Saturday night's Uranus & Neptune images & animations.

[Kokatha man]

Hi folks - it's been a long time since I posted here...after posting on CN & sending images off etc I've felt flat a lot of the time & as I said earlier today, we're not young anymore & it has been a long year of imaging...

Anyway, tried a new location just North of Adelaide in the wheat-belt area (80km from the city) & was somewhat dismayed to sea huge harvesters in full swing belching enormous amounts of chaff-dust into the sky...on the way home about midday the next day these hazes around the harvesters were being turned into immensely tall dust-devils..!

But we found a nice location by an old sports oval & even got a couple who lived nearby appearing for a welcoming yarn - & to tell us that the temperature was going to be too low that night for the harvesters to work through the night as they often do - meaning maybe slightly better transparency issues.

We reined in the f/l from our previous 2.3X the C14's native f/l to about 1.8X & managed to collimate for Neptune about 9:15pm when it was sufficiently dark & then capture 2 avi sets of that planet before swinging to Uranus for its culmination around 9:45pm...both Neptune captures displayed BWC's (storm spots) but we switched to Uranus intent on seeing if anything more than cloud banding was evincible...employing the iR610nm, 685 & 742nm filters for several avi's.

Certainly a couple of the Uranus animations displayed lighter & darker areas moving between each frame in the simple 2-frame animations, so perhaps we were successful...but Uranus is much more difficult to image successfully than Neptune even though Neptune is much smaller, dimmer & distant... 

Here they are, don't know if the animations need clicking on but there are 2 Uranus animations & 1 Neptune animation...

[neil phillips]

Good to see you posting again Darryl. I was talking recently about how difficult it is to image anything other than banding. Even in good locations with good seeing. If your finding it difficult. With the amount of work you have done on this planet. And your Uranus images are about as good as it gets world wide. Then obviously without animations anything showing other than banding. Would have to be considered uncertain.

 Looking at your animations of Uranus. It does look as you say. But they are at breakneck speed, my old eyes finding it hard to keep up if I am honest.

Did you experiment with slower movement ? would like to see that. 3 would have been nice. But I am guessing you didn't have the data. So we cant show what we haven't got.

Don't want to bring up the old chestnut again. But I am in awe how consistently and defined you get that collar. Wish I knew the secret ? Haven't imaged either of these planets for a while now. But your images always make we want to resume.  Not long left for Neptune. Love the detail on it. Just amazes me we can do this now. Admittedly with differences of quality and success. between different people

 

 

[astroman001]

Good work Darryl. Amazing amount of detail on Neptune especially considering it's small size and low light levels. Lovely collimation images, must have had good seeing in your new site.

I haven't bothered with either Neptune or Uranus this year. I have been scratching my Deep Sky imaging itch. Lots of galaxies and the like posted on SGL.

Best regards

Peter

[CATLUC]

Hello

Very good shoot, great work.

Clear skies.

Luc

[resonator77]

2 hours ago, CATLUC said:

Hello

Very good shoot, great work.

Clear skies.

Luc

Interesting, what would your beast of a scope manage on farthest of planets of Uranus and Neptune?

[CATLUC]

Hello

Still no good conditions in my area to try these planets.
I have never been able to obtain images of the quality of those of Kokatha man.

Clear skies.

Luc

[Kokatha man]

Thanks fellas - Peter, I guess I'll have to re-assess our "relative seeing" after your comment here...Nick Haigh (I think he's "Happylimpet" here on SGL also) made a similar comment for some seeing slightly poorer from his appraisal of the star-images of a previous session a couple of months back - we would not have agreed at the time although the seeing was considerably better in the above session...

But I know that the star-images can be considerably better again at times although I suspect the slightly oval appearance of that first ring is because the temperature of the primary is well below that of the air...my thoughts anyway & it is difficult arriving somewhere & getting the scope cooling & then stabilised before you start imaging when it isn't even really dark.

Neil, strangely the slower animation makes it more difficult to discern these phenomena...I even annotated one trial version with a red indicator & that made it worse in some ways, drawing your attention to it instead!

I switched to these much faster animations earlier this apparition for Neptune initially as I found them to actually be better...maybe to do with more easy to follow even though they're faster although Neptune 's spots are much more distinct: the other really difficult aspect to Uranus images is no 2 ever really turn out the same regardless of whether you process them identically...they vary from capture to capture with fine nuances of seeing & transparency variation as well as focus adjustments: I often play with the brightness "Normalization" in AS!2 when processing Uranus avi's because it seems to make a significant difference sometimes for some reason...

