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Lion Nebula SH2-132 - RC71

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Posts Made By: Alan Friedman

January 17, 2007 11:27 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

water ice found...

Posted By Alan Friedman
... everywhere!

Forgive the terrestrial picture but I am in a bit of a dry spell image-wise.
I expect many of you have seen similar scenes this week, no?

cheers -
Alan

January 18, 2007 07:26 PM Forum: Solar System Observing

saturnian moons in alignment

Posted By Alan Friedman
Hi -

A wonderful view last night - I hope some of you caught it too. At 11:00pm EDT, Saturn's visible moons were in alignment as if they were Jovian satellites. Titan holding court alone to one side, Rhea, Dione and Tethys on the other. I couldn't catch Mimas and Enceladus in the hazy skies from my backyard, but they were lined up too - even a 10th mag. star in Leo further out joined the fun. It gave the illusion that all might proceed to transit the disk. Actually, at the current inclination, I believe both Mimas and Enceladus do transit the disk from our perspective.

The seeing was average, but the color of saturn was quite dramatic in my 10" scope - the amber southern latitudes making a noticeable contrast to the blue tinted northern tropics.

cheers-
Alan

January 22, 2007 03:55 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

windy saturn

Posted By Alan Friedman
I missed the boat on this one - a beautiful alignment of saturns moons strung out like pearls in Jovian fashion would have been the perfect target and a shorter focal length a better choice in the gusty wind. Precious few opportunities for saturn so far this apparition - I am hoping for some better ones!

cheers-
Alan

February 28, 2007 03:57 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

moonrise through a 14" A-P

Posted By Alan Friedman
That would be 14" long not 14" aperture... sorry smile

Rather than hibernate through this frustrating winter, I have been tinkering with an A-P Stowaway that I was very fortunate to acquire - 92mm f4.9. What a wonderful tiny scope this is! Seeing was terrible this evening, but at least it was clear. Stacking was of no use due to the turbulence so I made this picture using single frames from the DMK camera - 8 of them in all, taken through the A-P 2X barlow. (At prime focus, two 640x480 frames captured the moon).

best wishes -
Alan

March 12, 2007 11:13 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

Sweet Pitatus

Posted By Alan Friedman
A mosaic made from six (not very well planned) streams - 150-200 frames used from each.

This is bittersweet potatoes, really - the end of the barrel for my nice data that I saved for a rainy day. I hope the winter is almost at an end!

Captured with the A-P 10" mak/cassegrain at f30 and DMK21BF04 webcam on August 16. 2006. This is reduced a bit to fit Astromart size limits - the original file can be viewed here:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/sweet_pitatus_hires.html

best wishes -
Alan

March 18, 2007 10:59 PM Forum: Coronado-Lunt-DayStar Solar Filters

90mm F5 Solarmax

Posted By Alan Friedman
Hi -

I've been working on mounting my 90mm Solarmax on a recently acquired 92mm A-P Stowaway f5. Here is the first (snowy) light picture. I'm testing with a Traveler adapter. It is fit to a Traveler tube ring clamped to the dewshield - works quite well. Using a 2.6X compensator, the Baader Mark V binoviewer yields 36X with two 32mm Plossls - the solar disk fills about half the field of view.

best-
Alan


March 25, 2007 06:14 AM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

first saturn of spring

Posted By Alan Friedman
I happened on a stretch of good seeing an hour or so into spring. I have a lot of pretty good unfiltered luminance streams to go through, but I thought I would post this RGB image. You know you've had some good seeing when you can see the Encke division peeking out of the blue data. I prepared a luminance layer for this image from the red and green images as Richard did in his recent fine image.

The south polar cap is just visible. Four moons were recorded in the green streams so I stretched the levels and added them to the image. Captured with the Astro-Physics 10" mak/cassegrain and DMK 21BF04 camera.

best wishes -
Alan

March 30, 2007 09:05 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

3 second waltz

Posted By Alan Friedman
Chopin would have liked the efficiency of this very short story spanning 4 years of imaging:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/saturn_04_07.html

I hope to be able to continue this project until the rings are edge on - then perhaps back again!
If you follow the links through the image, I have included a page with the RGB components. Notice an eine kleine encke division in the blue image. smile

thanks for looking -
Alan

May 1, 2007 02:53 AM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

Re: Saturn 4-21-07

Posted By Alan Friedman
Very nice detail on saturn - Thanks for posting it.

Alan

June 1, 2007 04:09 AM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Solar System

a little jupiter

Posted By Alan Friedman
I spent the last two nights wrestling with Jupiter at 24 degrees. On May 30 the seeing was quite good overhead - might be worth spending some time working with this data. This morning the seeing was not as good and the transparency very poor, so I set the 10" mak at its native focal ratio (f14.6). If you use your imagination you might see just a hint of the detail shown in the gorgeous images from Chris, Mike and Anthony.

L(R+G)RGB prepared from about 250 frames each R, G&B recorded with the DMK21BF04 camera.

best wishes,
Alan

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