I took the scope out tonight as it was a clear sky and moderately humid (which is less than the usual VERY humid). I tried some different shots of Jupiter tonight with both the Olympus D460 and the Meade LPI. My results were pretty much what they’ve been. I’m either at the limit of my scope or the atmosphere… of course I could just have no clue what I’m doing! The seeing was probably as good as it’s ever been here. There seemed to be very little atmospheric turbulence.
At any rate, here’s the D460 shot which is actually a stack of 5 different “exposures.” Exposures is in quotes because the D460 offers very little manual control over the camera so I use the term loosely.
Here is the first stack I processed from the LPI. This is an average of about 40 frames (I always forget to look and see exactly how many). The Great Red Spot is faintly visible in the lower center of the disk.
click for larger
The single biggest problem I continue to have with all this exposure and focus. I’m either working through a LCD display on the back of a camera or my iBook (gamma set to red screen). In either case it’s almost impossible to be sure I’ve got the best focus and totally impossible to preview the exposure.
What? … people did this with film?!?!? Oh the woes of modern technology.
I determined today from looking at nautical charts for the Tampa Bay area that magnetic north is actually 4°15′ W (west) of true north in my area. I would have to take this into account when polar aligning the scope with a compass. Polaris is usually very low on the horizon at this latitude and lost in skyglow.
I thought this was interesting. I mean I knew magnetic north and true north weren’t the same but it didn’t occur to me that depending on where you were on the surface of the Earth there could be further deviation from variations in the planets mass distribution, crust thickness and field line orientation.
I went out tonight to test out some new items I bought. Namely an electric focuser, a 3X Barlow, and a 9.7mm Plössl eyepiece. Everything worked out fairly well.
I plugged in the LPI to try some shots of Jupter through the new Barlow and had a tough time finding the planet in the monitor. After about 30 minutes I discovered the scope was roughly pointed right at it but the fact that my scope doesn’t collect enough light in conjunction with the image being out of focus, rendered it invisible on my computer monitor. After riding the focus all the way out and in I “found” it as it came into focus … just in time for the sky to cloud over for the evening. I mean I was about to push record and it disappeared! I looked up and saw a cloud had covered it and behind was a whole sky of unbroken cloud. 🙁 Another time I guess.
I found another image stacking program tonight with an auto-align feature. As it indicates on it’s webpage, Lynkeos seems geared more towards planetary image processing as opposed to lunar. This proved out as I reprocessed some of the other evening’s images of the Moon and Jupiter.
