Sun Moon and Planets
Double star occultation by the eclipsed moon, May 15, 2022
During the total eclipse of the moon on Sunday night May 15, 2022 the moon gradually
crept up and occultated the interesting double star WDS J15317-2010 in Libra on its left limb.
This six frame animation shows moon and stars at one minute intervals starting at
11:53:07 pm EDT.
The primary star of the double is magnitude 6.3 and the secondary star is mag. 8.9.
The two stars are separated by 11 arc-seconds.
The stars are aliged almost east-west of each other.
The moon initially covers the faint part then covers the brighter component of the double.
Click on the image for a larger view in a new window. The double star will be easier to see.
Details:
Location: Front yard Cary, NC
Camera: Canon T3i DSLR
Exposure: 6 x 3 seconds each at ISO 400
Filter: none
Scope: Televue Genesis 4" f/5 refractor
Mount: iOptron GEM-45
Guider: none
Capture software: APT
Guiding software: none
Calibration frames: none
Processing software: MaximDl for star alignment, Photoshop CC for animation layout,
and GIF animator for the animation.
Weather conditions: Mainly clear with passing clouds. Mild temperatures.
Notes: The image was cropped.
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97% partial lunar eclipse - Nov. 19, 2021
The 2021 "almost full" partial lunar eclipse.
A strong cold front moved through just in time for us to see this eclipse.
The weather was cool and windy though.
My goal was to make a small time-lapse sequence 15 minutes before and after the 4:03 am
maximum eclipse.
The time-lapse wasn't very interesting, so I chose this 4:03 single 1 second shot instead.
For a larger view in a new window, click on the image.
Details:
Location: Front yard Cary, NC
Camera: Canon T3i
Exposure: single one second jpg at ISO 400
Filter: none
Scope: TeleVue Genesis 4" f/5
Mount: iOptron GEM-45
Guider: none
Capture software: APT
Guiding software: none
Calibration frames: none
Processing software: Photoshop
Notes:
Photoshop was used for a very slight curve to dim the brightest parts of the photo
and resize for web.
I bracketed my exposures at 0.5, 1, and 2 seconds with the 1 second being best.
I used an APT looping sequence plan to run the bracket once a minute.
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Jupiter rotating - Oct. 20, 2021
This is a six frame Jupiter animation from 10:18 to 10:33 Wednesday evening.
The Great Red Spot is lower center.
It is smaller and fainter compared to years ago.
Callisto is the dark spot just to the right of the GRS.
Above and to the right of Callisto is the shadow of Io.
Io itself is moving away from the planet to the right.
The seeing was pretty bad tonight, but I decided to try anyway.
It has been a couple of years since I had tried any planetary imaging.
I kept to my C-8's native focal length of 2000mm because of the poor seeing.
I captured six different 60 second long AVI videos and selected the best 20% of each
to stack.
Details:
Location: Front yard Cary, NC
Camera: ASI120MC-S
Exposures: 6 groups of the best 20% of approx. 3000 10ms long AVI frames
Filter: none
Scope: Celestron Edge HD-800 at f/10
Mount: iOptron GEM-45
Guider: none
Capture software: Firecapture 2.6
Guiding software: none
Calibration frames: none
Processing software: Autostakkert 3, Photoshop, and GIF Animator
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Lunar Eclipse - Jan. 20-21, 2019
Here is a 3 panel mosaic of the lunar total eclipse taken at 11:12 pm, 12:12 am, and 1:12 am.
The images were captured with my Canon T3i connected to my Televue Genesis 4 inch f/5 refractor.
I used the Celestron AVx mount to track the eclipse.
A meridian flip was necessary after the total shot.
The partial phases were captured at 1/750 second at ISO 200.
The total phase shot was captured for 3 seconds at ISO 200.
The images were captured using Backyard EOS.
The mosaic was created with Photoshop CS2.
The images were captured from my front driveway in Cary NC.
Temperatures were around 25 degrees F with gusty winds.
Making this mosaic made me realize how much the Earth's shadow moves westward relative to the stars
in two hours while the moon is moving eastward.
Click on the image for a larger view in a new window.
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Mars - August 6, 2018
Mars on August 6 at around midnight.
