Venus mark II - 17 December 2016

[MarsG76]

Hi All,

I had another go at imaging Venus through the 14" dob. This time I spotted Venus when the sky was still quite bright and Venus was quite high in the sky.

Before imaging I had a look at it through the eye piece and what I saw was amazing, even upto 471X it was crisp and massive in the FOV with a hint of shading near the terminator. I tried it using a 2X powermate and the X-Cel 5mm eyepiece, delivering 660X. The view was only just marginally softer than when using the 7mm LV, so I was quite happy with that, but visibly the disc was only slight larger at 660X vs 471X, so I preferred to view it through the 7mm & 2X PM combo.

I imaged Venus through a 3X TV Barlow and the IS DMK618 through the Astrodon UV, Baader IRPass 685nm and a Neodymium/Green filter combo, later combining the stacked videos as RGB (IR NdG UV).

I attached the color as well as the UV stacked frame.

Thanks for looking.

Mariusz

 

[Pete Presland]

Fabulous image!

[Debo]

Cloud bands and all, that's really good 

[bottletopburly]

stunning

[Yamez]

Wow stunning image, fantastic job. When i've tried to view venus it's always too bright and i can only just work out the phase. Is there any tips you can give to have a better viewing experience? I was using a Skywacther 130P with a 4mm Planetary ep.

[laudropb]

Very nice work. Lovely to see some cloud detail.

[MarsG76]

19 hours ago, Yamez said:

Wow stunning image, fantastic job. When i've tried to view venus it's always too bright and i can only just work out the phase. Is there any tips you can give to have a better viewing experience? I was using a Skywacther 130P with a 4mm Planetary ep.

You're right about Venus being difficult to observe because of the glare. The only bit of advise to observing Venus is to either start looking at it quite early when the sky is still bright, basically as soon as you can spot it in binoculars or a finderscope. Observing so early will lower the contrast between the sky and the planet glare, allowing you to spot some shading in the atmosphere near the terminator, this is how I observed Venus last Saturday.

The other alternative is to view Venus through a Polarizing filter, a ND filter, color planetary filters such as yellow or light blue filters.

[MarsG76]

Thank you for the kind comments everyone.

It was a slight improvement over the first attempt at Venus in the 14" dob... one thing I realized is that when setting up I didn't check the collimation, I didn't have a reason to with the views I had, but you never know, perhaps with imaging that little tweak will bring out a bit more detail... only one way to find out... "Venus Mark III".

 

[niallk]

Outstanding 

[Radec]

Absolute stocker of an image. Impressive amount of detail. Who says size doesn't matter.....?

[Tyson M]

Stunning! I'm always so surprised to hear dob planetary imagers. But it is more and more apparent that it's not that hard to do 

 

Well done

[Dave In Vermont]

An excellent capture! Thank you for posting this!

An Astrodon filter, this? Very interesting to me. As I have it's ancestor - the Schuler Venus-UV. And with a neodymium also - very interesting, too.

Keep going, please,

Dave

 

[MarsG76]

21 hours ago, Radec said:

Absolute stocker of an image. Impressive amount of detail. Who says size doesn't matter.....?

For planetary detail, especially when imaging through filters like a UV filter, size definitely counts, not so much the focal Length, but the aperture Girth is what delivers the pleasant high detail results. Focal Length can be compensated for. :-)

 

[MarsG76]

19 hours ago, Tyson M said:

Stunning! I'm always so surprised to hear dob planetary imagers. But it is more and more apparent that it's not that hard to do 

 

Well done

It's a GOTO tracking dob, and at high powers that definitely makes a massive difference. At the FL I imaged, without tracking, it would be a lot more difficult to image since I don't think the planet would be in the FOV for more than 10 seconds.

Tracking helps with not only capture of a reasonable amount of frames but keeping the planet within the frame for long enough to hit the focus spot on.

 

[MarsG76]

5 hours ago, Dave In Vermont said:

An excellent capture! Thank you for posting this!

An Astrodon filter, this? Very interesting to me. As I have it's ancestor - the Schuler Venus-UV. And with a neodymium also - very interesting, too.

Keep going, please,

Dave

 

Yeah, it's a Astrodon UVenus filter. The Baader neodymium filter stacked with the green filter basically adds a bit of contrast and cuts out any IR leak.

I intend to keep going... I'm hoping to get a few more opportunities to image Venus as it approaches the crescent phase and greatest eastern elongation on 12th January, and perhaps get more detail.. see how far this "rabbit hole goes". What I'm looking forward to imaging are Jupiter, Saturn and, in 2018, Mars. I wonder how much more detail the 14" dob will capture when comparing to the images I got through the 8SE.

 

[Stu1976j]

Fantastic image and some great detail, thanks for sharing 

[MarsG76]

I had another go at imaging Venus on 23rd December, but straight away I saw that the seeing was nowhere near as good as on the 17th. I imaged anyway but I could not get any detail so the image turned out to be quite bland, still, I think it looks OK.

One thing I noticed while processing the 23rd Dec data was that when I used just the UV for blue and IR for red data, while for green using a 50% mix of them both I had a crisper image, so I reprocessed the Venus image from 17th Dec and there is a bit more cloud detail visible.