Posts Made By: Alan Friedman

Hi all -

I used a collection of Baader narrowband filters to record these images of Venus - H-Alpha (655nm) , Solar Continuum (540nm) and CaK (395nm). The CaK filter is close enough to the UV wavelengths to show a bit of cloud detail.

best wishes,
Alan

Nothing makes a better mousetrap than good seeing. I enjoyed a little bit of this before sunrise this morning. After imaging the moon, I shot Venus again using the CaK and green filters.

best -
Alan

Hi Dan -

That's a great display of the changing face of Venus - thanks for posting it.

best wishes-
Alan

Hi all -

Apologies for posting yet another image of Clavius (my first).
This was one of the few opportunities I've had to use my new DMK
41AF02.as camera at a long focal length (7.5 meters). This camera has
smaller pixels than the 21BF04. The larger image scale really
requires good seeing - something that has been hard to come by from
my location for some time. This image was made from 120 frames
captured in average seeing. A larger version can be seen here:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/clavius090207.html

best wishes,
Alan

Low light levels and a bit too much focal length made this a very difficult image to process. The seeing was good, but the detail suffered from the noisy video frames. Captured on October 4th with the A-P 10" mak/cass with 2x powermate and DMK41AF02 firewire camera.

best wishes,
Alan

... and it was clear, too!

A-P 10" mak with DMK 41AF02 webcam - taken in white light and colorized in Adobe Photoshop.

best,
Alan

Hi all -

Was reworking my images from 10/25 - to my surprise, I found a deconvolution filter followed by a mild unsharp mask and gaussian blur revealed some startling details in the coma of 17/P Holmes.

8O

cheers,
Alan

Lovely large prominence today, I played hookey this morning to take a picture of it:
Very poor seeing (so what else is new) - but a grand sight nonetheless.

Do you see a headless horse - or is it just a Halloween hangover?

Captured with my f5 92mm A-P stowaway, Coronado filter and DMK 41AF02 webcam.

cheers,
Alan

good morning!

Here is a comparison of three images of Venus taken over the last six weeks.

The size and distance from earth change dramatically but the brilliance of the morning star remains steady.

Captured with the A-P 10" mak/cass at f30 and dmk21BF04 camera. A Baader CaK filter was used for the narrowband images.

sunny skies,
Alan

Hi all,

It has been a long winter and a long time since I've had an image to share - I hope you enjoy this animation prepared from images captured early on Easter morning:

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

(follow the link below the image to compare a monochrome version of the observation.)

I was excited to have a night out under a clear sky after many months of clouds and cold. As I pored through video of saturn recorded in pretty good (6/10) seeing, I noticed a pair of bright and dusky spots moving in tandem. Had I known that a transit of Tethys was scheduled I would have planned the workflow differently. The four frames here are captured through a mix of red, green and IR filters - hence the luminosity variance seen in Saturn's cloud belts. Using a small number of frames (about 200 for each image) and a firm hand in processing I was able to isolate the disk and shadow of Tethys against Saturn - perhaps also Enceladus as it reached the darkened limb just to the left of Tethys' shadow.

A moon transit on Saturn is quite a bit more challenging to record than similar events on Jupiter. Saturn is twice as far from us and Tethys only a third the diameter of Europa (a fifth that of Ganymede.) Tethys subtends about one sixth of an arc second (Enceladus would be about half that size.) But as the plane of Saturn's system aligns with ours and these dances become more frequent events, I expect we will have a chance to enjoy many more of these observations.

best wishes,
Alan