This is my first Mars attempt in about two months.
The dust storms seem to be subsiding somewhat now,
but one is prominent near the south polar cap at the top.
The central meridian at the time of the photo was 40 degrees.
This image was captured with an ASI 120mc-s camera and a Celestron HD 800 SCT at f/10.
The scope was mounted on a Celestron AVx mount.
1540 of 5136 frames over 90 seconds (57 fps)
were staked together using Autostakkert 2. An ROI of 640 x 480 was used.
The image was enlarged by 25% in Photoshop.
Seeing was only fair tonight.
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Saturn - June 30, 2018
Saturn near opposition 2018.
This image of Saturn was captured around 12:25 am from my front yard in Cary, NC.
South is at the top.
It is a composite of the best 192 frames of 640 captured over 3 minutes.
High clouds were present.
The image was captured with my Celestron Edge HD 800 SCT on an AVx mount.
I was using a Televue 1.8x barlow in front of an ASI 120mc-s camera.
Exposure times were only 3 frames per second.
The images were processed in Autostakkert and sharpened with Registax.
Seeing was only fair - about 3 out of 5.
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Jupiter with Red Spot - June 17, 2018
Jupiter with Red Spot. I have been trying for several years to get a decent
shot of Jupiter with the red spot visible.
This one isn't great, but it is the best so far.
The image above was taken at 11:58 pm from my fron yard. The seeing was only fair.
It was quite warm and humid.
This image was shot straight through my Celestron Edge HD 800 at f/10 on my AVx mount.
I was using my ZWO ASI120MC-S color camera and Firecapture to capture the images.
Autostakkert was used to stack the images.
The stacked image above was made from the best 20% of 2000 frames.
I was using a shutter speed of 30 ms at gain 25 and a ROI of 800 x 600.
Photoshop was used to enlarge the image 25% before cropping.
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First Mars of the season - June 10, 2018
Mars at 4:49 am on June 10. The south polar ice cap is at the upper left.
Syrtis Major is right of center and it appears to be cut in half by an equatorial
dust storm.
This image was captured with an ASI 120mc-s camera, a Celestron HD 800 SCT,
and a Televue 1.8 barlow for an effective focal length of 3600 mm.
The scope was mounted on a Celestron AVx mount.
About 1200 frames were captured in 30 seconds and the best 30% of those
were staked together using Autostakkert 2. An ROI of 800 x 640 was used.
The temperature at time of capture was about 70 degrees and it was humid.
There were high clouds over Mars at capture time.
The seeing was only fair.
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Jupiter with Io at left - May 26, 2018
After waiting about an hour at the telescope and experiencing bad seeing yet again,
the seeing finally settled enough to get a decent set of images of Jupiter.
In the span of 10 minutes around 12:30 am, conditions really improved.
The image above was taken at 12:43 am.
Tonight, I decided to try my luck without using any barlow lens.
This image was shot straight through my Celestron Edge HD 800 at f/10 on my AVx mount.
I was using my ZWO ASI120MC-S color camera and Firecapture to capture the images.
Autostakkert was used to stack the images.
The stacked image above was made from the best 30% of 2659 frames.
I was using a shutter speed of 18.4 ms at gain 25 and a ROI of 800 x 600.
Photoshop was used to enlarge the image 25% before cropping.
The images were taken from my front yard in Cary.
Click on the single image above to see a 5 frame animation in a new window.
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Io and shadow moving off Jupiter - May 23, 2018
This is a six image gif of Jupiter taken on May 23, 2018 from 10:54 to 11:07 pm
as Io and it's shadow were leaving Jupiter.
High clouds and bad seeing made the images a bit blurry and finally shut me down by 11:15.
The images were shot straight through my Celestron Edge HD 800 and a 1.8x Televue barlow
which gives a mirror image. The telescope was mounted on my Celestron AVx.
I was using my ZWO ASI120MC-S color camera and Firecapture to capture the images.
Roughly the best 330 images from 6 different sets of images were stacked with AutoStakkert and then
made into a gif animation using Photoshop.
Each individual image was a bit over 50 ms long.
The images were taken from my front yard in Cary.
