Ahhhh, its like the return of an old friend whose been gone way too long. I miss drawing Jupiter so much that I beat back the desire to lie in bed when my eyes opened a few minutes before 5:00 this morning. The planet looks better than ever, I saw more bands than previously in the year the turbulence within the larger bands was big as life. What seemed really neat was the band that in this drawing is just below the equator seemed to make a weird dip, it bends down on the right side of the image. That was intentional, not just sloppy drawing! 

I can't believe it took me so long to get around to drawing planets! Wish I started doing this 15 years ago. Thanks again to Bill for turning me onto this. I'll make sure this image goes out to the organizations that can use illustrated planetary imagery.

Steve Gale

Lunt Solar Wedge First Light

"Disclaimer, Viewing the Sun can be extremely dangerous resulting in permanent damage to viewers eye!!!   The Sun is only to be viewed with equipment such as specific solar filters that are known to reduce the Sun's energy to safe levels.  The manufacture instruction's for solar equipment must be followed at all times!" 

Well, I finally obtained my Lunt Solar Wedge for white light viewing of the Sun.  This was after a 3-4 month wait.  The 2012 Venus Transit was to blame given the run on solar equipment since earlier this year.

Lunt 2" Solar Wedge and SV 105 APO

The solar wedge looks like an oversized 2" telescope diagonal.  The wedge attaches to the back of a refracting telescope.   The wedge then allows a safe amount of light from the Sun to reflect up towards the eyepiece.  The majority of the energy from the Sun passes thru a special grating in the wedge.  Since the light from the Sun comes to focus after contact with wedge's grating, no harm is done to the telescope.
The Lunt wedge itself comes supplied with an ND3 filter.

Lunt Solar Wedge and supplied case.

The benefits of the solar wedge are high light-output and a sharper image than conventional film and glass based filters.  For added safety I have purchased a Baader UV/IR blocking filter and 2" ND 0.9 filter to be used when visually viewing the Sun with the wedge.   Without the added ND 0.9 filter the image is too bright to comfortably view.  The UV/IR blocking filter is just an added measure of safety to protect against any UV/IR light that may be left after the light passes thru the wedge and the two ND filters.

From what I have seen so far, the Lunt Wedge, does indeed produce a sharp solar white-light image!  Detail across the solar disk is nice and sharp.  Solar faculae associated with the Sun's magnetic field are easily viewed too.  In one instance I could easily observe solar faculae surrounding Sunspot AR1542 as it sat on the edge of the solar disk.  The wedge can not be used with a reflecting telescope.  But it does allow for ease of use should the owner have more than one refractor.  I was able to use the wedge for solar imaging with my Stellarvue SV105 (4") APO on one day and use it for quick viewing with my WO 80 mm APO the next.

                                           Sunspots AR1542 and AR1542, 8/13/12

The above shot was taken using a SV105 4" APO, the Lunt 2" Wedge, a 2" TV 2X Barlow,  Canon T1i DSLR, and 2" Baader Continuum filter
BackYard EOS was used to collect a 1200 frame movie that was later stacked with Autostakkert2. The final composite image was later enhanced in CS2.

Unfortunately I can see that the 2X Barlow and DSLR was only sharp in the center of the image.
The image is also, not fully illuminated.  On the good side, I believe the lack of focus helps give this particular image a 3D effect.   But, next time a composite/ mosaic image will have to be considered in order to produce a sharper image with this combination.  But this was only a first light.  I hope to use a CCD-video camera at some point in the future to obtain best result.  Recent aquasition of a 4X Telvue PowerMate will also allow for sharpness and even illumination thru-out the image.

There was also a problem reaching focus with the DSLR without the barlow in place.  More in-focus is needed.  But a shorter barrel can be purchased to help bring the camera closer to the wedge.  



William Anthony

Jaw Dropping Solar Activity Sunday

We saw a hard to believe solar prominence this past Sunday. It was this wide, squatty thing over the course of the afternoon, but a little before 5 it exploded outward. At first it took on a shape like crumpled up paper. But then it expanded into this linear filament that just kept going. If you looked at 5 minute intervals it was really different every time! I believe I'm being conservative when I say at its greatest length it exceeded 10% the diameter of the Sun. Vlad and I were the only ones to stay till the end, it disconnected and by 5:20 or so it was an evaporating wisp of a prominence. Been looking at the Sun for years, some times its great, sometime it puts you to sleep. But I'd never seen anything remotely similar to this.

