From snow to rain! Close to 1 month of it! What's new? Not too much. I talked about the next galaxy project which I did start. That is Arp 84, a pair of interacting galaxies. I find that whole process extremely fascinating. However with the weather as poor as it's been I have only accumulated 6 of the 15 hours of luminance data thus far. I'll talk more about this next month.

As you can see I finished processing M106 which is posted on the main astroimages page. I was happy with the resolution overall, but the color data was disappointing. Looks like 4-5 hours per channel was not enough!

And for something a little different, I decided to try some Saturn observing and take a break from the deep space stuff! Not sure how I missed the huge storm that appeared on Saturn in December, but at that time it was only visible in the predawn hours. Now it is a little further away, dimmer and actually kind of low in the sky from this lattitude, but it is easily seen in the early evening. I have posted it here.The storm is located in the northern hemisphere right about the level where the white pointer line hits the globe. Apparently it is still active but unfortunately I couldn't capture it. You can see what it did look like back in December here

Right now to the naked eye if you look south, Saturn appears as though part of a double star! Just 1/3 degree to the right is the star Porrima (gamma Virginis). The bright star Spica is below Saturn and to the left. This image was taken with a Skynyx color video camera. Saturn is actually kind of dim now. I normally try to go with as high a frame rate as possible but had to settle for about 17 frames/sec here. Total of about 1100 frames. North is up as shown. This was around 10PM on Wed the 25th of May. High res planet imaging is extremely challenging because it so dependent on seeing conditions, which basically stink most of the time in the Northeast US. Even with a high frame rate camera, superb mount and good optics, the high resolution planet image has been elusive for me. Current imaging practices for best results employ 4 channels of data (LRGB) the same as for deep space imaging. However, for planets you have to keep in mind planetary rotation! So dedicated planetary imagers are set up where they can take say 1 minute of luminance, switch to each color channel, focus each channel perfectly, download about 1 minute of data for each color channel as well and finishing the whole process in under 4-5 minutes for Saturn and 2 minutes for Jupiter! So needless to say it's not going to happen with my 5 year old PC! I can try to circumvent the problem by using a 1 shot color camera as I did here and occasionally I try to combine that with my mono camera, so it's basically like using a filter wheel. Here I really didn't have time to do the luminance or black and white sequences because Saturn disappeared behind the pines!

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Blog archive: April/May 2011