Garradd and M71...

[fatwoul]

I was a bit disappointed with my x7 240sec frames of Garradd, so I had another go last night. This time, I reduced to 60sec, but left it going for 4 hours. As a bonus, it just happened to be when the comet was passing M71.

The cause of the little spikes on brighter stars, I suspect, is a diffraction effect caused by OAG being a little too far into the light cone.

I was surprised how many stars jumped out of this one after processing, considering the exposure lengths and the relatively quiet part of the sky its in. I really like the way M71 seems to be just a slightly denser patch of stars.

I'd like to do two things with this data. First, I'd like to try and register for the comet rather than the stars, to see how much tail detail might be there. Second, I'd like to turn this into an animation, but I have no idea where to start with so many frames to work with. I'm only familiar with animating in photoshop, so would need to convert every FITS file to jpg, which would take a long time.

Anyway, hope you like:

[RogerTheDodger]

Great image, I was wondering if someone would get a pic of this passing M71.

[fatwoul]

Someone did. Glad you like it.

Know of any tutorials for animating these things, Rog?

[RogerTheDodger]

I've not done it with FITS files, but this looks like it may be able to do it - it has a 40 day trial

ImageTOOLSca

[andrew63]

Great image - was looking last night with with 4" - very close together about midnight less than 0.5 deg . Visual just two small smudges but amazing to see the globular resolved. Hoped someone would get an image, thanks for posting.

andrew

[fatwoul]

Thanks Roger, I'll have a look. I've since managed to get it to animate in Maxim, but it makes my computer cry because I have to open over 200 images at once, and then tell it to animate them!

Glad you liked it, Andrew. I didn't get around just just looking at it, but I did pass the time viewing Jupiter through dad's ETX90 :-)

[wcgucfa]

Wonderful image! Very nice resolution. The stars in M71 remind me of

solar granulation!

I imaged last night and acquired some frames also, but haven't had the time to scrutinize my results. If there are any worth posting, I will, sometime today/tonight.

It was unexpectedly clear so I feel lucky just to view the close pass visually. It's hard for me to not put the camera on the scope to confirm what I am seeing with averted vision. It's also sort of like bringing back the proof I was there!

Bill

[RogerTheDodger]

It may be worth a google for progs that batch convert FIT to jpeg, that would ease the pain a bit

[Ant]

I like that a lot.

I think that DSS will let you stack on the comet.

Adobe Image ready will let you open a folder of images as animation frames. Fairly painless way of getting an animation. File sizes tend to be quite large though.

Cheers

Ant

[fatwoul]

Cheers, everyone. :-)

After much faffing about, here is the video I managed to get out of Maxim. Unfortunately, I didn't notice a spare erroneous frame at the end, but trying again seems cruel to my poor old PC.

If anybody knows how to embed this into this thread directly, please be my guest, as I was unable to make it work.

Enjoy.

[fatwoul]

Had a go at stacking for the comet (it was easier than I thought to make it work - just took ages to highlight Garradd in each frame!)

Got a bit carried away with the Photoshop bit, but I'm fairly happy with the result. Looks like a torch in the rain. Wow, you'd never guess I spend my day with art students...

[RogerTheDodger]

Fantastic animation

to emebed you just use [ youtube ]B-72gKflmZs[ /youtube ] without the spaces before and after the square bracket, with the identifier in the middle.

B-72gKflmZs

[Ransu]

Great Images and videos.

I was able to took some images of Garradd and M71.

Here is 4x2min light with TS250 f/5 Newton and Canon EOS1000D.

Couple more images in my Blog