Solar System

Mercury Transit, November 2019

With a snowstorm the night before, it seemed like I would not have a chance to image this event. Luckily, the storm started to clear out just as the last part of the transit was happening. This was shot on a fixed tripod, with the gimbal head, using the Sigma 150-600 at 600mm through a white light solar filter.

Tiny Jupiter

My first capture of Jupiter came along as a fill in target of opportunity, shot in between the clouds, on the last night we had our gear set up. The skies were just cloudy enough to preclude the ability to collect any deep sky data, so I eventually decided to take a look at Jupiter. I was not properly configured for the largest image, and with clods could not get any color frames captured, but even the little image shot with no Barlow and the 0.62x reducer in produced a recognizable image. It was amazing to see how much better the seeing was than what I had seen up in CO a few weeks earlier. And just by luck, I also imaged when the Great Red Spot was visible, as well as the 2 moons Io (farthest away) and Ganymede (closest) as well. Equipment: ZWO ASI1600MM-C Camera @ -20C and Gain:139 Offset:21 Software Bisque MyT Mount Celestron EdgeHD 800 8" SCT, with Lepus 0.62x reducer, f/6.2 at 1260mm Software: Registax PIPP Light Frames: Luminance: video, best 10% of 5007 frames @ 90 fps, 320 x 240 resolution

Mercury Transit

Mercury transits across the face of the sun, seemingly no larger than some of the small active sunspots.

Venus Transit Through Clouds

A shot of Venus transiting the sun, taken on a tripod and using a 10 ND filter for safety. With the clouds it was hard to get a clean shot, but Venus is clearly visible, and even a few smudges of sunspots can also be seen. The manual lens doesn't report actual shooting parameters - the actual aperture was around f/8, using a Pentax Tele Takumar 400mm f/5.6 manual focus lens on an adapter as my 'scope'.

First Comet Capture - C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

So getting a presentable image of this object was a real learning experience, both in the data collection and certainly in the data processing. I was constrained to using a mono camera, usually an advantage for deep sky imaging, but in the case of 'fast' moving and visually changing objects like a comet probably not the best choice. This image is made from about an hour's worth of total data, split up into 5 frames of 180 seconds each from 4 filters (LRGB). The frames were then dark subtracted and registered, and then the stars were batch removed and the star data and comet data processed separately, with the comet aligned using the newly improved Comet Alignment module in PixInsight. Finally, the 2 images were recombined to produce a composite with aligned comet data and pinpoint stars. This comet is currently rising close to 2200 MST, and is visible via binoculars in the night sky most of the night, although the moon will start to affect it's visibility. it may even be approaching naked eye visibility from extremely dark skies as it gets closer to the earth into the month of February on its journey now outbound from the Sun. It has an orbital period of ~50,000 years, so this is our only chance to experience its rare green glow. Equipment: QHY268M Camera @ -10C and Gain:56 Offset:25 Software Bisque MyT Mount Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8 Antlia Pro Filters (LRGB) Askar FMA180 Guidescope/ASI290MM Software: Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8 Lightroom CC Photoshop CC N.I.N.A. Control Software Star XTerminator (Russell Croman) Noise XTerminator (Russell Croman) Light Frames: Luminance: 5 x 180 secs ( 15 mins) Red: 5 x 180 secs ( 15 mins) Green: 5 x 180 secs ( 15 mins) Blue: 5 x 180 secs ( 15 mins) 1 hr total Dark Frames: 10 x 180 secs (30 mins) No Bias Frames No Flat Frames