Pluto in Sagittarius

[nytecam]

Wide field brief shot of Pluto very low in Sagittarius last night through cloud gaps [data on image] and identified via NASA Horizons plotted on Sloan DSS inset lower left - my field enlargement inset lower right Anyone seen or shooting Pluto?

[swamp thing]

Great stuff.

That looks a very busy field it's in. Not an easy target.

[ianaiken]

Great - thanks for sharing. Always wanted to try to capture this myself but weather is not so kind at the moment.

[lukebl]

Nice one. I like to have a go at capturing it every now and then. I have a strange fondness for it myself, having dreamed about having equipment big enough to see it when I was a kid with a 60mm refractor in the 1970s. This was my capture over two nights on 22nd and 23rd July. Even distant Pluto can move a fair bit.

[kirkster501]

Wow, that's amazing nytecam/lukebl - incredible ! Well done.

[nytecam]

Thanks everyone for your interest and Luke for your July duo Third clear night in a row for some great astro imaging. Merge of last two nights on Pluto below showing its movement over 24 hours confirmed via NASA Horizons and Sloan DSS

[nytecam]

Here's the raw marked merge

[luis]

Great !

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Really nice to see some images of Pluto! Well done!

[davies07]

Second all the above comments. Great stuff, especially Luke's. How did you do that?

D

[lukebl]

Second all the above comments. Great stuff, especially Luke's. How did you do that?

Many thanks! I did the animation in Photoshop, using images taken on consecutive nights, and saving it as an animated GIF file.

[nytecam]

Many thanks! I did the animation in Photoshop, using images taken on consecutive nights, and saving it as an animated GIF file.

Here's last night's 30s shot under a nearby full moon as Pluto moves west [caused by earth's rapid motion 'east'!] with stars to mag 17 recorded. Pluto seems unusually bright but according to Sloan DSS nearly overlays two nearby fainter stars!

Luke - any easy tutorially for PS animation ?

[lukebl]

.....Luke - any easy tutorially for PS animation ?

Well. here goes (I'm using Photoshop CS3)

1: Open the two (or more) image files showing Pluto on successive nights.

2. Paste one of them onto the other, so that you have two (or more) layers, each with an different image

3. Line up the images. A bit fiddly. I usually set the top layer to 'Difference' then move and rotate the image till the two line up. Crop the image.

4. Make sure the images aren't too big otherwise the file size will be unmanageable. For an animated GIf for the web, my Pluto image was 700 x 532 pixels. If you have more frames, the file will be bigger. make sure you set the layers back to 'Normal'.

4. Go to Window > Animation

5. Check that the bottom right button in the window is set to 'Convert to frame animation', you should see this:

6: Click the top right button and click 'make frames from layers'

7; Highlight all frames, click where it says '0 sec' and set the time span between each frame, say 0.5 seconds. make sure the time loop is set to 'Forever' so that the gif loops continuously.

8. Go to File > Save for Web and Devices and save it as a GIF.

9. Bob's yer uncle. I've done it with 20-30 frames, but that can get rather time-consuming, like this animation of Comet Garradd from earlier in the year. Obviously, I could have done a better job of aligning the stars! Also, colour images make bigger files than greyscale ones. You don't really want a GIF bigger than, say 1 or 2 MB, otherwise a movie-making program would be better so that you can make an MPEG file.

[nytecam]

Many thanks Luke for the comprehension tutorial - I'll give it ago !

[ronaldo999]

yes a very busy shot and difficult to capture well, good job.

[davo]

Just got to say this is amazing!