I do have another iR685nm capture taken between the 2 displayed in that particular animation but these are a b***** to process & get some sort of frame uniformity because of all this: what I have to do is open both stacked images in P/shop side-by-side & after every single processing application you make (levels, curves etc) I paste one on top of the other to see if they match relatively well...this becomes a p.i.t.a. with just 2 frames & means a lot of frigging around because you invariably find the same single application doesn't match them up (Murphy at work here!) - making it with 3-frames would leave me hair-less..!

One ploy is to make the images in the frames much smaller which "hides a multitude of sins" as they say but you can use your screen-browser controls to see if that helps..!

 

[mikeskor]

As good as it gets. Great work.

[neil phillips]

6 hours ago, Kokatha man said:

Thanks fellas - Peter, I guess I'll have to re-assess our "relative seeing" after your comment here...Nick Haigh (I think he's "Happylimpet" here on SGL also) made a similar comment for some seeing slightly poorer from his appraisal of the star-images of a previous session a couple of months back - we would not have agreed at the time although the seeing was considerably better in the above session...

But I know that the star-images can be considerably better again at times although I suspect the slightly oval appearance of that first ring is because the temperature of the primary is well below that of the air...my thoughts anyway & it is difficult arriving somewhere & getting the scope cooling & then stabilised before you start imaging when it isn't even really dark.

Neil, strangely the slower animation makes it more difficult to discern these phenomena...I even annotated one trial version with a red indicator & that made it worse in some ways, drawing your attention to it instead!

I switched to these much faster animations earlier this apparition for Neptune initially as I found them to actually be better...maybe to do with more easy to follow even though they're faster although Neptune 's spots are much more distinct: the other really difficult aspect to Uranus images is no 2 ever really turn out the same regardless of whether you process them identically...they vary from capture to capture with fine nuances of seeing & transparency variation as well as focus adjustments: I often play with the brightness "Normalization" in AS!2 when processing Uranus avi's because it seems to make a significant difference sometimes for some reason...

I do have another iR685nm capture taken between the 2 displayed in that particular animation but these are a b***** to process & get some sort of frame uniformity because of all this: what I have to do is open both stacked images in P/shop side-by-side & after every single processing application you make (levels, curves etc) I paste one on top of the other to see if they match relatively well...this becomes a p.i.t.a. with just 2 frames & means a lot of frigging around because you invariably find the same single application doesn't match them up (Murphy at work here!) - making it with 3-frames would leave me hair-less..!

One ploy is to make the images in the frames much smaller which "hides a multitude of sins" as they say but you can use your screen-browser controls to see if that helps..!

 

Fair enough. Your working with the data so are better judged at speed for eye recognition. As for uniformity. I always did it by eye lol. (not Uranus ) But of course your processing it, this way. Is a lot better. Great idea to see the levels check your using. Which is still by eye of course. But to a much finer degree I guess.

[U Cyg]

Great work.  Good detail on Neptune.

Angie

[Kokatha man]

Thanks once again fellas!

[Pete Presland]

Brilliant set of images Darryl. Incredible amount of detail visible on such small distant targets. Fascinating looking through the capture details, especially the focal lengths and frames captured!

[si@nite]

As good as it gets on these distant worlds, class work Darryl!

[kev]

Well done indeed

 

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Wonderful images and animations.

[astroavani]

A great result Daryl, I have had difficulties in getting details on Uranus mainly due to the great vibration caused by the wind that in my place of capture at that time is very intense. The first acceptable result is below but it was only 120 sec of capture;

[jetstream]

Excellent work Daryl, many kudos to you.

[Kokatha man]

Thanks again for these additional compliments folks!

Besides seeing & of course a scope with enough aperture, the really important aspects for these Ice Giants (as well as other planets!) is collimation & focus: took a couple more Uranus captures over the weekend just gone & found a histogram in the low to mid 40% range was quite sufficient & allowed us to capture Uranus at almost 50fps using the iR685nm filter...which we would not have considered previously...

Almost the finish for this year re these 2 planets but it is always good to pick up new insights for next year...hopefully we're still upright & breathing then!