Saturday, June 30, 2018

Jupiter during Twilgiht

Clear sky and tempertures around 25°C. In stead of waiting till it's dark, I started taking pictures during twilight. All in all, the pictures are quit good and I'm satisfied with this result. Pictures are taking with TAL200K and ASI224MC Barlowx2. SharpCap capture software was usen with some experiments to boost up the number of frames/s  Staking done using AutoStakkert and editing in CS4.


Friday, June 29, 2018

Sky at Night


Open clear sky and according to MeteoBlue moderate to good seeing .. let's wait and see :)


Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Sun H-Alpha SolarMax3

Todays Sun in H-Alpha with Prominences, Filaments and great granulation. Stacking done using AutoStakkert and final editing with CS4.


ISS Crossing Sun's Disk

Beginning this week I got an automatic email from CalSky mentioning that during the week the ISS will be crossing the Sun's disk of which the centerline was about 800m from my home. The max. distance the ISS is still on the disk, is about 1,3km from the centerline based on my earlier calculations. So I decided to do the set up from my backyard.
Set up used was my refractor TS/TLAPO 80/480 f/6 with ASI224MC and Baader ND5 Solarfilm.
Frames are set 15 per second usng SharpCap capturing software. Capturing started 1 minute before crossing. During capturing I could not see any crossing of the ISS.
I used AutoStakkert to look into each frame in order to find out of the ISS was captured. Only one frame showed the ISS. The ones before and after did not captured the ISS. Not sure why, could be that ISS is considered as bad frames and was kicked out. For that I need to do some more investigation.

So the result is shown below (frame #1646) and the good news... it's on the picture. The bad news... I have greater expectations :)


Sun H-Alpha SolarMax 3

My first try-out using my CMOS camera ASI224MC on SolarMax 3. Some trial and error was done to have the correct double stacking setting and durng the same time camera settings are adjusted.
SharpCap software was used to capture the sun for about 2 minutes and almost 1000 frames. Stacking completed with AutoStakkert and final editing using CS4.
The pictures shows some beautiful prominences and filaments and also the granulation. I'm really satisfied with this picture of the sun and see even more posibilities with this set up.


Saturn TAL200K ASI224MC


Some more results of Saturn around opposition. Picture taken with TAL200K, ASI224MC and barlowx2. Sharpcap is used as capture software and 120s timing was set. Files are RAW16 SER profile and Stacking with AutoStakkert. Final editing in CS4. In below picture color was kept.






Saturn at Opposition

Today, Saturn lies opposite to the Sun. This is the best moment to observe Saturn and Saturn can be seen in the constellation Sagittarius. Not only is Saturn the entire night visible it appears as its brightest and largest. This optimal positioning occurs when Saturn is almost directly opposite the Sun in the sky. At around the same time that Saturn passes opposition, it also makes its closest approach to the Earth.

Below is a picture from two days ago, taken with TAL200K and ASI224MC with barlowx2.