Mars & Neptune - storm spots confirmed almost immediately!

[Kokatha man]

Hi all - a quick post after just getting home from Carrieton a few hours ago where we imaged Mars 2 nights ago & Neptune the morning after... (ie, about 36 hours ago)

We almost didn't get to take our first capture of Neptune due to my iphone's battery going flat & the alarm not waking us up at 4am - I awoke at 5am & we rushed outside knowing it would be light by 6:30 am...

I had foolishly left the corrector plate uncovered overnight & due to the enormous amount of moisture in this normally dry area of Sth. Oz I had literally cupful's of water sluicing off the corrector when I applied the hair-dryer - needing wads of tissues to soak it up as it ran to the lower edge...the result was a grubby, water-stained corrector, looking atrocious..!

We got Lambda Aquarii onscreen pretty quickly but it still took a little while to get Neptune on the sensor - this is our first time this apparition for N. & we don't use "GoTo" so it isn't quite as easy as it might seem...

Anyway, by the time we had it onscreen after collimating on L. Aqu. & went through our focusing routine we only got one avi in before the seeing went bad, no doubt due to pre-dawn atmospherics...

But to our surprise we could clearly see 2 bright storm spots on N.'s disk - we sent off emails to Prof. Ricardo Hueso of PVOL as well as Mike Foulkes from BAA - & were more pleased when Ricardo sent us this email tonight..!

 

< "Dear Daryl and Mike,

You are right. There are two bright spots in the images. Both of them were imaged by our team on 17 May with a 2.2m telescope at very low elevation (22º over the horizon). One of them has been observed by HST (I can not send an image since I am only co-I of the observations). The only reason we did not issue an alert to amateurs is that we thought Neptune was still a difficult target for amateurs and that the ephemeris of the feature were not easy to determine from the close in time observations with HST and PlanetCam. I'll measure the spot positions and produce ephemeris over the day.

Best wishes,

Ricardo.">

Here is Neptune at 150% capture scale as well as a heavily processed image to assist visibility...

Btw, here is the Mars image as well!

 

[2STAR]

Superb images

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Superb captures! That Mars is absolutely stunning, and congrats on the observation of the storm spots!

[Freddie]

Very interesting shots and information on Neptune.

The Mars image looks great. Up there with the quality of John H's shots.

[Ruud]

Amazing images!

[laudropb]

Very nice images.

[Pete Presland]

Amazing to see such features from astronomers telescopes on earth!

[Tyson M]

I cant wait to dial in my camera settings and scope collimation to take a stab at Neptune (and Uranus I think) coming up soon here.

 

I am hoping to dial it in to grab Saturn and Mars too, but yea....

 

Thanks for sharing! Superb, as always. 

[astroman001]

Superb images. shows the value of amateur observations.

Best regards

Peter

[si@nite]

As above great work, & beautiful mars too!

[laudropb]

The BAA have sent out an email asking for observations of the storm spots.

[Kokatha man]

Thank you to everyone who has replied...as Peter said, Neptune & Uranus are where we can all make some valid contributions at times & you people in the N. Hemisphere aren't disadvantaged once the culminating times are ok - & of course you need fairly decent scope apertures!

For us there's a slight hiatus due to weather & I need to clean the corrector & dry out the C14, which I should've done by now but we have a lot of other things going on...but we look forward to other amateurs' results!  in the interim!