334 replies to this topic

[TerryWood]

Here are a few from this morning using my Questar 3.5 and ZWO 678mc camera. 

 

Jupiter with Europa on the upper right edge. You can also just barely see the Great Red Spot rotating out of view on the right side.

 

Jupiter with Europa reappearing on the left side a few hours later.

 

And Saturn with three of its moons. 

 

Now, I'm need of some sack time. Been up too long. Thanks for looking!

 

V/R

 

Terry

 

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[Winks]

Very nice

[Psereiko]

How did you process the Jupiter and Saturn images.

[TerryWood]

I tried to lighten them up a bit using my phone editor. Hard for me to tell if this is any better. Looks different on my phone compared to my laptop. Initially processed with ASICap, Autostakert and Registax.

 

V/R

 

Terry

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[RMay]

I hesitate to post this amidst such superb images being posted by others, so, with apologies, here’s a single frame of Saturn pulled from a short video I shot a few minutes ago while it was rising. iPhone 12 Pro to my Seven at 200x, plus goosing the internal phone magnification a bit, with lots of internal editing to clean it up best I could.

 

Ron

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Edited by RMay, 27 August 2023 - 12:38 AM.

[RMay]

Guess who…

 

😉

 

Ron

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[norcalryder]

Here is my first attempt at stacking to make a lunar image.  I used my a7riii set for electronic shutter then had it capture 80 images using the interval feature.  Then I used Lightroom to convert them all to tiff and ran them through AutoStakkert!.  It must have been pretty good seeing because 80% of the images were above the 75% threshold.  What is the advantage to using AVI versus raw image capture?
 
Flicker Link
 

Edited by norcalryder, 10 September 2023 - 02:33 PM.

[norcalryder]

Pixel Peeping - 2090 x 1394

[RMay]

Here’s a fun little shot taken just now of Io casting its shadow on Jupiter. Image is a single frame pulled from a brief video I took close-coupling my iPhone 12 Pro to the 16 mm eyepiece of my Questar Seven with Barlow in place at 300x magnification. Visibility tonight from my side yard was quite remarkable; this turned into one of the best viewing sessions I’ve had this year.

Ron

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Edited by RMay, 11 September 2023 - 04:08 AM.

[RMay]

Here’s a first time capture of Uranus; same setup as above.

 

Ron

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[Psereiko]

Lagoon Nebula.  I put the details in the image when I upload it.  Hopefully you’ll be able to see it.

 

[RMay]

This falls into the ‘whatever’ category… here is William Hurt opening up his birthday present and finding a brand new Questar Duplex inside, in “Into the Wild,” a great movie we were re-watching yesterday.

 

Ron

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[RMay]

Uranus taken tonight via my Seven and iPhone while spending some time looking at Jupiter…

Ron

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Edited by RMay, 31 October 2023 - 01:32 AM.

[Winks]

excellent

[RMay]

Caught a lunar ISS transit tonight; captured in slo-mo mode, and some glitch created the weird horizontal lines you see, and a slight doubling of the image; it should be much sharper.

Test videos taken prior look fine, so who knows… I’ll blame operator error… here’s a frame grab.

Enjoy,

Ron

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Edited by RMay, 28 November 2023 - 01:37 AM.

[mtr1]

Wow Ron, that's excellent!  I've never tried because it's a lot of work to get the timing right and so forth.  Tech details -- camera, frame rate, anything else that might help sort out what's up with the artifacts, and give some ideas to those of us who might want to try this?   Best, Mauri

[RMay]

Wow Ron, that's excellent! I've never tried because it's a lot of work to get the timing right and so forth. Tech details -- camera, frame rate, anything else that might help sort out what's up with the artifacts, and give some ideas to those of us who might want to try this? Best, Mauri

Hi Mauri, thank you for the kind words. This is the first slo-mo video I’ve captured that included a glitch; otherwise, I just close-couple the lens of my iPhone to the eyepiece of my 3.5, center on the moon, and then film in slo-mo mode paying very careful attention to the projected time of the transit as it’s usually accurate to about a second. Tracking is not required because the entire transit is usually only about one second in duration, so there’s not much drift.

I use the ISS transit finder website and plug in my address. If I’m close to a transit, I will just adjust the map to know where I need to go. For this one, we were just out of the field of view and had to go about 12 miles down the road to capture it. There will be another near here in two weeks and my home is right in the centerline, so I’ll be shooting that one, as well.

They’re easy and fun…

Ron

[mtr1]

Thanks, Ron -- you make it sound easy!  In 2019 or so I recall a colleague presenting at our astro club about his ISS lunar transit capture and every step was much more complex -- finding dates and potential venues was a big project, tricking whatever camera he used into a fast-enough frame rate, and processing the movie down to images required a 45 minute lecture to explain rather than your two brief paragraphs.  I think you also got a better image...

Best, Mauri

[RMay]

Hi Mauri, it really is a snap; here’s a screen grab from a transit I caught a couple of years ago. It was apparently a good night to catch Lunar V and X, too, I just noticed…

 

😉

 

Ron

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[RMay]

And don’t forget solar transits…

 

😉

 

Ron

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[RMay]

Here’s a blast from the distant past. This is one of my earliest astrophotography shots, piggybacking my Canon 35mm camera onto the top of my 3.5 to capture Halley’s Comet.

 

Image taken at Anza Borrego State Park in Southern California, March or April 1986, as I recall. It was low, maybe 5-10 degrees above the horizon, but plainly visible under what I recall were Bortle 1 skies.

 

Ron

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[AbbeyandHobbes2020]

I love that Halley’s Comet pic. Bortle I skies must be terrific. 

 

I know it isn’t much, but this is my first phone shot of Jupiter that didn’t turn out like a blurry blob, so I’m pretty excited.
 

 

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Edited by AbbeyandHobbes2020, 05 December 2023 - 08:24 PM.

[RMay]

I love that Halley’s Comet pic. Bortle I skies must be terrific.

I know it isn’t much, but this is my first phone shot of Jupiter that didn’t turn out like a blurry blob, so I’m pretty excited.

Thank you for the kind words.

Your Jupiter pic is a great start using a phone (I’ve been using them for years). Keep up the good work!

Ron

[gstrumol]

That's good! It looks exactly like my first shot of Jupiter with my Apex 90mm Mak and an old iPhone camera (held over the EP). 

[RMay]

Here’s a screen grab of a somewhat rare/meh daytime ISS lunar transit video captured this morning under hazy/cloudy skies from northern central California. Visible from the house, so I couldn’t pass it up… (never looked up to see if it was visible in the sky.)

 

Ron

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