Phoebe, aka Saturn IX

[Xilman]

Who says images of small satellites in the outer solar system can't be artistic?

This one was taken with my 0.4m Dilworth telescope. A Dilworth uses several relay lenses in the optical train, each of which scatters a very tiny amount of light. Usually the scattered light is completely undetectable but if a very bright object, Saturn in this case, is just outside the field of view effects like this can be produced when contrast is enhanced. Saturn was about a million times brighter than its satellite Phoebe, which is marked with the cross lines. Phoebe was magnitude 16.6 at the time of observation, 2021-07-08.

 

[Kon]

Nice capture. Excuse my ignorance, but how can you tell this is Phoebe out of the other bright spots? 

[Xilman]

An entirely sensible question which deserves a full answer so that others can also observe these sorts of things. For outer satellites of JSUN head over to https://minorplanetcenter.net/iau/NatSats/NaturalSatellites.html

Select which satellites in which you are interested and enter the date and a range of times around the observation. I used 2021-07-08 00:00 and 10 positions separated by 20 minutes. The site will return the co-ordinates of the satellite at each time.

Prior to that I plate-solved the image (using a local installation of astrometry.net) and displayed it in an image viewer (ds9 in my case) which indicates the position of the cursor as it moves around.

Many other ways are possible (rummaging around the JPL web site is valuable, whether or not you want to find satellites, as is using Aladin) but I leave those as an exercise for the reader.

 

[Astro Noodles]

Another question - What on earth is a Dilworth telescope?

[Xilman]

19 minutes ago, Astro Noodles said:

Another question - What on earth is a Dilworth telescope?

Duckduckgo is your friend.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dilworth+telescope&t=h_&ia=web

[Astro Noodles]

I don't know - you tee it up so a guy can show off his telescope and he tells you to go and look on Wikipedia.

 

[Xilman]

1 minute ago, Astro Noodles said:

I don't know - you tee it up so a guy can show off his telescope and he tells you to go and look on Wikipedia.

 

Sigh.  Why should I want to show off a design into which I made no input? The "0.4m" is far more significant than "Dilworth" in my opinion.

Anyway, if you wish --- www.astropalma.com and http://www.larrosa.ch/astrooptic.htm if you want to find out more about this particular Dilworth.,

[Astro Noodles]

10 minutes ago, Xilman said:

Sigh. 

And the same to you. 

[Xilman]

Looks like my Asperger's strikes again. Oh well.

 

I'm somebody who is more interested in what people do rather than what they own. Think of it as an odd personality trait.