Very sorry to say there was no photographic provision at the time, we were set up to serve the public. All we walked away was observation.

Hey all,

My very first post on this blog and I want to share my experience using RCX and DMK camera for planetary imaging so far this year. Just a week ago I decided to purchase Astra Image 3.0 Pro software which I read good things about for a while. It has multiple deconvolution filters and it combines RGB images plus a ton of other image processing tools. I want to share couple images that I have reprocessed from a while ago. First is Saturn from March 11. For some reason this is the sharpest Saturn that I ever got and I think I know the reasons why and I will share it more in detail next time. Let me just say it had to do with too slow of a fps rate that I was choosing lately. Saturn is dim and I was doing slower than 1/15 at times (even as slow as 9fps and I think with poor or average seeing we need to be using 1/20 of a second per frame which is 20 fps or maybe even faster. Collimation and focusing were also causing "blur" and I know how to fix both (for focusing make it 3 different RGB videos and then post processing pick one with sharpest rings. As for collimation, note to myself to not be lazy and re-collimate on Spica (its next to Saturn) the night of imaging.

Now, here is Saturn image. It is 10% stack, 1.5 drizzle. The Cassini division is fairly sharp but I have seen much sharper from other people, so there is a lot to improve on.

Next is Jupiter from way back in December... This was the only image I took at 27 fps instead of 60 fps (which shows "onion ring" sort of distortion inside the planet and should not be used in the future). The fastest fps our DMK camera can handle is 30fps or maybe 45fps, if there is such option. If you look at Jupiter's moon on the left you can see that scope was not focused and collimated properly, it looks like a triangle not a disk yet and still there is a lot of detail showing on the planet. Small bends are easily see, therefore it should give us hope for a lot of room to improve before Jupiter returns in the early morning sky.

And here is Venus couple weeks prior to the transit.

In the next blog I will go into more details as far as what I think the best settings to use.

Vlad.

So Saturday I had my solar scope out, which is an old Meade 4500 with a full aperture solar filter cap. Sunspots looked just great. Lately I have been telling people how much I miss Jupiter, such a great subject to draw. Then it occurred to me ... the Sun never goes away! If you get into drawing that and it fails to come up one morning, nothing to draw is the least of your worries! So I've found a new model to pose for me.

What I think is neat here is the way the center-most cluster seems to have broken up over a day.

April 13th Research Group Meeting "Mining the Kepler Mission Database"

NJAA Research Group Meeting

Friday April 13th 8 PM

"Mining the Kepler Mission Database"

Kevin Alton Presenting

The Kepler space satellite is best known in the lay press for reporting the possible detection of Earth-like worlds circling far-off suns, yet by comparison to this primary objective, the Kepler Mission will most assuredly lead to the discovery of far more traditionally defined intrinsic or extrinsic variable stars. Started in 2009, the Kepler Mission will continue for at least 3.5 years and perhaps as long as 6 years. New data are generally made public on a quarterly basis so that there is a veritable warehouse of lightcurves available for analysis. If you only have time at night to take astro-images suitable for framing, but still are interested in the scientific aspects of variable stars, then the Kepler database could probably keep you busy for the rest of your life. Fortunately, there are a large number of freely available software tools and applications that can assist in finding, retrieving, downloading and analyzing lightcurves gathered by the Kepler space satellite and stored in the Kepler Archives. Join me on April 13th at the NJAA Research Group Meeting and I will walk you through the process of potentially discovering something new about a variable star in the Kepler field-of-view that has never been seen before.
Kevin Alton

Please check out Kevin Alton's website at :
http://www.underoakobservatory.com/

I highly recommend Kevin's Journal #3 which contains information pertaining to the talk:
http://www.underoakobservatory.com/UnderOak_Issue3_Final.pdf

Please join us this Friday as expert variable star observer Kevin Alton presents. 
Refreshments will be served.

Saturn, Jupiter, and Martian Volcanoes.

Saturn, Jupiter, and Martian Volcanoes

Displayed are some of the images taken thru March of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.  

The first two images were taken by Vladimir Alexandrov and Mitchell Revalski of the NJAA Research Group.  These images were captured the night after Wayne Jaeschke’s presentation on lunar/planetary imaging.  We learned a lot from Wayne and everyone was excited to image.  The last two images of Mars were taken by yours truly a week later.  

