear on a telescope mount, but the gear would have teeth or a gear that is curved that allow the tripod to rest in a fixed state and not move much when the alt/az was activated. A kind of locking design a bit like the tripod spreader my bino tripod already has. The tripod would likely only need to track for 1/2 hour so 7.5 degrees of movement would be enough. Many dob tracking tables move 15 degrees and track for an hour. I think the tripod would have to be low and the northern table would actually be split and have two gears one for each northern tripod leg. The southern part of the tracking spreader, would be for one leg. The tripod would not likely be fully extended but quite low for a low CG, something more geared toward a seated position, than standing. This would give the CG a lower position. It might make viewing near the zenith a challenge because the binoculars would be quite low.

I'd like tracking binoculars for solar and public events. I know I won't have anything constructed by this Tuesday.

The other half of my time or free time has been spent thinking about new video and computer equipment for video editing. Not astronomy related. It's mostly dreaming. I have a pretty cool video edit system already, but it's limited for massive camera video from many bands at q music festival.

It's almost 3am. I'm not sure if I'll try to open up tonight for the image test or not. I hate missing good observing opportunities, but the other stuff going on around here, keeps me away from HJRO maybe half of the good nights.

Below is a really bad example sketch of the tripod spreader tracking concept, taken from tracking table design ideas, shown on the right.

It's not scaled or drawn well, more for internal thoughts.

The tripod legs would have to be captured somehow so they could not easily be lifted from the base and the base would be a kind of table connected, but not with a solid base, more like a spreader. It would still rotate the base like a normal table would to allow full EQ adjustments to the rig.




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Comet Ison would be a tempting morning target, but weather will be horrible

Ison will be positioned close to Mars, and the Leo triplet Saturday morning.

Unfortunately we will have 60 percent cloud cover and winds gusting up to 45 mph in Lincoln Park, so the observatory won't be open at 4 or 5 am to try to image the comet.








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One of the better photos I was able to take of Jupiter this month when it was high in the sky.

Jupiter at 625x.

A shadow transit that happened earlier in the week. This image shows Ganymede and Io two of Jupiter's moons. In this photo Ganymede is casting it's shadow on the planet.

This photo was taken just before sunrise when Jupiter was very hi in the sky and sky conditions were quite good.




I actually processed the above photo a few different ways and the image above is just one of the outputs I created from the same AVI movie.

Below you can see index information with the names of the moons, in the double photo.




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Jupiter with one shadow as it rose more in the sky.

Te image of Jupiter looked better in this photo, with only one shadow on the surface. This was a photo taken after the triple shadow transit when Jupiter had risen much house in the sky.

The image of Jupiter looks better here, and we can see the great red spot.




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I've been trying to capture some great photos of Jupiter from HJRO

This involves waking up or staying up into the early hours of the morning.

Jupiter rises late in the evening.

Processing a captured AVI movie from a camera like a canon EOS attached to the C14 is rather easy. We just load up Registax 6 which is free software with the AVI movie and toy with the adjustments a bit. It's a little more work than I'll mention here, but the computer does most of the work.

The real challenge is not learning how to use Registax, it's getting a good photo or movie to begin with. The c14 is a great telescope and the observatory can provide great images. When objects are low and near the horizon the light must pass through perhaps as much as 100 miles of atmosphere. There is a lot of particles and humidity often in the sky and that causes distortion in the images you gather.

The top photo below was captured late last month, 9-26. It was captured using backyard EOS and a 2 x Barlow. A 5x digital crop of the sensor data zoomed in the image further giving us 1250x for the image. That is a tremendous amount of magnification and most times this image will break down from something like the c14 at that kind of power. That kind of power is usually not usable because the seeing and transparency isn't good enough. But the morning I took this Jupiter was high in the sky and conditions were good. So the too image was taken around 6am in the morning. Jupiter doesn't show as much detail as I'd like it to show, but for a one shot camera and our setup, it's pretty good.

The second image is Jupiter with 5x the normal focal length of 625x when we have the canon EOS t1i attached to the f11 c14. Native power is 125x with a t mounted 3/4 inch sensor. 3911 divided by 50 times 1.6 gives us the effective power. When I multiply this by five, The 5x digital magnification setting in backyard EOS software that I used, we get 625 power.

So the second photo is half the power of the first. And the image maybe slightly zoomed a bit with processing. The states powers are close to the actual power we see with a normal 100 image display.

Why does the second image look much worse, than the first?

Te second image looks worse because Jupiter was photographed at about 2am in the second photo. Jupiter was much lower in the east and still rising. It was only 18 or so degrees above the horizon. There was more dew and humidity in the air. I was also looking through half the shutter and half of the telescope was aimed at the wall. Jupiter hadn't risen far enough to be fully visible in the shutter, but I tried to get the photo anyway. I was hoping to get an image of the triple shadow transit last week with the second photo, but the shadows of three moons of Jupiter were moving across the face of the planet when it was only 3 degrees above the horizon as the event started.

I could not see the shadows on the planet with a different telescope outside aiming low at the planet. The air was unsteady and Jupiter was fuzzy in the telescope. By the time Jupiter was hi enough to get a capture with the C14 one of the shadows of one of it's moons was already off the face of the planet.

A triple shadow transit only happens a couple of times a decade, so they are rare. I was hoping to get a photo of this or see it visually. If I was in Europe under clear skies I probably could have seen the event. But it was over and Jupiter was to low for our area.

This shows the most important thing in getting a good astrophotograph. You have to have an object high above the horizon and get those images when the object is 30 degrees or higher in the sky. Lower targets can be seen and photographed, but they won't look as good.

Later in the year near December Jupiter will be high in the sky near opposition at midnight. We will get the best views and photos of it at that time, around midnight, when it's highest in the sky, and closer to earth.







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Jupiter this morning

Was out early this morning taking some video clips of Jupiter through the c14 at HJRO trying to see what I could get as an image from them.

Here is one result from this morning.

Europa, and Io two moons are on the left.

Jupiter in this image was captured at 625x using Backyard EOS and my canon t1i. Capture was at 5x digital zoom off the default 3911mm focal length.





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