clouds on uranus

what better follow up to methane on jupiter than clouds on uranus? 

prior blog entry: "there's not much to see visually.  bluish-green, it can be seen with the unaided eye in dark locations.  At high power it can be seen as a small disk rather than a dot.  A monster telescope or camera might detect several moons, and possibly faint cloud formations..."

to my surprise, an IR filter was able to bring out cloud cover on the upper half:

Uranus IR-RGB 10/27/2018 08:52 UTC

have to try a methane filter on this one ;)



Imaging details:
camera ZWO ASI 290MM with ZWO RGB filters
Baader IR pass 685 nm, Astronomik IR pass 807 nm
celestron 11" Edge HD
East Bluff, CA
10/27/18 8:52 UTC
120 second captures, 2x each filter (only one for IR 685)
gain 456 , exposure ~13 ms red, 4 ms green, 6 ms blue, 130 ms IR 807 30% histogram
upsampled x2 in autostakkert, derotated in winjupos.
color balance eyeballed ;)
(actually set the white point to the clouds)


here's the straight RGB for the purists:

Uranus RGB 10/27/2018 08:52 UTC

References:
interesting articles by Christophe Pellier on the spectrum of uranus and implications for IR filters:
https://www.planetary-astronomy-and-imaging.com/en/uranus-spectrum-commented
https://www.planetary-astronomy-and-imaging.com/en/filters-uranus-spectroscopy