Limerick Astronomy Club

Hi

The local seeing where I live is generally quite good and rarely poor compared to Limerick where a "good" night was quite rare. This has allowed me to use the opportunity to do some planetery imaging with my DFK colour camera.
This is a shot of Jupiter taken on the 21st Oct through the C11 at F10 only. A stack of the best 500 frames out of 3000 taken.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1074/510 ... 070a_b.jpg

I attended my first club public school night during the week at the club site where about 50 kids turned out. They are given a lecture on astronomy and then allowed to look through the members and club scopes. It was good fun and the kids were very well behaved. 22, 18 and 10 inch dobs, an 8" refractor, a bino-chair and my little 8" sct were used. I thought SAC was well equiped until I joined this place

Nice pic John.

I cant wait to get pic's like that.
Just got my 1st DSLR but probably will wait til I get a bigger appature scope before I go hunting for nice pic's like that.

Cheers Roy

Thanks Roy
Look forward to seeing your first images with the DSLR.

Well done.... a lovely image John. Great to see you are settling in down under. Well your image spurred me in to action and I took out the old Phillips Toucam on Halloween night and stuck it in the Meade 10". It was very damp and misty with fog building so, I got little time to get going and remember all the things to do. I know that focussing is critical and when I discovered that the micro focusser was not working this rattled the concentration. Anyway this is the best I could manage in the circs. I look forward to having another go asap.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16829187@N04/5146520021/

Hi Conn

Thats a nice capture, plenty of detail there. You could adjust the hue slightly in registax - its a bit green on my monitor.
I'm hoping to do some imaging again tonight. The weather has been poor the past few weeks.

Good images guys, Jupiter is well placed for viewing and imaging.
I have to say, the images doesnt look all that green to me, I must try another monitor.

Hi John, I have made many more attempts at imaging Jupiter with the web cam but have not improved on the one I posted here. I was out for 5 hours last night and the cold was like last January .. weather from N.E. with hard frost. (I was actually grateful to come in to the house to take a few phone calls).
I reckon I have reached the end of the line with the web cam set up. I am not well up in other cameras and I wondered what the DFK camera that you use is like?

Hi Conn

The DFK camera works well and is a single shot colour camera. I am sorry I didn't get a mono camera and a set of RGB filters as I have more clear skies now but I still like the convenience of the colour camera. I use a netbook to capture all my avi's now which is very handy at the eyepiece end of the scope when focusing.
Temperatures getting into the 30's here today which tends to give stable seeing just after sunset-might have another go at Jupiter tonight.
Going throught lots of mozzie repellant

cheers

Hi John, Great to know there is some heat on our planet still. 30 degrees is quite hot and I am sure the Aussie mozzies are just as annoying as our European ones. No such problem here.. cabin fever was taking a hold of me (no golf either) so I was out with the scope last night from about 6 to 11. By 9:30 it was -7 Celsius! A bit like last January. I was curious to see if I could improve on Jupiter with the web cam. The avi's did not seem to be much different so as you suggested I had a go at taking multiple 30" shots of NGC 7662. Only just now have downloaded DSS so will try this out shortly.
I was about tp pack up and was having a last look at Jupiter and noticed (with averted vision a very distinct shadow on Jupiter so I set up again and here is the result:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16829187@N04/5219015680/
I did not realise just how frosty it was and I am not sure if the image is not quite focussed or if the frost on the lens reduced the quality.
Here is what the scope looked like at this stage:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16829187@N04/5219015526/
The shadow of the moon is clearly visible but I wondered which moon?
Here is a Starry Night image of Jupiter/moons at that time:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16829187@N04/5218463935/
Does anybody know which moon is casting the shadow? I have not been getting S+T magazine lately but I recall that they published a table each month with transit/shadows times.

Oh boy, that looks coooold !!!!
Not sure what the shadow is. Is it on the individual frames of the AVI?

Yes, I believe it is one of the moons ... you can see it at that time on the Starry Night still. I know it is a common sight but it was my first time to visually observe a moon shadow. Well the snow has finally arrived to the Limerick region today and the next week is forecast to be very frosty/icy. Just to go out to the garage and take out the scope would be a major expedition.