Dirty Skies

Archive for May, 2005

Since the seeing has been so poor lately and the moon is not rising until after midnight, I thought I’d fool a little with re-processing some of my older images now that I’ve had a bit more experience with it.

Below is an image of Jupiter from my observation run with the Meade LPI on May 6th. I used Lynkeos for the stacking in this instance (see the Software sidebar to the right) averaging about 100 frames. I did some post tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. If you compare this to my earlier image processing attempt (Jupiter Tonight) for this run, you will see I was able to tease out much more contrast and detail here. You will also see I mislabeled the moons in my earlier work as well! DOH!

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What a bummer man. After a journey of millions and millions of miles, the engines cut off 130 feet too soon. I realize that the theory is old news but now it seems there may be visual confirmation. Mars Polar Lander Found at Last?

I went out this evening at dusk to fool with the ScopeTronix 40mm eyepiece. The Moon was waxing crescent about 4.4 days old. I went out at early dusk because it was due to set at 12:29 AM and was already into the west — about 40° above the horizon. I took some shots in different zoom and Barlow configurations just to see what I could come up with and even threw on the Moon filter towards the end for good measure.

I really like this eyepiece! It has a great FOV with the camera. I think the batteries in scope were dying though, as I could hear the focus motor straining and the slew controls became sluggish and unresponsive (Oh will I ever achieve perfect alignment?). So I don’t think it was tracking properly. I have the power supply so I guess next time I go out I’ll need to run an extension cord.

I should really remember to horizontally flip these BEFORE annotating them… anyway, here they are.

I’m going to call 050512_016 the “money shot” for the evening.

I combined two of the images above using Photoshop, to create this extra wide view.

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On a different note, I had the good sense tonight to think about what I was going to do BEFORE I went out. So instead of taking out the full kit of everything I own and fumbling in the dark with packaging and whatnot, I had it all prepared in a mini gear kit. I even got the idea to clip the mini Maglite on the visor of my baseball cap! Not only could I see what I was doing, I had both hands free and no mosquitos flying into my mouth.

A few actually…

Took the scope out this afternoon to try out the new ScopeTronix 40mm Plössl. I was excited to get it as up until now I have been unable to image the entire disk of the Sun or Moon in a single frame. FINALLY! Again, a difficult focus but at least with the Olympus I’m shooting through the eyepiece so I can get it reasonably in focus before snapping the camera on.

I was probably out there about 45 minutes. The great thing about the ETX90 is you can just grab it and bring it outside in 2 minutes. It’s really convenient — and I gotta tell you, if it wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use it… I’m lazy. Anyway, here are the results of the session.