Jupiter, It Moons Us!

Following an unfortunate accident recently involving a falling camera, our latest astrocam candidate, an Ixus 125, arrived in the mail the other day. Great little camera, it shoots full 1080 video making it a hopefully-ideal planetary and moon shooter.

Sadly, no port of CHDK yet, though work seems to be in progress on that. Fingers crossed we'll be able to get RAW out of it soon. A trip to the local hardware store and much experimenting with the camera and an eyepiece in store ("Can I help you find something?" " No, I don't know what I'm looking for") resulted in the acquiring of an odd looking piece of plumbing hardware. A quick hacksaw and much sanding and filing later, and I had an adaptor that takes a GSO 1.25" eyepiece on one end, and slips fairly tightly over the Ixus on the other. Et voila, the birth of astrocam 3 (or is it 4? what are we up to valHallen?).

The bush fires in Aussie were casting a pall across the sky last night, so seeing wasn't the best. Unfortunately it also clouded up around the horizon denying us what would have been a spectacular sunset, if the brief glimpses of a blood-red sun an hour before it hit the horizon were anything to go by. I pointed valHallen's scope at the Moon and then Jupiter once the sun was sufficiently in hiding, and was quite stunned at the details on the camera screen. I shot a few movies and fed one of them to Registax, and below is the resulting shot of Jupiter with (L to R) Ganymede, Europa and Io in tow through the 15mm GSO 1.25". Registax is quite daunting to the newcomer, so I'm sure we can do better with some practice, better focus, and better seeing! Very happy with the result though. Click the link below for Flickr, as usual.

Jupiter and Moons

March Skies

A good month coming up!

First off, 1200mm has a public Google calendar now, for events (like the hike on 24 March) and general stargazing goodness (Mars in opposition tonight!).

so, March So far:

4 March: Mars in opposition.
8 March: Moon close to Mars, Full Moon
11 March: Moon close to Saturn
14 March: Jupiter and Venus close together
15 March: Last Quarter Moon
20 March: Autumn Equinox, day and night are equal length
23 March: New Moon
24 March: 1200mm Hike to the Stars - if you;d like to come to this, please contact us.
26 March: Crescent Moon close to Jupiter and Venus.

Skies in March from the Royal Astronomical Society of NZ

For us Rodney/Snells Types, lots of LMC and SMC this month, as well as the usual cuplrits of Orion, Crux et Al.

Looking forward to some good moon and mars viewing!

Southern Skies in February

So, what to look forward to this month?

Straight up early in the month, the moon is full on the 8th, which unfortunately coincides with the peak night of the Centaurids meteor shower.

The moon then proceeds to last quarter on the 15th and is new again on the 22nd.

Early in the month, Both Jupiter and Venus will be visible in the west, during the early part of the evening. With Saturn and Mars rising later in the evenings, towards midnight.  These planets will continue their dance around the skies this month.

Orion is very visible this month, so some awesome M42 opportunities will be able to be had, 1200mm is thinking of a stack for that one, through the scope on AstroCam 2 :)

The Seven Sisters (Pleiades/Matariki) is also hanging around and is stunning even through a small pair of binoculars.

The 1200mm crew is planning our first star party of 2012 on February 8 to attempt to pierce the full moon's glare and see some Centaurids from the meteor shower.

And finally, there's another small meteor shower (Gamma Normids) starting up on the 25th of February, that will peak in March.

Planetary goodness.

Pity I have to work tonight ... Mercury, Venus and Jupiter all visible to the naked eye.  Ahhhh, the dance of the planets :D

Some busy days!

Phew!  Have things been busy!  As it was my birthday on Friday, the Birthday Faerie visited with cash.  Cash is good.  I took said cash out to see my mate Lance, and exchanged it for some new toys. Nice nice toys.  I got a variable camera projection mount and the noise pollution filter to play with :D  So I thought that with new kit, I would do a kit post, not been one of those for a while :)  So here's most of my kit.  I don't take all of this out, and the camera (astroCam 2) I used to shoot these with is not shown of course.

Some notes:  Galaxy tab is used for geotagging, star charts and reading books whilst waiting for timlapses.  Webcam and Finepix are not in use yet, they're earmarked for prime focus stuffs, once I get them apart.  Hardly ever use the 70-200mm, although its a fine lens indeed.  Enough of this kit-style blather Val!

