Uranus Imaging

[krwitman]

Happy New Years Everyone,

On December's Supermoon evening, December 3, 2017 at about 9:56pm, the seeing here in Southeastern Pennsylvania was excellent (4/5 - 5/5 Sky clock).  I decided to turn my Meade LX50-10" SCT to the Ice Giant Planet Uranus.  After doing quite a bit of research in imaging the 7th planet, I used an ASI120mm camera with a Baader 610nm Long Pass Filter. I choose not to use a Barlow since from historical experiences with Mars I find I obtain small but sharp results without one.  I acquired 39minutes of video at a frame rate of 4 fps with a gain of 73 collecting 10,012 total frames.  Using AS2 I stacked the best 3000 frames using a 1.5 drizzle then processed further using Registax 6 and PS5.  My question is did I capture any details on the planet?  Using WINJUPOS and Moon positions, I also show the orientation of the planet at the time of imaging.

The colored image is just a combination of the Near IR610RGB inserted in place of the overexposed Uranus showing the moons.

Just seeking anyone's ideas.

Thank you so much for looking,

 

All my best,

Kevin

 

[Demonperformer]

Well there is definitely a light patch by the pole and a dark zone in the centre of the disk. Excellent effort. 

[Pete Presland]

That's an outstanding capture, Uranus is a very tricky target. You certainly look like you have captured some Polar detail for sure, not sure about the darker central area to be honest, it does look similar to my results with my C9.25 though.

It is certainly a fine image especially for a 10" aperture, not that it is small, just a lot of imagers of the ice giants are using 16" and bigger. I am sure it will interest @Kokotha man who has produced some magnificent images recently of both the icy giants.

[kev]

Nice!  Especially on such a small target

[sloz1664]

Excellent images. I must concentrate on planetary imaging when the conditions are right.

Steve

[orion25]

That's awesome! I do well to get a little color in my images. Don't have the aperture yet to get any detail - yet, haha!

Nice work,

Reggie