Posts Made By: Alan Friedman

Greetings -

I posted this image on the CCD solar system forum:

http://www.astromart.com/forums/viewpost.asp?forum_post_id=318512&poll_id=&news_id=&page=

Taken with my Solarmax 90 and 5" Zeiss refractor. Look forward to seeing some of you at NEAF next saturday -

Alan Friedman

Hi all -

I thought you might enjoy this story.

Last night there was an occultation of an 8th magnitude star by asteroid 1847 Stobbe. The narrow path of the event passed over Buffalo - with my backyard quite close to the projected southern limit. My daughter and I went out to observe the event (for fun and a little extra credit.)

I thought I would try the webcam (DMK21BF04) to see if it had any use as a tool for this type of observation. The results were a very pleasant surprise. Knowing that Titan was pretty close in brightness to the star, I did some test exposures on a field with saturn at prime focus of my 6" f7 refractor. The exposure was .067 secs (the camera is capable of exposures up to 30sec) which I thought would be perfect and allow me to count frames to time the duration of the occultation using a 7.5fps download.

Not only was Titan an easy target, but the camera captured 5 moons and a couple of field stars down to mag 14.1. The raw frames were very smooth. This example is a small stack to better show the dimmer moons and stars in the turbulent seeing. This is a small crop from the frame at 100% size.

Much to the disappointment of my daughter, the star did not blink out from our location although it did a few miles to the north. But it was a great adventure.

cheers -
Alan

Eric -

Superb images and processing!

Alan

Eric -

Superb!

Alan

What a difference three weeks (and 37 million miles) makes. Saturn is withdrawing quickly into the western sky and getting hard to capture with clarity.

This was my first chance to try out a new manual RGB filter wheel with my DMK21BF04 webcam. The detail (luminance) was captured through the red filter. It is amazing what a difference this made in average seeing (5-6/10) even though the exposure were 10 times longer. The white light images were unusable due to constant atmospheric morphing of the planet's shape.

At the end of this session I took a stream using a half second shutter speed which captured a nice grouping of five moons (down to Mimas at mag.12.9) clustered very close to saturn. This was combined with the other data and processed in Photoshop

10" f 14.6 A/P mak/cassegrain with A/P 2x Barlow and SBIG RGB filters for RGB, SBIG R filter for luminance.

Hope you enjoy it!

cheers-
Alan

Greetings!

On Monday night there was a fine grouping of five of saturn's moons close enough to the planet that I could fit them all on the tiny chip of my webcam. Two different exposures were combined to include Mimas (mag 12.9) and brilliant saturn in the same image.

Enceladus is relatively easy in my 10" scope on steady transparent nights - but I have yet to see Mimas in the eyepiece.

Additional details on the image are posted to the CCD imaging/solar system forum.

cheers!
Alan Friedman

Hi all -

I am still waiting for Jupiter to sit still for a sharp image. It's kind of like trying to take a picture of your kids when they are little and squirmy.

This was taken the same night as my recent saturn image (April 19) using an RGB filterwheel with my DMK21BF04 (the detail comes from the red and green filtered images only). It took just over 2 minutes to capture three streams - but with seeing around 5/10 only about 380 frames from 1300 could be used for luminance.

10" mak with 2X powermate. I hope I get a chance to try this technique in good seeing conditions.

best wishes -
Alan

A friend pointed out that the newer versions of Starry Night Pro
show Jupiter satellite detail when you zoom in. I clipped a piece of the SNP image for 12:16am on April 19th  - the time of my recent Jupiter image - for comparison.

Why I futz around with this stuff for hours when the images
are sitting nice and pretty on my laptop all along - is beyond me!

!!!!!
oo
  >
....


Alan

I am shy to post lunar images on this forum - the work here is too good (but I know you will be kind)

Here are two views of copernicus taken through my 10" mak -
first a wide field at prime focus...

Do you ever look back at lunar video a week later and realize you are totally lost?

This landscape taken late on April 18th must be represented on Rukl's map 72 or 73? but I can't get my bearings.

Directions much appreciated!!

Alan