Here's the first results of what can be done with them.


Here's the first shot through the camera projection mount, taken by Jacqui, so qualifies as her first astro shot ever!  Didn't she do well?  It's the crescent moon, shot on the 20D, using the 25mm mount inside the Camera projection tube.






Then toinght I bodge mounted the noise pollution filter on the IXUS80 and took 2 shots through it.  Done nothing but reduced the noise here.

As you can see that knocks the streetlights right the hell out, so I am defintely looking forward to using this both in the scope and in the camera projection mount.

I just wanted to give a big Thank You to Lance for selling me this stuff oh and the 62mm lens up there in the first Kit picture.

More Martins Bay

Martins Bay
Originally uploaded by Astronomr

This is one of six shots posted - not counting the 1200mm milky way exclusive.

One planetary evening

So far .. Saturn, Venus, Mars and a passing airliner :)

Coming up - Jupiter, Uranus, Luna and will have a go at Neptune, although that may be too close to the Moon tonight :)

Also, resolved the double in Acrux (one of my FAVORITE stars) :D

6mm for the win!  I can resolve a planetary disk for Venus and Mars .. for the first time!!! Well Mars for the first time FOR SURE anyways.

Happy!

Today's things ...

BREAKING: Another Jupiter impact? | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Mars Rover surpasses Viking -1 record

and this is very interesting, and inspiring ...

The Mars Underground

And this from @BrianShiro ... Life on Titan?

The plan for tonight

Ok, so I am planning something.  It will hinge on whether I get the scotch mount done by tonight of course (drill charging now) but, here goes.

1730-1830 Venus Setting in the NW    Awesome Crescent, using 9mm + Barlow
1800-1900 Mars in NNW ~ 35°
2100-0100 Moon - half full
2100-0100 Saturn follows Moon down the sky  Oh so beautiful, will be looking again soon
2350 Neptune Rises
0200 Jupiter Rises in East
0220 Uranus Rises in East
0513 Mercury Rises

12 hours of solar system goodness :)

Lets see if I can do it :D

Back on the Rails (somewhat)

Ok.  Tonight I went down to the domain, armed with Jacqui's 20D, some fairly well remembered instruction, some mints and faithful AstroTorch.  Determined I was to get me some dSLR pics, and well, I did :)  You can see them over at Jacqui's and my Flickr Page or of course on the Picasa Web Albums .. here.

Phew!  I can see how people can lose themselves in this camera thing, sometimes to the expense of their photographs!  My mind was spinning after my last post. Well to be honest I was weeping like a spoiled 3-year old who can't have anymore lollies.

First off, I need a job, then, when I have a job, I need a new scope, with nice motorised mount and a good dSLR mount and .. oh crap, oh well.  I guess I will just have to keep to the spirit of this blog and do it myself.

Coming soon!  Jason attempts astromount III - this time with the length to fit the 25mm! And one of these!

Meanwhile, as you chuckle at the thought of me messing about with tools, here's some VERY pretty pictures for you to look at.

First off, NASA has this and a bit of this, oh and a whole heap of these. Then the charming, witty and terribly attractive Dr Plait has this to feast upon! Or for the full mind-intercourse .. click here. So back to NASA, or more precisely HiRISE is offering you the chance to pick the next photograph of Mars, which by the way is at closest approach on Friday if anyone's interested! Oh you will need to open an account with HiRISE if you go there.

Okies, well that about wraps it up for this post - I am happy that I got some results from the 20D .. this is a good thing, so all I need now is some time, and motivation for the IXUS mount and Scotch Mount!

Helios and Zeus

Hey all, there's a new timelapse up on Vimeo .. shot tonight as the sun went down on Sandspit wharf, where I caught no fish ...

Anyways, you can see Jupiter setting in the last few seconds.  This is a 20-second timelapse for an hour and 13 minutes - 2021 to 2134. Sunset was officially 2042 today.

Let me know what you think?

Party Party Party

Had a small star party happen last night.  In attendance were The Flat and significant friends, Bill, Pip and Rusty. Despite the wonders of a beautiful clear night, a lot of people were more interested in the laser of Martins than the stars themselves.  But there was fire, friends and stellar fusion, so that was all good.

