lukebl

I've been loooking forward to this for quite a while.

Unfortunately, it will be obscured from my obsy by my house roof, so I'll have to set up temporarily in another part of the garden.

I don't fancy setting it all up in the wee small hours, so I'll have to do it the evening before.

Given the weather forecast, I'm not sure how I'm going the keep the exposed equipment dry/dew-free/frost-free all night! Oh, to live somewhere dry like Arizona.

31 minutes ago, neil phillips said:

It does when you capture for 12 minuets 

Is that really necessary? I’d have thought a couple of minutes at 200fps would be sufficient. Law of diminishing returns and whatnot. I’ll have to try it if I ever get a clear night.

Fabulous images.

I just wondered if derotation has any great effect with Mars, given that it rotates so slowly compared to, say, Jupiter?

1 hour ago, Astroscot2 said:

Well done Luke, I didnt think imaging the moons would be possible without some sort of way to mask the brightness of Mars, I need to try capturing these moons also .

Many thanks!

I've only attempted it when both moons are at their greatest elongation. An hour earlier or later and Phobos would have been too close to Mars.

Here's a capture of Mars with 12th magnitude Phobos and 13th mag Deimos this evening.

I managed to capture the two moons at Mars's last appearance two years ago, but I think this is a better result.

I saw that Phobos and Deimos were both near their greatest elongations simultaneously this evening, so I had a go at capturing them using my ZWO ASI290MM Mini, 5x Televue Powermate and 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian. You have to be quick with Phobos as it orbits three times a day! This was a capture of 568 frames at an exposure of 120ms. Despite high cloud I was amazed that I could just make out both of the moons on the screen with such a relatively short exposure. The ASI290 is amazingly sensitive. I was lucky that they weren't in the diffraction spikes. Stacked in Registax and a bit of processing in Photoshop. Mars is obviously heavily overexposed. Well pleased with the result!

labelled:

The view on Sky Safari:

And with a properly exposed Mars. This was the result of 15513 frames, 0.36ms exposures, 270fps. Processed in Autostakkert and Registax.

I really must use this camera a bit more on Mars even though it's a mono cam, as it shows way more detail than I can achieve with my colour camera. I guess that's due to the really short exposures I can manage with it. Incidentally, you can see Olympus Mons as the pale patch at about the 2 O'clock position close to the limb.

48 minutes ago, symmetal said:

Click 'More', but not on the arrow on the right.

This gives you camera settings where you can set High Speed and USB Traffic. For a small ROI you can normally set the USB Traffic to 100% with no problems. If you start losing frames or get no picture turn it down a bit.

Alan

 

Brilliant!

Thanks, Alan. That seems to have done the trick. I'm getting 200-300 fps now. I wish I'd found that out at the beginning of the Jupiter season!

1 minute ago, AstroMuni said:

But could you explain the reasons why you want that higher frame rate?

Simple. To get more frames over the same period and get better quality. Also, with Jupiter to capture more frames over a shorter period so effects of its rotation are less noticeable.

36 minutes ago, symmetal said:

Have you tried selecting 'High Speed' mode

35 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Double check that no USB speed limiters are active in the capture software

Thanks for the imput folks. I'm not sure where to find these parametres, though.

1 hour ago, Elp said:

Is your hard drive you're writing to an SSD?

It's just writing to the built-in drive. No idea what sort of drive that is. How do if find out, and can I use an alternative to speed things up?

38 minutes ago, barbulo said:

The laptop´s specs sound good. What cable are you using? USB2 or 3?

It's the USB 3 cable which came with the camera, and plugged into the USB3 port

Can anyone tell me how to increase the frame rate on my ZWO ASI 120MC-S.

Even with a ROI of 288 x 276 (when imaging Mars) and an exposure of 3.2ms I can only get a frame rate of around 90fps. Surely I should get at least 200?

Admittedly, the camera isn't the fastest, and the laptop is a bit old, but I would hope for a faster frame rate.

I'm using Firecapture - is there anything in the settings I can improve? The laptop spec is : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz, 16.0 GB RAM.

Thanks, folks.

It's better than mine!

Here's  short animation of part of the transit of Io on the evening of 19th November 2022, captured in very variable seeing.

I had captured the whole transit, but the first half were spoilt by dew. Later solved with a hair dryer. Everything was absolutely dripping with dew like rain.

