Friday, 16 April 2010

Planets!

We have a good range of planets up at the moment. I trained the recently collimated 235mm Celestron on all of them. I used a -5D Barlow I found lying around and took a few snaps of each planet on my Canon EOS 350D through it, giving a focal length of about 4.5m at f/20. Exposure bracketing was done and I stacked the best few images of each planet. After contrast enhancements and aligning the red, green and blue channels etc., I put all 4 together to compare size for size & colour for colour. I worked my way round the sky from twilight to opposition, i.e. in order of increasing Right Ascension hour. Then I checked out the view of Saturn. Very sharp! I saw a very interesting alignment of moons next to the rings (Monday 12th April), so checked it out on the 20". This was brighter, but fuzzier. I attempted to image the moons but the tracking / vibration wasn't good enough on either scope. Shame - there were four moons above 12th magnitude within about 3 arc seconds.

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  2. BEWARE of links posted in comments from chinese blogger accounts. I see the names can appear to be english. It's very annoying and is just as irreputable as phishing, hacking, spam email, etc.

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