We started with Jupiter before he went down - there he is in the pic, just above the streetlamp. Then M42, which is always a fave.  In fact I think I am addicted to M42, it's beautiful!

Then while waiting for Mars, we went sky hunting - mainly looking for the Horsehead (IC434) and even with running inside and checking Stellarium, we couldn't see it - we found the right spot in the sky, but we thought it was too dim maybe? The plan next time is to go somewhere really dark and try.

Also, there was a good number of both satellites and meteorites visible last night - the best of which left some lovely glowing trails across the sky.  I should have time-lapsed it, but was ouit of battery :(  Perhaps tonight.

Then we went on looking at things ... we found something that was christened "Bill's Blob" just off the SMC, which it turns out is NGC104, Mag 4 ... all that could be said was "My God, it's full of stars!"  And some of the detail within the Milky Way was awe-inspiring - reminded me why I love doing all this.

Once Mars came up, we all had a look at the bright orange blobby disk, was close to horizon and very wobbly,  and then it was all wrapped up really.

So that was an awesome time, and my thanks to Bill and Pip et al for sharing the wonders of the universe with me, and to everyone else who liked the frikken laser!

Stars in MooLoo Land

Well, I'm here! After a stunning day of heat, 3-year old niece and her boundless energy and a kitten with almost as much energy .. night fell, and I found myself cursing.

Cursing my inability to hold a cam steady for 1/10 second, cursing my lack of telescope on such a beautiful night and cursing my SD card reader failure!

Still, all is not lost, and in the best traditions of taking the same shot in different places, I present you with these!

Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of War!

Went observing last night, with Martin and Karen.   Started off at the chateau du Val, where we had an awesome view of such wonderful sights as the Great Nebula in Orion, Jupiter with all four Galilean moons clearly visible and a fruitless but fun search for Uranus.  After that it was heading towards midnight and we decided to pack up the bucket and head down to the beach to watch Mars rise (12.07).

After waiting for a bit, Karen pops up saying "what's that orange star over there?" and we were off!  Mars appears very small in my scope, but quite bright and very very orange.  Quite quite beautiful .. most definitely a crescent in the scope, no sign of the Dogs of War of course - too small and too dim I would think.

There was much cursing on my part regarding the size of my scope, and what I would give for a 16-inch bucket, not to mention getting my hand pinched in the springs causing some little resentment towards my scope :)

So a good night all in all, some lovely things seen.  The Orion nebula and of course Mars.  Also Io appeared kind of red to me last night, could have just been atmospherics of course, or could be that Io is slightly red :)  Also, the night was filled with shooting stars - perhaps a fringe of the Geminids creeping down to the southern hemisphere :)

No pics of the night's activities of course, because I forgot to take the Camera Mount :(  I am, an Idiot.

Phew!

OK .. here's the skinny.  Been offline for a few days, as y'all can probably tell.  But here's what's happened:

Fridays results were, quite frankly, shit.  Due to the CCD being around 2.5mm on a side, the object of the shot (in this case, was Jupiter) stayed on the fov for about 3 seconds, so I had issues even focussing the scope, let alone shooting anything good.  Also, due to my wee bucket needing collumation I was getting focal and exposure issues from the sides of the image to the center.  So not a good night Friday all in all.

However .. some other things have happened .. first off, my good friend Eddie has long-loaned me a Dell laptop - Eddie! I love you man, in that bromance way :)  Then on Monday my new camera arrived and it's a lovely little beast - have to give thanks to Fab and Sarsha for buying my Lumix so I could afford the Canon.  So the other night I got the CHDK kit loaded and had to go have a wee lie down.

Granted the 80IS is not an SLR .. but it now has most of the functionality of one - seriously, with the hack you can use the damn thing as an e-book reader if that's what you want to do.  It gives you control over everything!  And I mean everything - focus, aperture, exposure, timelapse, RAW format saving (both average and sum), remote firing and a whole lot of other things besides!  So I'm now learning how to use the hack basically and am pretty sure that my astro shots will improve somewhat :)

So then today, my 2x Barlow lens arrives! :) So now my focal length is effectively 2400mm :)

Now all I need is for the skies to clear - seriously, we've had one good night in the last 3 weeks!  First clear one I get, the cam+hack is getting a workout!

