First attempts at Saturn

I'd earmarked last night for about a week as my best attempts to (a) stay up late and (b) get decent imagery of Saturn. Well, the skies didn't cooperate as well as I liked. After setting everything up, the clouds rolled in on cue. While they did evacuate just in time for Saturn to make an appearance, they left a wake of turbulent air for me to try and see through.

This was probably the worst seeing I've had for the 925 CGEM and the ASI 224 camera. Regardless, I took some images. Because, you never know - you might get lucky!

I didn't though. I've only gone through about a third of the stacks I put up, but the results are pretty consistent. No matter how much post-processing I do, there's just not enough data in the noise to get really robust imagery. Oh well.

Here's a couple of images of my endeavours. Keep in mind Saturn was no more than 20 degrees above the horizon and directly over the treeline and my neighbor's home.

What did Galileo see when he pointed his telescope at Jupiter?

So I was futzing tonight with the ZWO ASI 224 and I tried something a little counter-intuitive. I asked myself "how well would the 224 image Jupiter through the Galileoscope"? The Galileoscope has, at best, jerky focusing, a 500mm focal length, rudimentary gunsight aligning, no tracking and uses a camera tripod as a stand. And the seeing tonight is listed as "poor" with lots of clouds. I was able to get one run in. It took about 20 minutes to set everything up and get the camera in reasonable focus so that I could ID the cloud bands of Jupiter on my monitor. I took 2000 frames and kept the best 30%. The results are below.


Even with my ham fisted editing it's still way better, I suspect, than what Galileo would have seen. :)

No more shakey tracker

Well, I seem to have solved the shaky tracker issue. Recalibrating the mount (i.e. moving around the weights and what not with all the accessories already on it) did the trick! Now I need to solve the "average at best" viewing issue. Though admittedly, that involves controlling the weather - so it may take a tad longer to resolve. On the plus side tonight's Jupiter treat was the shadow on the moon Io across Jupiter. It's the little dot on the planet's face :)

Jupiter, with Io transiting. To the right of Jupiter in order of increasing distance are Europa and Ganymede

First light with my new ZWO ASI 224 camera

So I finally had a clear night to take out my ASI 224 camera. And boy, am I thrilled! Firstly, because this is what I see on the screen from my laptop:

That... is snazzy! I have no idea what I'm doing at this point - I'm literally pushing buttons, moving sliders and making all sorts of educated guesses. But, I mean, even looking at that is comparable to what I'd see in the eyepiece.

Anyway, fast forwarding ahead to later that night, I managed to take some footage of Jupiter. Now I should point out that the way this kind of astrophotgraphy works is that the camera takes hundreds (if not thousands) of brief frames, stacks and averages them. Its completely different than taking one long exposure. The stacking and averaging gets rid of a lot of the noise in the photograph. After numerous false starts with Autostackkert! I come up with this result:

Jupiter plus the Galilean moons (from left to right)- Europa, Io and Ganymede..

Which I thought was pretty great. Autostakkert is one of the two main software people use to compile these photos. The other was Registax. It took some additional finagling to get Registax to work (including processing some of my runs through PIPP first).  But in the end (about an hour later), I got this:

RegiStax is a more complicated piece of software that gives you finer control over the end result. In this case, I've over-processed the final photo somewhat, but I wound up with an additional bright spot past Europa. A quick check back to last night with Stellarium and it's apparently the fourth Galilean moon - Callisto.

This photo is oriented correctly (i.e. it's what you'd see if you were looking directly at Jupiter without a telescope). The moons, from L to R are:
Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.

(it'll be interesting to come back to this raw data in six months to see how my post-processing skills have improved!)

Tonight let's try webcam astronomy!

So I've been hearing about stacking photos and expensive CCD / CMOS sensors for some time now. And I've also been hearing about using some trashy old webcams to achieve some pretty decent results. I don't have one of those expensive sensors... ("yet" *cue music*) but I do have a really, really old webcam. Like 240x480 resolution kind of old.

for ~$15 USD off Amazon I can grab an attachment for it to mate it to a eyepiece tube. So, I did. The end result looks like this:

Ignore the DnD map for the moment. But that's a circa 1999 Logitech webcam. Anyway, using the supplied drivers and etc. I was able to capture some video of Jupiter and using a random off-the shelf stacking program I was able to come up with the following image:

This is hardly observatory quality - but you might be able to just make out the Great Red Spot at upper right. It's very washed out. The dark storm under it (the picture is upside down) is more obvious.
The interesting thing is that this is pretty much what you would see tonight looking through the eyepiece. Maybe a little more detail in the eyepiece, maybe a little less. And just to show that, I've got an accompanying sketch to go with the photographs.

Regardless, I think I'm hooked. I may have to get me one of those fancy sensors now... :D

Planets season is upon us!

It has been a long, dark, cloudy winter and spring here in the hills of West Virginia. With the onset of May, I'm hoping that the weather takes a turn for the better as the parade of planets begins. So for the next few months, I'm going to be updating this blog pretty regularly as I hope to see (in order) Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus each take their turn in the spotlight. And I also hope to somehow image all of them, especially my favorite Mars. The last time Mars was this close I bought my Mak 127 just to see it (I only had the 8" dob at that point). Now I have the Celestron 9.25" SCT. So, I'm expecting big things!

Tonight, though, it's all about getting the scopes out and dusting them off. I spent a bunch of time recollimating the Meade XT10 then brought it and the Mak out. It was a pleasant night for observing and I came back with this sketch of the king of planets:

Not a bad start to the observing season!