Solar System Images

This is a first for me and it nearly didn't happen. There was intermittent cloud after sunset. The X was due at 23:45. The Moon was photogenically sitting right next to the Pleiades tonight but my field of view is too narrow to capture both targets together. As the due time got close the clouds got thicker! I was looping 30 second exposures just to help keep on target. Then with perfect timing the clouds cleared, I reduced the exposure to 0.001 seconds and caught a few frames. Single frame, masked stretch, curves adjustment and sharpened in PixInsight.

Moon 29/12/23 - Mare Crisium

Cancer

29/12/23

The shadows of the mountains to the west of Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises) are only visible for a day or so after full Moon. I needed to get an image this month on the 29th. Too early and the Sun is overhead and there are no shadows, too late and the mare moves past the terminator into Moon shadow. I realised I was running out of time for a clear sky. So I grabbed a quick 500 x 0.0001 second luminance filter sub frames.

After blinking in PixInsight to get rid of the frames where I nudged the telescope mount too much, I had to do a batch convert from .xisf to .fits. Then I analysed them and stacked the best 5% in AS4. Back to PixInsight I did a Masked Stretch, contrast S curve and TVG Denoise. I cropped the top off which was annoying, I might have another go. And the mountain shadows are not as long as they would have been later in the night. But here it is, my go at a monochrome 91.6% terminator! Mare Crisium is the sea at the north east, half in shadow.

Geminids Meteor

Geminid Meteor

Aries

14/12/23

I set up with an 18mm lens on the front of my ASI294MC Pro Camera, on a tripod looking South. The 14th December is the peak of the Geminids Meteor shower. This one zoomed through bang on target above Jupiter and below Hamel and Sheraton in Aries.

The Sun 10/09/23

The Sun

10/09/23

After seeing some other Solar images today the number of visible Sun spots was the incentive to try another Solar capture.

5000 frame SER file. Captured in SharpCap, 10% of frames stacked in AS2. Processed in PixInsight.

The Sun 04/09/23

The Sun

04/09/23

The nights are too humid for Deep Sky Astrophotography. Once it reaches 90% my USB connections start to fail! So I thought I would get the white light solar filter out during the day. This image is a stack of the best 10% of frames from a 500 frame SER video, captured in SharpCap Mono 8 and stacked in AS2. I used my new mono camera at -10°C, so I had to convert the image to RGB in PI then pull up the red and green in Curves to make it a Sun(ish) colour. Then I darkened it to show the sunspots better by moving the mid point of the histogram closer to the black end.