Saturn 28th Feb

Very gusty tonight.

New Guider

Here's a picture of my new Auto Guide Port controller. Exciting isn't it?
I used push to make switches and a small plastic case from Maplins. The green button is up. The cable was from an old fax machine ( has to be RJ12, 6 pins).
I chopped off the BT plug and wired to the switches as per Nexstar Resource site instructions, then plugged it into the guide port.
It works like a dream. The lead is long enough so that I can have the controller right by my laptop, so for planetery imaging at the 1x speed it's perfect.

Saturns rings

While waiting for the rain to stop and skies to clear, here is a nice Cassini view of Saturns rings that I found on the web.


















PIA07873

Saturn 20th Feb.

The sky is clear tonight apart from the odd cloud, but there is wind and therefore bad seeing.

Saturns moons on 18th Feb.

Here are some of Saturns moons shown alongside an image of Saturn captured at prime focus. The bright moon is Titan.

Saturn 18th Feb. later

Managed to capture these before the fog really rolled in... it's a real pea souper now.

Re-processed images from 17th Feb.

Saturn 18th Feb. early morning

Later on the seeing was not as good.

Saturn 17th Feb

Better seeing tonight.

Saturn 15th Feb.

A lot of turbulance tonight.
C9.25, 4xImagemate, Toucam Pro II, 2000 frame AVI best 40%, Paintshop Pro.
Reduced by 50%.







C9.25, 2xBarlow, Toucam Pro II, 2000 frame AVI best 40%, Paintshop Pro.
Reduced by 50%.

Covingham Observatory.

Here are a set of pictures of my new observatory.
The pillar is set in a 3ft x 3ft square by about 2.5ft deep re-inforced concrete block, (it's only 2.5 ft deep because I came across the water table... that was fun). The corner shed itself sits on 16 concrete blocks.
The 2 metre steel tube was purchased locally and the pier top was bought from company called Epsilon, and I used velcro strips from Compaq for attaching the HC holder and cables to the pier. The two central corrugated roof sections are secured using some hook and eyes and are just pushed to the side when observing.
I have laid an old rug on the floor just in case I drop something, and have one of those TV shelf things that I use to support my laptop.
I still have some work to do, but it's well usable. :-)

Tycho from 10th Feb

I wasn't going to process this because the video looked crap! but I managed to get something out of it. Very high Sun angle.

Cassini - This is what Saturn should look like...

Cassini

Partial Moon mosaic from 8th Feb

I took this using Toucam's image software 'PhotoImpression', one frame at a time, and used Panavue to stick'em together. It's a partial mosaic because I missed out loads of bits :-(
It consists of eighteen 1280x960 images, the original is huge and is on my astroweb site.

Funny...

I love this comment on one of the Yahoo newsgroups. His wife talking about his large telescope:-

"why not put some fins on that thing and a motor and just fly up there for a better look"

;-)

...more Moon from the 10th Feb

Mairan























Marius





















Schickard

Hi-Res Moon images from 10th Feb

Aristarchus




Gassendi
























Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project - Orbiter IV

Saturn 10th Feb

Saturn 9th Feb

Not very good seeing tonight, (Pickering of 5), but I managed to squeeze out a couple of Saturn pics.
(I've processed and posted these up whilst sitting in my observatory... posh eh?)
Top; C9.25, 4xImagemate, Toucam, best 40% of 3000 frame AVI
Middle; C9.25, 2xBarlow, Toucam, best 40% of 3000 frame AVI
Lower; C9.25, Prime focus, Toucam, best 60% of 400 frame AVI



... Below are some of the Moons from earlier:-

New Video file.

I made a short 7 min. video file of some of the pictures that are on this Blog site and my Astro web site:-




http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mickhyde/images/blogvideo.ram

I used Sony Vegas 6, video editing suite (brilliant). The original format was in DVD, so I converted it to Real Video for the web. You'll need broadband for a decent stream rate.
The editing took me a couple of hours to do on Sunday, but I'm in the process of refining it, and will produce a more polished version soon.

Saturn 28th Jan

I used a barlow extension on this image to increase the maginification of my 2X barlow. The corrector plate was dewing up, even as I was capturing this image. :-(
Seeing is not as good tonight, but the wind has died down a bit.
There's also a strange thing in the centre of the globe, just above the dark ring. I don't think it's an artifact.

Mars 28th Jan

Here is Mars tonight. It's looking very small in the EP now compared to a few months ago.
The image was bouncing around all over the place due to the atmospherics, very windy tonight.
I've come to the conclusion that when it is windy, the seeing is usually bad for imaging.
This was produced from a 2500 frame avi, using the 4xImagemate and Toucam.

Funny picture of the month...

I love this picture of a lil ol' Toucam on a telescope that's a bit larger than mine:-

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rhill/test/100_2884.jpg

Saturn 26th Jan

This image is derived from a 1400 frame avi, that I managed to catch in between some rather large clouds.

Saturn on the 25th Jan... err I don't think so!

Isn't it funny. I looked out last night about 10:00pm and it was perfectly clear. So I put all my gear on and collected all my equipment and went out to do some observing.

Now that I have my scope setup in my new observatory, it only takes about 10mins to get everything setup. And would you believe it, the minute I put the EP in the scope and started looking through, it started clouding over. Timed down to the second.

I still managed to do some observing of Saturn, (it's amazing how much you can see, even looking through what looks like very dense clouds), but I really wanted to capture some video, because it was a lot clearer than it had been on previous nights.
It was not to be. I stayed out for another hour or so waiting for the clouds to clear, but they didn't and that was that.

So here's a detailed drawing that I did instead:-

Saturn on 24th Jan 2006

Here is Saturn again, but taken under worse seeing
conditions than the 21st. I processed the image straight after
I took it, and by that time (an hour later), the sky was completely
fogged over. I think a small amount of fog/mist helps though to
stabilize the seeing. But the gain of the Toucam had to be
increased to about 75%, hence all the noise in the lower image.

The top image has wavelet processing and some colour
correction/noise reduction/sharpening in Paint Shop Pro.

The middle image is straight out of Registax with no processing,

The bottom image is an average single frame taken from the
3000 frame AVI file. Some were lighter and some darker.

Best 40% again, using 4xImagemate, Toucam Pro...
and Registax/Paint Shop Pro.

Saturn best yet 21st Jan 2006... Slightly brighter

3000 frame avi, best 40%, Toucam Pro, 4x Imagemate, Registax.

Saturn best yet 21st Jan 2006