More Planetary Pics
Lately I have been taking an enormous amount of planetary pics, especially Jupiter and I am waiting for Saturn to reach opposition. I recently bought a new ZWO ASI120MM-S high speed USB 3.0 camera for taking monochrome images of the planets. It does not do well with Deep Sky, so I am relegating it to just taking planetary images. I hope to soon buy a ZWO ASI290MM or it's equivalent Rising Tech 290. I also bought a new Celestron Neximage 5, 5 mega-pixel solar system imager and that has given me some nice color Jupiter shots. But I use my Nexstar 8SE OTA and my images never come out really sharp, either from bad skies or bad processing, so I am hoping to purchase a new Astro-Tech 115mm F/7 ED APO refractor soon and that should give me unobstructed imaging.
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These pics are taken with my ASI120MM-S camera and a Baader 685 IR bandpass filter.
These pics were taken with my new Neximage 5 camera and my ZWO ASI224MC camera. I had a few issues with converting the 224MC pics to color, so some of them came out B&W, but they show great detail!
These images were taken with the ZWO ASI224MC and a methane band filter from ZWO. The Red Spot shows up bright white and the moons also show up bright white.
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These images are from 2016, still trying to perfect my processing, basically it's just hit or miss.
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These are my Saturn pics from 2015 and 2016. Still a work in progress.
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Here are some pics of an overexposed Saturn and highlighting the Moons as they dance around Saturn.
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Here are some pics of Uranus and her Moons.
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These are a few pics of Neptune and Triton.
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Some pics of Mars from last years opposition.
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These are pics of Venus taken over the last two years. The last one was taken in the middle of the day, about 1:00 pm.
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Here are my images of Saturn from Jun 10, 2017. I caught 5 moons and some fairly good detail on Saturn, using a Baader IR 685 pass filter on my ZWO ASI120MM-s camera.
June 28, 2017
Here are my latest images of Jupiter and Saturn. I bought a new imaging post processing program called Astra Image. I am starting to get the hang of it and I am going back to old images, trying to tweak them up and adding more aggressive sharpening and denoising.
July 4th and July 5th, 2017
On July 4th/5th, I went out to capture some planetary pics of Jupiter and Saturn. It was about a 3/4 full Moon. The sky was clear, but bright, awash with Lunar light. It was dry, warm, but not much humidity.
The detail on Saturn is amazing. At the cost of a little noise, you can see many bands on the cloud tops, the "C" or Crepe ring is a gossamer haze, "A" ring is bright due to the Seeliger affect, caused by the phase angle of the rings at opposition. The rings are almost dead on straight as seen from earth and the ice crystals get the maximum affect of Sunlight on them.
Jupiter is awash in at least 10 bands and belts, many festoons, ovals, swirls.
Using my Nexstar 8SE scope and mount, an ASI120MM camera and a Baader 685nm infrared filter to bring out a lot of detail. The infrared filter bypasses a lot of the Earth's atmospheric affects and a mono camera is best for imaging the planets since the detail is so much higher too.
The detail on Saturn is amazing. At the cost of a little noise, you can see many bands on the cloud tops, the "C" or Crepe ring is a gossamer haze, "A" ring is bright due to the Seeliger affect, caused by the phase angle of the rings at opposition. The rings are almost dead on straight as seen from earth and the ice crystals get the maximum affect of Sunlight on them.
Jupiter is awash in at least 10 bands and belts, many festoons, ovals, swirls.
Using my Nexstar 8SE scope and mount, an ASI120MM camera and a Baader 685nm infrared filter to bring out a lot of detail. The infrared filter bypasses a lot of the Earth's atmospheric affects and a mono camera is best for imaging the planets since the detail is so much higher too.
Click on an image to enlarge it.
July, 20 2017
Forty Eight years ago today, Men first walked on the Moon. I dedicate this posting In memory of Neil Armstrong.
I went out early this morning, at 4 AM, to get some UV images of Venus. I made the mistake of putting the UV filter over the IR 685nm filter already on my monochrome camera. Needless to say, my first images did not come out at all. When I realized what I had done, I took off the IR filter and replaced it with the UV filter. However, I could not get a good focus on Venus in UV light, so I did the best I could. In one image, you can see some detail, but it is not sharp enough focus to really see anything, so I am just posting an image of Venus in normal light. But I found another image from a few weeks ago, taken in UV light that is posted here instead.
