lukebl

Thanks! They are gifs which I make in Photoshop, then upload them to my Flickr Photostream, then copy and paste the link into my post.

Got up this morning after Storm Barra had passed to get some great views of Comet Leonard. It was still pretty breezy, but got some good results. The comet now moving pretty fast and heading into dawn. These are some captures with a Canon 6d at 1600 ISO, Newtonian 200mm f/5. I love the bright green head and orangey tail. 6 x 2 minute exposures, Stacked in DeepSkyStacker, aligned with comet 6 x 2 minute exposures, Stacked in DeepSkyStacker, aligned with comet and stars. This is the first time in all my years that I've managed to get DSS to successfully stack on the comet AND stars. Unfortunately, I don't know what I did right so probably wont be able to repeat the trick! Here's an animation of it as it headed into the sunrise. 24 x 2 minute exposures. One centred on the stars, the other centred on the comet

I know it does, but that's the whole problem. Your illustration doesn't show a coma corrector, which is the very thing preventing focus. At least in my case.

You’ve missed off the coma corrector! I have the same problem, which is why I’ve had to revert to a separate guidescope when capturing with my 200mm Newt.

Yes. I have really just seen Santa! Asteroid 1288 Santa. There really is an asteroid called Santa. I don't know much about it, or why it was named after the jovial bearded one, apart from the fact that it is a main belt asteroid of around 39 km diameter discovered on August 26th 1933 by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte Joseph. It's currently quite near Jupiter in the sky at around magnitude 17, and I managed this quick capture between clouds. 8 x 60 second exposures, Atik 383L, 2x bin, 200mm f/5 Newt. Field of view 68 x 51.2 arcmin. Strangely, I realise that I have captured this asteroid before. Almost exactly 9 years ago on this very forum I posted a capture of it, with a similar facetious comment about having seen Santa! My imaging skills haven't improved over the years. A closeup of its movement over a period of about 30 mins.

I got up early to capture comet C/2021 A1 Leonard this morning with a Canon 6d and 200mm f/5 Newtonian. Unfortunately Deep Sky Stacker just wouldn't co-operate and didn't produce a useable stacked image. However, a single image wasn't too bad. So this is a single 2 minute exposure at ISO 800. Glancing over to the eastern horizon I saw the rising thin crescent moon and captured this image of the earthshine. 3 second exposure. Same setup. The star upper left of the moon is 7th magnitude HD128986.

Actually, it looks like that app has potential. I found an android emulator which allows you to run android apps on your PC, so for only 89p I downloaded the app and got it running. Sure enough, it predicts nearby transits of the sun, moon and planets. However, I note that when comparing with transit-finder.com on the right-hand image below (which I know from experience is highly accurate) there's a discrepancy. As you can see from this screen grab, the path of the solar transit on 7th December is shifted west by a considerable margin, and the time is slightly different. Perhaps it's using out of date orbital data, as I know the ISS is regularly adjusting it's orbit to counteract drag as it skims the upper atmosphere. Does anyone out there have experience of this app and its quirks?

Thanks for that. I don't have an android phone, and that's the most user-unfriendly website I've ever seen, but I'll see what it can do!

Does anyone know of an online resource to predict transits of the ISS over the planets from any given location? I’d like to have a go at imaging the ISS transiting the disk of Jupiter. Since the recent demise of the awesome Calsy.com website which had all sorts of useful information, there doesn’t seem to be anything similar out there. There are sites which predict Lunar and Solar transits, but not planetary. Any suggestions? Here’s an example by a chap called Arthur Franke. I hope he doesn’t mind me using his image

In a very rare moment of clear skies and great seeing, I captured this animation of Io, its shadow, Ganymede and Callisto (visible very faintly below Io) this evening. Jupiter still has lots to offer! Around 7000 frames captured every 4 minutes from around 16:18 UT to 18.10. Processed in Autostakkert and Registax. 200mm f/5 Newtonian, 3x TV Barlow, ZWO asi120mc-s cam. Painstakingly animated in Photoshop. Very low in the sky here, but possibly the best seeing I've had all season.

Thanks, John. I’ve got Sky Safari Pro but that doesn’t really help. I’d still need to manually punch in the coordinates into CdC (for GOTO purposes). I wonder why CdC has some of the moons, but not all of them (and in Himalia’s case, one of the brightest).

Hi, I was trying to find Jupiter's moon Himalia in Carte du Ciel but, even though I had 'Show the faint satellites of the outer planets' ticked, it wouldn't show Himalia. It does, however, show Amalthea and Metis and Neptune's moon Nereid, for instance. Any idea how to get it to display Himalia? Also, there doesn't seem to be an option to search for any of the minor moons in the search box. I eventually found Himalia by a rather tortuous route. I went online to get the co-ordinates from an ephemeris, then typed in the position in 'User defined objects', but this does seem to be a shortcoming in CdC. Any ideas? Anyway, here's a very rough and ready capture of Himalia (no flats, clearly) and a greatly enlarged animation of its motion over the period of about 40 minutes. You can see the bright glow of Jupiter off the top left of the view. Atik 383L, 200mm f/5 Newt

I listened to this programme and it got me thinking. With the appalling British climate, how on earth did the great British astronomers and scientists of the Georgian and Victorian periods manage to make such significant advances in astronomy? Imagine how much more they might have achieved if we had decent weather!

