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Greetings, I thought I'd share with you all this little arty farty collage I made of the moon and some of the planets: Jupiter, Mars and Saturn. All the photos were taken by holding my iPad to my 8inch dob. They were then processed on my iPad and put together on Instagram. Not amazing I know but I was quite chuffed considering my technical limitations. clear skies, Thomas

Last week I've finally got my Opticron Oregon 15x70 binoculars repaired - they've been collecting dust since March when they took a graceful fall from the tripod. So when the skies opened up yesterday night I was ready - binos on the tripod, window open, sky chart and sketch book at hand. And let me tell you - this was one of my best stargazing sessions. What I expected to be a quick glance at the night sky turned into a mind-blowing exploration of the outer Solar System, which until now I've only seen with naked eyes. I'm listing the observations below along with the sketch that I made while observing. And by the way, all the underlined words are links, with extra info. Alright, let's get going! Jupiter I saw it as soon as I opened my window - it was hanging in Aquarius, appallingly bright and very physically present. Two things really struck me when looking at it "zoomed in". First, I saw four little white dots forming a horizonal line on both sides of Jupiter, as if piercing it. From left to right these were: Europa, Ganimede, Io and Callisto. The first two were both affected by Jupiter's brightness, Ganimede still prominent, being the biggest one of the bunch, and Europa only visible with eyes squinted. And second was that Jupiter was a circle. Up until now all space objects (excluding Sun, Moon and hazy dispersed things) looked like dots to me. Even the bright-red Mars looked like a dot, but Jupiter had a white-yellowish body with an outline! I tell you, I really took my time eyeing this little 140 000km wide circle. Saturn A little to the East from Jupiter, in Capricornus, was another little dot, which to my absolute bamboozlement resolved into a disk in my binoculars. Like a little sandy-brown UFO it hung among the stars, mesmerising and enchanting. 15x magnification didn't show me neither the moons of Saturn, nor the separated rings with their coveted Cassini division. But the joined outline of the planet with it's rings looked like what it's meant to be - a planet with rings. And I don't think I will ever forget this celestial pictogram. Neptune After checking Neptune's visual magnitude, which is 7.9, I started star-hopping left from Jupiter: σ Aqr -> Hydor -> φ Aqr -> 96 Aqr. From there I leaped to three YBS(HR) catalogue stars that were poking right into Neptune. Visually, it was a simple dim dot, akin to myriads of stars that don't have a proper name. But don't get an impression that I was disappointed - I was actually stoked to see it, given that it is the furthest planet from Earth visible with my astronomical equipment. I was however surprised that it lacked colour, which I expected to be much more blue. It was instead white, with a veeeery subtle blue tinge. So subtle in fact, that I would've probably mistaken it for a star if I focused on it by chance. Still, I was happy that I have finally met my childhood's favourite planet, the big blue one. Uranus Now this one was a real challenge. First, the Moon's yellow waning crescent was quite close to Uranus. It was not as bright as a full Moon, but still somewhat blinding through the binos. Second, Uranus was hanging at a low altitude, where the sky was yellow from city lights. Third, it was by then 4AM and the sun was about to peek above the horizon - it was only two weeks since summer solstice. And the cherry on the cake - noctilucent clouds were scattered all over Aries, where Uranus was located. I was also quite sleepy, but decided to give it a go nevertheless. I tried star hopping eastwards from the Moon, but soon figured out it's really hard to do when you only see one star. So this idea was scrapped. Then I zoomed in on Uranus in the SkySafari app on my phone (no, they don't pay me), used the accelerometer mode to estimate the planet's position in the sky and pointed my binoculars roughly in that direction. And now for the good part. In-between noctilucent clouds I somehow noticed a vertical pair of stars: π Ari (below) and 40 Ari (above). They were both at least of apparent magnitude of +5 , which was well within the capability of my 70mm binos, but because of the sky brightness, the stars looked extremely dim. Nevertheless, left of these two I spotted another couple, also vertical and sitting closer to each other: ρ2 and ρ3 Ari. And finally, after getting a reference from the app, I made a leap of faith to the right and there it was - Uranus, with ο Ari sitting just right from it. To say I was happy to see the 7th planet would be an understatement. The planet and ο Ari have the same m of ~5.8, but Uranus stood out from the surrounding stars due to it's colder hue. But after the whole ordeal, I was not as much affected by the looks of Uranus, as I was by the peaceful perfection of the entire view before me. In dawning summer skies, covered with ethereal noctilucent clouds, all planets of the outer Solar System lay in front of me, embodying the boundary between Us and the vast Nothing of the Universe. The birds were welcoming the rising sun and I could finally go bed, feeling so at home here, next to our ☉ P.S. I say all planets of the outer Solar System because Pluto was also there, next to Saturn. Though it's m was +14.3, so I'll have to write about it some other time. P.P.S. That night all of the outer planets were aligned in what people call a planet parade. P.P.P.S You might have noticed the Andromeda Galaxy on my sketch. I observed it too, however the viewing conditions were entirely against anything DSO-related, so it's a topic for another write-up.