Saturn 3/11/12 by

Vladimir Alexandrov

12” RCX 400, @ F20

DMK21AU04,  2X Telvue Barlow

Schirra Observatory

Saturn

Saturn is considered the most beautiful planet in the solar system.    Saturn is also one of the most difficult planets to image!  Unfortunately, Saturn is not as bright as one would expect.  This creates a host of problems as we try to capture the detail on the planet.  To obtain this image, NJAA Research Group member Vladimir Alexandrov stayed out till 5 am in the morning.   By 4:30 am the planet was high enough for a good image to be obtained.  Vlad had to increase the gain on the DMK21AU4 CCD imaging camera due to the planets low magnitude.   The exposure time was much longer than typically used for Mars and Jupiter at f20.   Still, Vlad’s hard work paid off with an excellent image of the ringed planet that shows a wealth of detail.   Close scrutiny of Vlad’s image shows 8 belts/zones along with the A,B, and C rings.  The Cassini division is evident along with a hint of the Enke Minima.

Jupiter 3/10/12 by

Mitchell Revalski

12” RCX 400, @ F20

DMK21AU04,  2X Telvue Barlow

Schirra Observatory

Jupiter

Imaging Jupiter was no easy task.  The low altitude and smaller size of the planet make it more difficult to image than a few months ago.  After imaging Mercury and Venus, Mitchell Revalksi turned the 12” RCX on Jupiter.  Three images were obtained with the DMK21AU04 CCD camera, and later processed with Autostakkert 2.  The separate R, G, B filtered images were than compiled in Photoshop CS2.   This image is important considering that it clearly shows the thinning of the Northern Equatorial Belt (NEB).

If the observer looks at the two main belts of Jupiter they will note that the NEB is going thru a dramatic change.  Many of the drawings by Steve Gale clearly show the thinning NEB too. 

Mars 3/23/12   1:46 UT

  

Mars

Mars is changing with the seasons.  As noted before, the planet is currently going thru summer as the Northern Polar Cap (NPC) shrinks.  Clouds have been seen on the Red planet just about every day.  On the night of March 23, I was able to image the planet at two different times, three hours apart.   This was after the discovery of a strange high altitude cloud by lunar/planetary imager, Wayne Jaeschke.  

(More information about the strange Martian cloud can be found here:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/30/10945735-mars-mystery-cloud-explained)

   I was not able to image the cloud feature observed by Wayne.  But the 8” SCT used for imaging did not disappoint!  The image taken at 1:46 UT shows three dark circles that correspond to the location of volcanoes on the Martian surface.  The large Nix Olympia can also be seen to the right of the three smaller volcanoes.  Nix Olympia contains a dark surrounding area coupled with a cloud formation over the volcanoes peak area and to the north of it. 

     Mars 3/23/12   3:35 UT

    Three hours later, at 3:35 UT, the planet was imaged again.  By this time, the previous volcanoes had rotated to the side with Nix Olympia dead center.  A tiny cloud can be viewed over its peak coupled with a larger cloud on its western side (left side in image).

These images were sent to the British Astronomical Association Mars Director, Richard Mckrim.

Richard, remarked that the detail was excellent for an 8” scope and that the Martian volcanoes do become darker at this point in the Martian season.  (the dark circles in the 1:46 UT image).   This was a relief as I originally could not match the appearence of the surface markings in the 1:46 UT image with the expected view from the Mars Previewer II software.   A follow up with a Mars iphone app, showed that volcanoes were located exactly where the three dark patch circles were located in the 1:46 UT image.

Conclusion

Hopefully the weather will cooperate and many more images of the planets will follow.

I am very pleased with our success and Wayne Jaeschke’s advice has really paid off.   I am extremely thankful for all the hardwork done by the members of the NJAA Research Group.  To top it off, we have had excellent support from the NJAA board members.  One of the board members (Al Witzgal) even donated a rare Telvue 2.5X barlow for imaging. 

As for the planets, Saturn will be nearing opposition in the coming weeks.   Mars is going to start shrinking in size (as viewed from Earth).  Hence the detail on the planet will be more difficult to image.   Still, now is an excellent time to keep an eye on Mars planet as other observers stop following it.  

William Anthony
NJAA Research Director