Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Starry Stormy Night

I don't usually post others' work, but I sort of collaborated:

StormyStarry Night

Notice anything unusual about the sky?

The sky is not filled with van Gogh's stars, but rather swirling storm clouds on jupiter's north pole captured by the juno mission.  The foreground is my daughter's rendition of van Gogh's Starry Night.  After seeing this awesome flyby of jupiter captured by the Juno space craft, my brother commented that the clouds were reminiscent of Starry Night.  So I took a picture of my daughter's painting, a screen shot of the NASA flyby and combined the two in photoshop.  

Here's her original a la van Gogh:

Starry Night by Alice circa 8th grade


and here's the flyby paying homage to kubric (suggest full screen view):

Juno Flyby of Ganymede and Jupiter
Video Credit: Images: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SWRI, MSSS;
Animation: Koji Kuramura, Gerald Eichstädt, Mike Stetson; Music: Vangelis

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

more than you wanted to know about 2001 a space odyssey

Saturday, March 12, 2022

Ice Giants and Moons

Here's a capture of Uranus equatorial north (earth's) up:

Uranus
11/29/21 06:50 UTC

Uranus' north pole is rotated to the left 90 degrees relative to the orientation of the rest of the planets in the solar system. a cloud on the north pole makes the left side brighter.  

Here's a wider view using a much longer exposure showing...

the moons of Uranus
Miranda is above, but lost in the glare as it's too close
11/29/21 06:36 UTC


Here's Neptune:

Neptune 11/29/21 4:04 UTC

and a brighter view showing Triton:

Neptune and Triton 11/29/21 4:04 UTC

The magnetic fields of the ice giants uranus and neptune are unusual in that, they are highly skewed/off center from the axis of rotation.  a recent study suggest this is due to super ionic ice (which is just fun to say).  

Imaging details:
camera ZWO ASI 290MM with ZWO RGB filters
celestron 11" Edge HD, no barlow
East Bluff, CA
11/29/21 04:04-06:36 UTC
120 second captures
gain 456, exposure ~5-12 ms, 30% histogram, ~60-200 fps
3x upsample (drizzle)


Tuesday, March 1, 2022

animated jupiter

seeing was not great for me this past apparition of jupiter.  here's an animation at low power:

Jupiter 10/4/21 03:34-03:47-UTC

Here's a combination of all of the frames derotated combined.  this gives a smoother image, but blurs the moon and causes edge effects at the extremes:

Jupiter 10/4/21 03:34-03:47-UTC
derotated to each time point

Lastly here's a wider composite image showing the moons:

Jupiter 10/4/21 03:24 UTC



Imaging details:
camera ZWO ASI 290MC with IR block
celestron 11" Edge HD, no barlow
East Bluff, CA
10/4/21 03:24-03:47 UTC
90 second captures
gain 351, exposure ~0.567 ms, 30% histogram, ~200 fps