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Saturn at opposition - June 16, 2017
This image of Saturn was captured just before 2 am this morning through high clouds.
It was just about to transit at a low altitude of 31 degrees above the southern horizon.
Opposition had occurred earlier in the day.
The seeing was pretty good tonight but not great.
It was better than on my previous two attempts about a week ago which yielded much blurrier images.
In addition to the seeing problems due to low altitude,
there was occasional heat lightning and high clouds were present.
Despite all of this the views were pretty good both for the camera and through the eyepiece.
This image was taken through my Celestron Edge HD 800 (C-8) using a TeleVue 1.8x barlow
to give a focal length of 3657 mm and a f-ratio of 18.
I was using my Celestron Advanced Vx mount to track - no guiding.
An ASI120MC-S camera was used to capture 563 video frames at 3 frames per second.
Autostakkert was used to select the best 419 of those frames and stack them
into the final image. RegiStax was used to sharpen the image.
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Jupiter with two moon shadows - May 19, 2017
This image shows Jupiter at around 12:15am on Friday morning May 19.
At left, off Jupiter's disk is Europa.
On the upper left side of the planet is the shadow of Europa.
Towards the right side of the image inside the North Equatorial Band (NEB) is the shadow of Io.
Io itself is visible very near the center of the NEB, but it's color is nearly the same as
the band making it difficult to see.
The image is mirror reversed because I was using a diagonal mirror on the telescope.
This image was captured at my home in Cary using my Celestron Edge HD 800
mounted on an Advanced Vx equatorial mount.
I was using a Televue 1.8x barlow to enlarge the image.
The camera used was my new (to me) ZWO ASI120MC-S camera.
A one minute video file of 1530 frames at 30 frames per second was captured using Firecapture.
I used AutoStakkert 2.6.8 to select the best 370 frames of the video and create a stack for a tiff file.
The tiff file was taken into Registax 6 for wavelet sharpening to produce the final image.
The image was cropped in Photoshop CS2 and a jpg copy of the image was produced.
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Pluto - July 10, 2015
Friday night July 10, 2015 was a Raleigh Astronomy Club observing session at our Bigwoods site.
The evening temperatures started near 90 degrees with dew points in the low to mid 70s, making the night very uncomfortable.
Every once in a while, we would get a very subtle westerly breeze which helped a lot.
The seeing started out pretty good, but got worse as the night went on.
Since Pluto has been in the news lately because of the New Horizons fly-by,
I decided to try another animation but this time with my 8" f/6.2 home-made Newtonian reflector and my SBIG ST-402 CCD camera.
I had previously created animations with my 4" refractor over a two day period.
Pluto at magnitude 14.1 is currently located in a very crowded star field in Sagittarius.
After spending about 20 minutes finding and verifying the field which contained Pluto with my camera,
I started taking five sets of images separated by about half an hour. Exposures were tracked, but unguided.
The first group started around 11:30pm and I finished up around 1:30am.
You can notice the seeing get worse as the animation gets to frames 3-5.
Individual exposures were 15 seconds long and then dark subtracted.
The individual exposures were median combined with the best 7-10 frames in it's group and saved.
The photos were then taken into Photoshop and the animation was created.
Some star reduction and sharpening was used on the final three frames to compensate for the bad seeing.
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Full Moon May 3, 2015
This full moon photo taken on May 3, 2015 is a combination of 11 jpg photos taken with my
Stellarvue 80 mm f/9.4 refractor and my older Canon Rebel XT non-modified camera.
The individual exposures were 1/500 second at ISO 100.
The images were combined and slightly sharpened in RegiStax 6 then taken to Photoshop CS2
for some contrast enhancement and cropping before resizing for web display.
With the exception of lunar eclipses, I think this is the first time I have photographed the full moon in many years.
To see a larger view in a new window, click on the image.
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Total Lunar Eclipse - Oct. 8, 2014
I took a sequence of photos of the total lunar eclipse from my front yard in Cary on
Wednesday Oct. 8 and made them into this animation.
The animation starts at 5:29 and ends at 6:33 when the moon's altitude
became very low and started degrading the image. I polar aligned my G-11 mount and kept it
fixed on a spot in the shadow of the earth. Then I allowed the moon to move through.
