Venus IR & UV'ish 22/04/2023

[NenoVento]

Hi all,

I've been working on my setup to join "the Venus party" for several weeks and finally it seems to be payin off.

This is an image I captured early evening yesterday, by using an Optolong IR685. The day before I had managed to get a proper focus by using a bahtinov mask with Sirius, so I hope that the captured video was properly focussed:

 

I can't really say if what you see in this picture are clouds or rather artifacts of my processing, but I can tell you that they came up (together with the discontinuity in the border) as soon as I applied the slightest wavelet modifications by using Registax. What do you think, are they real or not?. Then I switched the IR filter for an UV stack inspired by @Kon, which is made by putting an Astronomik IR-Block together with a Kepler #47, and tried my best to get focus:

Later I repeated the trick with the bahtinov mask with these filters on Sirius and found that I was rather close but not right on the sweet point. Unfortunately, by then the seeing was terrible, so I couldn't make a good capture.

Now I need to learn how to make the false colour images by mixing these pictures 🙂.

The gear:

• Sky-Watcher Skymax 180 PRO
• Baader Q-Barlow 2.25X
• Optolong IR685
• Astronomik IR-Block + Kepler #47
• Risingcam GPCMOS02000KMA
• Sky-Watcher HEQ5
• RB Focus Merlin 3.0

The software:

• FireCapture 
• Autostakkert 
• RegiStax 
• The Gimp 

Thanks for looking,

NV

 

 

Edited April 23, 2023 by NenoVento
typos

[Kon]

Good effort with it. I think the IR pass is oversharpened in my opinion, you seem to have an additional artifact outside the planet so hard to tell these are real features. The repeated patchy pattern inside is also an indication of oversharpened image. Try go a few steps back and see how it looks. The #47/IR cut is much better.

By the way, I use an Astromania UV filter not a stack.

Try to focus on the planet than using the mask as seeing constantly changes. I refocus several times before I am happy to start capturing.

[NenoVento]

Thanks @Kon, I'll try to improve my focus. Impossible today with so much wind, though...

[Pete Presland]

The phase is nicely visible, as Kostas said be careful with the sharpening, the first image does look over done a little.