12 frames captured about every 4 minutes, 60 second videos of around 3000 frames. ZWO ASI120MC-S cam, 5x Televue Powermate, 250mm f/4.7 Newtonian.

Are we alone in the universe?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Will we ever find out?  No, I don’t think so. The universe is way too big, we’re way too small (intellectually and physically) and everything’s way too far away.

Well, that’s my honest two penneth.

You can see why any attempt at discussion with me doesn’t get very far.

Just noticed this amazing prominence on the NASA website. This was it at about 9:45 UT. Shame about the clouds

Looks to me like a rat pouncing left to right!

I’m off there myself for a few days in January, so I’ll watch this thread with interest.  

No doubt I’ll report back on this forum if I see anything of interest. We’ll be staying in a cabin close to the beach near the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsular just north of Keflavik airport. I chose it as it will have clear views northward over the sea, free of street lights. The sun is relatively active at the moment, so you should see the Aurora.

The downside is that cloud cover is even worse than the UK! I’ve been to Iceland twice before and absolutely love the place, but didn’t see the Aurora due to cloud!

Whatever happens, I’m sure you’ll have a great time. It’s a fabulous country.

Update.

I'm told by others more learned that me that this could possibly be satellite 2013-024B, a rocket body launched by the US on May 25th 2013, or similar, which swings between 665 and 66,000km from the earth. At that distance it would clearly move much slower than closer objects.

Hi all.

Last night I set out to capture an occultation of a bright (mag 7.9) star in Cetus by asteroid (8071) Simonelli. I was under the predicted shadow path but the asteroid is only 8km across and I recorded a miss, which was disappointing. Even at 2x integration with my Watec camera, the star was so bright that it was heavily saturated.

Whilst I was preparing for the event, I captured an object moving very slowly eastwards across the field at a rate of about 7.5 arc-minutes a minute at a position angle of about 45 degrees.

You can see it in the real-time video below, moving from right to left. The target star for the occultation is the bright one lower centre. The field of view is about 22 arc-minutes across.

I assume that this is simply a satellite, but I’ve seen countless satellites drift across the FOV, but never seen one as slow as this one. Even with geostationary ones, and this one can’t be a geostationary as it was at the wrong declination and moving at the wrong angle. In any case, a geostationary satellite, orbiting as they do at about 35,786 km, would take about a minute to cross this star field. Other low-orbit ones would whizz through in a couple of seconds. This one took about 3 minutes. Any ideas about what this might be?

I attempted an animation of last nights double transit of Europa and Ganymede in very mixed seeing and transparency. Hence the sub-optimal quality of the frames.

These is the result of 35 captures every 4 minutes from about 1830 to 2100 UT.

250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 3x Barlow, ZWO asi120mc-s camera, 3000 frames, 70fps, Stacked in Autostakkert, processed with Registax and Photoshop.

Asteroid Lemaitre is just 8 kilometres wide, with an eccentric Mars-crossing orbit. It was discovered on 25 November 1948, by Belgian astronomer Sylvain Arend at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

On the evening of 15th October, I was right under the shadow path of its occultation of an 11th magnitude star (TYC 2908_00765_1), and managed to capture this short footage of the event which lasted just 0.8 of a second.

Captured with a WATEC 910 video camera, Timestamped with a GPSBOXSPRITE3, 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 0.5x reducer.

It is a strange feeling, watching in real time as a tiny invisible rock millions of miles away briefly blots the light of a distant star.

Here's its orbit

I'm very rusty, not having done any imaging for a very long time, and a couple of years since I attempted Jupiter.

Anyway here's a short capture of Io's transit on the evening of 2nd October 2022.

Captured with a 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 3x TV barlow, ZWO ASI120MC-S. 12 frames of 60 second captures at about 70fps. 4 minutes between captures. Processed in Autostakkert and Registax.

Shame it’s not further north, as it’s predicted to brighten up to mag 6 on impact.

Hopefully, there’ll be some interesting images from Southern Hemisphere observers tomorrow.

Here’s my Moon landing postage stamps, which my dad told me would be worth a fortune when I’m old.

Well, I’m now old and I see you can get them for £1.99 on EBay!

The prism on my off-axis guider has come detached.

Can anyone tell me what would be a suitable adhesive to fix it?

Many thanks, Luke

Fantastic. Great to see a bit of detail on Ganymede too.