Red Aurora alert, 3rd Nov! Just been out here in mid-Norfolk but nothing showing here yet. incidentally, beautifully crisp clear sky here, despite Metcheck and Clear Outside telling me it’s cloudy.

I was reading about this on Spaceweather.com. They suggest that it's likely to hit 'from midday on Oct. 30th to the early hours of Oct. 31st.' However, I find Spaceweather very annoying as they often don't say whether it's UT, Eastern Time, Central Time or whatever. If only they'd use UT so that everyone in the world knows what they mean.

After one of my periodic purges of unused cameras and scopes (which I invariably regret) I’m now back to virtually the same basic setup I had a decade ago: just a cheap old 200mm Newtonian and a few filters. I always come back to the old reliable Newt. At least I also kept my Atik 383L, and captured this quick Pacman (NGC 281) last night. Although the stars aint as round as they could be, I was quite pleased at my first go at this object. Unfortunately, my Off-axis guider creates too much distance between the coma corrector and the sensor, so I had to guide with a separate ST80 guidescope and its associated problems with differential flexure. (With the filter wheel and OAG, the distance is about 75mm from the corrector to the sensor plane, creating even worse coma than without the corrector). Just 10 x 5 minutes each of HA and Oiii, synthetic green. 6 darks, no flats. Field of view 68.5 x 52.1 arcmin. With such short exposures there was barely any Oiii nebulosity at all.

I’ve found that I get a much better frame rate using Firecapture rather than Sharpcap. No sure why that should be, but I think Firecapture is a nicer program anyway.

This is a not great, not terrible, animation of the transit of Io on 29th Sept 2021. To digress slightly.... 'Not great. Not terrrible' is a phrase I now use several times a day, to the annoyance of everyone around me. It comes from the awesome mini-series 'Chernobyl' starring Jared Harris. After the Chernobyl reactor exploded, the technicians report that the radiation levels are 3.6 Roentgens, to which the Chief Engineer Dyatlov (played by Paul Ritter) replies the memorable phrase 'Not great. Not terrible'. However, their feeble geiger counters maxed out at 3.6 Roentgens, and couldn't measure anything higher, and the actual levels were in the lethal thousands. I highly recommend the series. Very dark, but superbly acted and scripted and very atmospheric Anyway, This is an animation 19 images of c. 8000 frames each captured every 4 minutes, 200mm f/5 Newt, 3x Barlow, ZWO ASI120MC-S camera, c. 80 fps

I've just checked, and mine is an SSD. Not much RAM and very little capacity on the drive, though.

Thanks for that vliav. Very useful. However, until you mentioned it, I'd never heard of SSD. I really know very little about computers! I just switch them on and hope they'll work. The laptop has a USB 3.0, but I guess just not enough RAM.

I thought it looked more like it was just The Almighty picking his nose!

I find with my ASI 120mc camera and admittedly very low-spec laptop, I can only get about 50 frames per second. So 40000 frames would take over 13 minutes. Way too long for Jupiter’s fast rotation, even using derotation. Is 40000 frames really feasible for a subject like Jupiter? I get a much faster frame rate with my mono cam, but that’s not much use with Jupiter as the planet’s features will have moved after each colour channel capture. I aim to get whatever I can over a period of about a minute, i.e. about 3000 frames. Short of a major hardware upgrade, there’s not much else I can do.

Hi folks, Here's a rough animation of the shadow transit of Europa and the occultation of Ganymede from last night (23rd September 2021). As you can see, the seeing was pretty variable, but with a few moments of pretty good seeing. 200mm f/5 Newtonian, 3x Barlow, ASI 120mc-s camera. Stacked from 25 videos of 3000 frames, captured every 4 minutes. I intended to catch an earlier part of the transit, but hadn't factored my neighbour's roof into the equation, so the earliest frames wasn't until 20:43 BST This was the best frame out of a bad lot

Heres'a small animation of Jupiter from the evening of 21st September. Captured in appalling seeing conditions (I don't know where you folks claiming good seeing are getting it from!) and varying transparency due to high cloud. I've kept the animation small due to the poor quality of the indiviual frames, but at least you can see a few details. 18 x 2000 frame videos captured every 5 minutes from about 20:45 BST using Firecapture. 200mm f/5 Newt, ZWO ASI120MC cam, 3x Televue Barlow. 21ms exposure, 47 fps.

I do a bit of imaging with my Coronado PST, using an ASI 290MM Mini cam (mono) and 2x Barlow. I've also had good results with a QHY5-II Mono. You should be able to get reasonable results with yours. They key advantage of the 290MM Mini and the QHY5 is that they fit entirely in the eyepiece holder so that you can get focus, which the DSLR was never able to manage without a barlow. The DSLR was also way too big and cumbersome. I also found that imaging with a colour camera just didn't work - I found focussing the bright red image nearly impossible, and the resultant colour image was never satisfactory. This is a quick capture from this afternoon. About 500 frames captured with Firecapture with the ASI 290MM Mini and 2x Barlow, plus a bit of colour tweaking in Photoshop. This is nearly the full frame view. You do get a bit of gradient across the field which you can get rid of with flats, but it doesn't really bother me. I think it gives a more 3d effect.