This is HARD

Ok, Astrocam2 works!  But it's a viciously difficult thing to focus and control.  I am having a wee hiatus between observations at the moment, both for a break and also because I need to give the moon an hour or so to get a bit higher in the sky.

So, the cam system works very well.  But it is very hard to control, very very hard to focus.  This isn't a bitch session, but I can see why a motorised 'scope would be ftw in the situation.  Focus as it goes kinda thing.

I grabbed some video of Jupiter, will transfer that from laptop nowish.  I'm immediately noticing some things however.  The colours and focus is excellent around the sides of the image, but the planet just goes to white in the center of the image ... anyone know why this might be?

I am such a n00b.

In other news, Canon should be here on Tuesday/Wednesday and then I can start the hack etc.  Also just ordered a 2x barlow from AstroNZ, so that should be here soonish too.

I will be back with more later

Stacking Em Up

Still finding my way around RegiStax 5 here, but here's the first result from the Lumix Videos.

and just as a comparison, here's one of the frames that I stacked to get it.

So I took the video into AfterEffects and stabilised it, then output it as uncompressed png stream and took that into RegiStax, from there I aligned it again (stabilised), stacked it and went bananas on wavelet settings.  As you can see the result is fairly oversharpened and the greenish halo on the right hand side is I think a result of chromatic aberration, I could shift the red channel over a bit.  This is teaching me that I need to shoot dark and flat frames next time, but again, I'm not unhappy with this result, stacking brings out a fair bit of detail, more than I expected.

The Death of AstroCam 1.0

Well.  I just reviewed the footage I shot last night, then hit the delete button on all of it.  Even at 1600x1200 Jupiter through the 25mm Lens is about 100 pixels square.  This wasn't the major problem, the thing that has caused me to lay AstroCam1 to rest is that I would be getting 1, maybe 2 frames in focus per 5 second video, then the camera would just lose it.  I got some frames that showed the bands, were in reasonable focus, and Jupiter wasn't just a big bright lens flare, but that's just it, 1 or 2 frames per video.

The 640x480 video shot on the Lumix came out much better - still a bit bright, and Jupiter is blown out to all hell, but it was all shot through the 9mm lens, so I have way more pixels to work with and I am starting to get a real handle on how to shoot with the Lumix.

I went out and got AstroCam V2 this morning - cheaper, lower resolution and non auto focus - Logitech Quickcam for notebooks - expect a post on the disassembly and preparation soon.

So, things I learned:
Autofocus is evil
25mm Lens is too wide a fov for good webcam video
Set Lumix to Macro
ISO 80/100 gives best results for detail, even if the moons disappear

No pictures yet this morning, about to stack some now

FINALLY!!!

Awesomely clear night tonight, I have some stills and a bunch of video from AstroCam1.0,  The stills are some of the best I have done so far!  Some of them are almost in focus even .. I am stacking some of them now, so I will edit this post once I have something to show!  Happy Val!!

Bill! You sir, rock, the laptop saved the day today, at least I think so, they're still copying.  Sorry for being cheeky and keeping it, but I'm hoping the results from two hours of observing and shooting tonight will be some excuse at least!

So tonight is counted as a win for me so far.  Will do some frame stacking now and post again with results!

YAY!

Holy crap!!!  I got the Spot!!!! Here's the first one, from the Lumix (laptop ran outta juice) .. 3 frames, stacked in RegiStax 5, then tweaked in Photoshop.

And here's the best of the full frame shots:

That's Jupiter (see the spot?) and the moons are (from Jupiter outwards) Io, Europa and Ganymede, at least that's what Stellarium tells me :)

OOOO!

Just awoken from my Nana-Nap and the sky is beautifully clear!!  Time to move the PC outside :D More as it happens :)  Just waiting for Jupiter to rise high enough to be in range of my limited USB cabling ... I really need a laptop!!

Waiting waiting ... Jupiter moves damn slowly, unless of course I am trying to focus on it :)  I love this stuff.

Stayed clear, but I ran out of time .. so maybe tomorrow

*grumble*