Science Daily: Jupiter
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Author: Roland Roberts
Sagitta from Jones Beach
It wasn’t a very clear night, and this was a back-up target for the not-so-transparent skies. I had planned to take a set of images testing the procedure for doing a mosaic. Around 9pm, the sky looked decent with hints of the Milky Way overhead. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. So instead of a mosaic, I …
Ten Mile River Scout Camp Astronomy
This year our troop went to Ten Mile River (Camp Aquehonga) twice. It’s a long tale and I’ll spare you. I normally help out and co-teach the Astronomy merit badge class but during our second week (actual week 4 of the camp), attendance was very light and no one had signed up for the classes. …
M13 Test Image
This was really an equipment test after replacing the Dec motor on my CEM25. But before I called it quits, I decided to do a single 120 second cropped exposure using my ASI2600MC on the RedCat 51. No calibration frames, just some denoising in PixInsight to get a pretty picture.
Orion Mosaic
Well, not much of a mosaic, just two panels stitched side-by-side and they had a lot more overlap than was necessary. My main goal was to simply get a good image of Orion. I had one attempt more than 10 years ago, taken on a very cold night in Narrowsburg, NY (-5F!) with film. It …
Taurus Region
Another one from Cherry Springs, this time centered on Taurus. I realize the orientation is a bit odd, but it’s part of the meandering set of frames I hope to eventually turn into a mosaic. Rigel is the bright star in the lower right, with the nebulosity around Orion’s “head” of Sharpless 264 showing clearly. …
Capricornus from Cherry Springs
This was taken early in the evening and at the start of the exposure there were some trees in the lower left corner of the frame which, after processing, have left some “interesting” colors. But I was reluctant to crop the image to remove this as there are other things happening due to a bit …
Lacerta from Cherry Springs
This was supposed to be Lacerta. Well, it is Lacerta, but the constellation is lost in the Milky Way. The North America nebula (NGC7000) can be seen in the lower left, Cepheus is in the center to lower right with the circular H-alpha region containing the Elephant’s Trunk nebula (IC1396) marking the left end of …
Auriga
I’m going to need to start a new constellation portrait section to organize these, and the problem is my ability to get good data has outstripped my ability to process them into good images. I spent October 13, 2020 at Cherry Springs (PA) and while it was not as clear as the night I spent …
943 Begonia Occultation Measurement
Well, I figured out a way of doing the analysis. I need to find a proper tutorial, or write one for myself to remember in the future, but some of the tools are misbehaving, possible because they use Python and I think I have some version skew, using Python 3.8 when they were written for …
First IOTA Result
The International Occultation Timing Associate is a group of amateur astronomers that measure timing and location of asteroid “shadows” that fall on earth. Sometimes the orbit of Earth and an asteroid line up to block a star that is visible in low-light video cameras through telescopes. Coupling this with a video time inserter that itself …