The animation consists of 35 images captured through my Stellarvue 80mm f/9.4 refractor with
my Canon Rebel XTi attached. Exposures varied from 1/500 second to 4 seconds at ISO 400.
The animation shown has been cropped to make the file size smaller for download. The animation
was created in Photoshop CS2. The animation is approximately 4mb in size, so it may take some
time to completely load depending on your Internet speed.
Click on the image for a full size view in a new window.
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Moon occulting Aldebaran - Oct. 19, 2016
Click on the photo to see a 21 frame animation of the Moon occulting Aldebaran (Alpha Taurus) on Oct. 19, 2016.
I stayed up late for this one... 1:29am.
The photos were taken in my front yard among all the street lights.
1/200th of a second exposures at ISO 400 were repeated every 35 seconds to make the animation.
I used my Canon T3i and the new Celestron Edge HD 800 on the Losmandy G-11 mount.
The images were taken to Canon's DPP where they were reduced in size and converted to jpg from raw.
Maxim DL was used to align all the frames on Aldebaran,
then the images were then taken to Photoshop CS2 and made into an animation.
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Venus Transits the Sun
Venus in transit across the solar disk June 5, 2012. Taken with a Canon DSLR through the Meade 4 inch SCT equiped with a solar filter. The location was the NC Museum of Natural Sciences Prarie Ridge Center near Carter-Finley Stadium Raleigh, NC.
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Ring Eclipse of the Sun
Annular solar eclipse at Lake Norman NC May 30, 1984. This shot was taken on Kodak ASA 400 slide film with a Olympus OM-1 camera mounted on my Meade 4" SCT. A group of RAC members made a road trip in search of clear skies along the eclipse track and wound up at Lake Norman by accident.
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Lunar Eclipse 2/20/2008
Lunar eclipse 2/20/08. Taken from my front yard in Cary, NC. This was taken through my Stellarvue 80mm f/9.4 refractor on my G-11 mount tracking at the lunar rate. The camera was my Rebel XT at ISO 400 and the exposure was 4 seconds long. This image was cropped from the original frame and reduced in size for web display. Note the star just to the left of the lunar disk about to be occulted.
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Saturn - June 5, 2015
Saturn on June 5, 2015 around 11:45 taken from my driveway with my 8" f/6.25 homemade Newtonian reflector and a 2.5x barlow in front of my Phillips SPC 900NC webcam. The frames were captured with FireCapture and then processed in Registax 6. The best 200 frames were used. I did a little levels and enlargement with Photoshop CS2.
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Jupiter and IO
August 22, 2008 - Jupiter an Io. Here is the result of a video sequence I shot last night after the RAC meeting around 11:45 pm. I was in my front yard at home in Cary. The seeing wasn't that good and high clouds kept moving through, but I was aware that there should be a shadow in transit at a decent hour so I decided to give the imaging a shot. The black spot on the right side is the shadow of Io and that is Io itself just to the right of Jupiter. I used my Phillips wecam and my Celestron C-11 working at 2800mm at f/10 to get the video. I used the best 314 frames of the video and processed it in Registax. I used Photoshop to enlarge the image a bit for display.
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Jupiter & two shadows
This is Jupiter on 8/26/09 at around 11:50 pm. From left to right are the shadows of Europa and Ganymede, then Europa and Ganymede themselves. Ganymede is very difficult to see. Captured with K3CCD Tools, register and stacking with Registax 4, and some final touch ups in Photoshop.
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Saturn
Saturn with its rings nearly edge on Apr. 26, 2009. This is my first ever attempt at imaging Saturn. I was using the C-11 and my Phillips Web Camera. The seeing was bad and the colors turned out a bit yellow/brown. I will try and address those issues next time. I was shooting 10 frames per second. I used Registax to align and combine the best 100 frames. We had some really nice weather today for NC. The temperatures made it up to 90 with low humidity during the day, so the night was very plesent. These images were made from my front yard in Cary, NC.
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Mars
Dec. 20, 2007 - This is my first image of Mars using the new Phillips web cam. It was taken at 12:10 am. The webcam was mounted prime focus on the Celestron C-11 which is a 2800mm f/10 scope.
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