Found an old (apparently USA model) celestron C8 SCT a while back, its a bit hit n miss with collimation and the optics - (some very strange star test shapes :P) but when it works it works well Here is a couple images from a couple months back. Thanks for looking. This particular night seeing was reasonably good, and collimation wasn't too bad either. Celestron C8 / ASI120MC / 2X barlow - captured in sharpcap2, stacked in autostakkert!2, wavelets in registax6

Hi, This is probably a very obvious question. If I'm standing outside at about 51 deg N. I had always thought that North was towards Scotland, but actually, it at an angle above my head. This seems right once I realise that I am halfway up a globe, so N is not the tangent of the globe where I am standing but at another angle, parallel to the axis of rotation of the earth. Similarly, the sun is in the South at midday, so I have to look South to the ecliptic. Does pretty much the whole solar system lie on the ecliptic? The Moon is to the South, as is Mars and Saturn, as was Jupiter when I could see it, so is everything in the Solar system there? Finally, during the seasons, in the Winter the Sun is above the tropic of Capricorn, so is the ecliptic further South during the day and at Night the objects on the ecliptic should be easier to see (higher above the horizon), and during the summer the Sun is on the tropic of Cancer, so the ecliptic is further South at night and harder to see (lower above the horizon) and also more difficult because of the short nights. I recall Jupiter was so bright and high it was almost casting shadows in April (2 months before the solstice), as was the Moon but now two months after the solstice, I can hardly see Saturn above my neighbour's trees, nor the Moon. Is this not right? What have I not understood correctly? Back off outside now, Regards Steve.

If you ever come to Sweden there is an interesting model of our solar system here, it covers the whole country. They started to build this model in late 1990s and my teacher in astronomy prof Gösta Gahm was one of them who started this project. In May 2019 I was invited by Gösta to participate of the installation of Jupiter version 2 at Sky City in Stockholm. I took som photos and did a report from that event. If you find it interesting to read you find it here: http://www.astrofriend.eu/astronomy/astronomy-articles/sweden-solar-system-jupiter-2019/sweden-solar-system-jupiter.html ps. There are of course a lot of other interesting things to visit and see in Sweden! /Lars

The definition of a moon is a natural object (or satellite) that orbits a planet. To my understanding Saturn's rings are made up of space debris, and they must orbit around the planet. Does that mean that each individual piece of debris and dust in Saturn's rings, and other planet's rings, count as moons?

After many hours of fiddling round with Registax wavelet settings to process my own solar system images, I've always been curious as to how it actually works. In doing so I've put together my own image sharpening program which does something similar to Registax wavelets. For comparison, I've also added some general purpose deconvolution techniques which you'll probably be familiar with from other image processing software (like Wiener inverse filtering, Richardson-Lucy, etc). In choosing a point spread function to deconvolve with, one suprising result was that the typical stack outputs from Autostakkert work best with a Lorentz point spread function (with a minor modification). Deconvolving with a Gaussian point spread function doesn't really work. Deep-sky images seem to deconvolve best with a Moffat point spread function (which is to be expected - it's already well established that star profiles in long exposures are best approximated with a Moffat function). On the whole, it's unlikely that you can sharpen solar system images much more in this program than you already can in Registax. You can see results from Registax wavelet (sharpening layers), inverse filtering (e.g. Wiener), and iterative deconvolution (e.g. Landweber) below. They all give very similar results. In all the techniques there's a similar trade-off between less noise but less detail vs more noise but more detail. There are some quick start notes on the first page of the Readme here: https://github.com/50000Quaoar/Deconvolvulator/blob/main/Readme.pdf There are some examples of deconvolved images here (move mouse over image to see before/after): https://50000quaoar.github.io/Deconvolvulator/ Image credits are on the hyperlinks The Windows download is here: https://github.com/50000Quaoar/Deconvolvulator/raw/main/Deconvolvulator32.zip Example solar system tifs to experiment with are here: https://github.com/50000Quaoar/Deconvolvulator/tree/main/image%20examples And the project page is here (with Source code in the src folder) https://github.com/50000Quaoar/Deconvolvulator If anyone finds it useful, do post here how it compares to other tools you use for solar system image sharpening. The download and the source code are free, you can use it unrestricted for any purpose. The OpenCV and OpenCVCSharp components which my program use have licence information at the end of the Readme.pdf. Sam

Decided to brave the warm weather in the San Francisco Bay Area to grab a photo of AR1504 and its friends. I was going to grab video using the Canon 1D MarkIII and the 3x Barlow but the laptop got too hot and turned off. So I decided to take several photos praying I would get a clear picture out of the set.

Horizon at 8 pm, BBC2 "The end of the Solar System" We're alllll dooomed, dooomed I tell ye!

Here's The big man from a couple of nights ago, I'm desperate ti get a bit more info out of it but I've started with AS2 and it's pretty good software. Would love to have a go with a 4x or 5x Powermate but could do with some motor driven focusing. Thanks for looking, other stuff is on my flickr site.

After months of missed opportunities, I finally managed to spot (and capture) the elusive Mercury! I was observing from the middle of a city, and due to high level of air pollution anything bellow 10 degrees near the horizon is very, very tough to see. finding Venus itself took me 10 minutes with binoculars, It was right among some clouds. mercury should have been to the bottom right of it but it wasn't visible. I took some photos of venus and just as I was about to give up on mercury and go inside, I looked one more time and there it was, so faint it was barely noticeable. I was elated and managed to get some shots of it, finally completing my solar system planets bucket list these have been taken over 4 years from 2014-18. the sun, earth (:p) and mercury shots are using a canon 600d, and all others are with the canon 600d + nextar 8SE.

Here is a short clip from the live feed I was doing from my backyard telescope is the San Mateo. I had the live feed on UStream and started it at 3pm and ended around 7:20pm PST. It was windy so thats one of the reasons it was jumpy. [media=]