I went out early this morning, at 4 AM, to get some UV images of Venus. I made the mistake of putting the UV filter over the IR 685nm filter already on my monochrome camera. Needless to say, my first images did not come out at all. When I realized what I had done, I took off the IR filter and replaced it with the UV filter. However, I could not get a good focus on Venus in UV light, so I did the best I could. In one image, you can see some detail, but it is not sharp enough focus to really see anything, so I am just posting an image of Venus in normal light. But I found another image from a few weeks ago, taken in UV light that is posted here instead.
Here are some Jupiter pics I took on Monday night/Tuesday morning 4/23/2018 using my Nexstar 8SE OTA on my ZEQ25 mount, Firecapture 2.6 using my ASI385MC camera, 5000 frames each with 30% of the best images in Autostakkert!3 and wavelets in Registax 6
Monday May 7, 2018
It was a very spectacular night last night. The transparency was bad, but the seeing was excellent! I captured over 59Gb of data last night imaging Jupiter. There was low level fog and a lot of Dew. I processed my images today using Autostakkert!3, Registax 6, Paint.Net and a little Photoshop, annotated in MS Paint.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
I went out on Sunday morning, May 13, to capture the Ganymede transit across the face of Jupiter. It was a good show and also captured the Red Spot too. Here are my pics of the event, in order of transiting. Callisto is the moon above Ganymede. This opposition, were are either above or below the orbit of Jupiter and therefore, Callisto will not be doing any transits this year.
Click on the first box, then proceed in order from left to right to see the transit in motion.
I went out on Monday night, May 14, hoping to capture another Io transit, but the clouds rolled and completely blocked the sky for any kind of observing. I have the dates jotted down to keep track of the transits coming up. I will post more images as the months come up.
Sunday May 21, 2018
As I mentioned in my deepsky images, the seeing was not so great and my images of Jupiter were so-so. During the video recording, you could see that Jupiter was boiling through the waves of atmospheric turbulence. I managed to get the Red Spot and Ganymede, Ganymede a mere few hours from transiting and then got some pics of Ganymede transiting.
Thursday May 24 & Friday May 25
Well, I was itching to get out and do some more imaging. I thought the transparency was going to be good, as well as the seeing. However, neither were very good. I tried out my AT60ED apo refractor along with my ASI385MC camera, to get some color pics of Jupiter. I used a 5X apo barlow and did a pretty good job of getting some presentable Jupiter pics.
July 4th, 2018
I got out last night, after watching the Boston Pop's on TV and the fireworks. It was 11:30pm by the time I set up and started imaging. I captured Mars, Saturn and hopefully Pluto, but that will have to wait until Friday night or Saturday night to confirm with two different images.
July 4 and July 5, 2018
I took the opportunity to image Pluto, according to the chart in Sky and Telescope for July. It was near 50 Sagittarii and not too far away. It was a fraction of 1/2 degree in distance. I caught Pluto moving from one frame to another. In the July 4th image, you can see Pluto near two other stars, to the left of a trapezium like asterism. In the July 5th image, you can tell that one of the stars has moved, most notably out of the frame, as referenced by the circle, which contains two immovable stars and one of the stars has left the picture!
I used an ASI290MM camera, Nexstar C8, iOptron ZEQ25 mount, UV/IR blocker, CS2 and Microsoft Paint for annotation.
I used an ASI290MM camera, Nexstar C8, iOptron ZEQ25 mount, UV/IR blocker, CS2 and Microsoft Paint for annotation.
July 20, 2018
Friday night, I had excellent seeing. I captured some great shots of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, using my ASI385MC camera, ZWO ADC, 2x barlow and an IR/UV blocking filter, all attached to my Nexstar C8, mounted on the ZEQ25 mount. I used Firecapture 2.6 for capturing AVI's and post processed with Autostakkert!3 and Registax 6.
August 5, 2018
I went out to one of my favorite imaging sites, located at an office building with a great western and southern horizon. I set up my Nexstar 8 telescope and used a series of different cameras to record the following images.
June 12, 2019
Well, it's been about 8 months since I last posted on here. I want to update my images of the planets. Recently, I acquired some new telescopes and cameras. These images were taken with my 120mm refractor, Nexstar 8SE, Nexstar 6SE, Meade 2080 and AT60ED scopes. My newest camera is the ASI294MC camera which is very good! My planetary pics are taken with my Neximage 5 camera. I also used my iOptron ZEQ25 mount and SharpCap 3.2 Pro.
Here is my new image of the Great Conjunction taken on December 21, 2020 at 5pm using my Celestron Nexstar 8SE telescope and mount, ASI294MC camera and SharpCap 3.2 Pro. I processed the pictures first as an overexposed image of the planets and moons, then processed individual images of the planets themselves for color and contrast. Next I overlaid the images of the planets onto the overexposed image of the planets and moons. The Final image was annotated to show the moons and planets.