Clavius

Clavius, Longomontanus, Tycho (Day 10 Moon)

Lower centre:
Clavius: many sub-craters – the whole basin is about the size of Northern Ireland!
Smallest sub-crater is about 4 miles across.

Above and to left:
Longomontanus: nicely terraced crater

Top centre:
Tycho: Classic complex crater with terraces and central peak, about 86km across.

Celestron Nexstar 8SE SCT (2000mm focal length, f/10)
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount
PGR Grasshopper 3 CCD camera with red 2c filter
Best 10% of a 3000 frame video at 20 frames/s

Have now solved some technical problems – can do 3000 frame video (about 10 gig) on external hard drive after changing how drive is formatted.

Have moved away from using linked wavelets in Registax 6 which gives much more flexibility in terms of sharpening an image – more to work with before it looks over-sharpened.

Next stage – try a 1.6 x Barlow magnifying lens – that should bring the focal length up to about 3200mm!

7 day old Moon

Have finally solved the problem of FireCapture crashing after capturing anything more than 750 frames of video. Had to reformat the external HDD that I use to capture video for stacking to exFAT format to allow files greater than 4GB in size.

These pictures are final images of 1500 – 2000 frame videos that were about 10 GB in size. Best 10% stacked and drizzled.

Apennine and Caucasus Ranges (Day 7)

Eratosthenes and the Sinus Aestuum (L79) in the Southeast passing along the Apennine range (L4) to the Caucasus range then finally Aristoteles at top right. Archimedes (L27) is the large central crater.

Other Lunar 100 objects
L66 Hadley Rille
L82 Linne crater

Celestron 8SE SCT
PGR Grasshopper 3 CCD camera with red 2C filter
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount

Best 7% stack of 1500 frames in AutoStakkert!2
FireCapture 2.4 settings

Gain: 234
Exposure: 27.34 ms
Gamma: 1536

Alpine Valley and Northern Terminator (Day 7)

In the centre is a long gash in the lunar Alpes – the Alpine Valley (L19). Plato is the large round crater to the left of the valley.
Cassini is the round crater with two small sub-craters like unequal eyes.

Other L100 objects
L23 Mount Pico – bright object south of Plato
L26 Mare Frigoris – dark lava plane to the North of the Alpes

Celestron 8SE SCT
PGR Grasshopper 3 CCD camera with red 2C filter
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount

Best 10% stack of 1500 frames in AutoStakkert!2 – Drizzled.
FireCapture 2.4 settings
Gain: 234
Exposure: 27.34 ms
Gamma: 1536

Lunar Central Southern Zone (Day 7)

A chain of craters from South East to North West:
Deslandres, Purbach, Arzachel, Alphonsus, Ptolemaeus.

Lunar 100 objects:
L15: Straight Wall
L28: Hipparchus crater
L46: Regiomontanus central peak – was thought to be a volcano
L47: Alphonsus crater
L75: Ptolemaeus crater
L92: Gylden Valley

Celestron 8SE SCT
PGR Grasshopper 3 CCD camera with red 2C filter
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount

Best 7% stack of 1500 frames in AutoStakkert2!
FireCapture 2.4 settings
Gain: 234
Exposure: 27.34 ms
Gamma: 1536

Recycling an old scope

If you go back to the beginning of this blog, I spent about a year doing visual astronomy with a Nexstar 8SE scope on a AltAzimuth mount which was great fun and quick to set up and take down. The Nexstar is a a Schmidt-Cassegrain compound telescope which gives a highly magnified view (2000mm focal length) with good light catching ability (200mm aperture) but is a good bit dimmer or slower than refractors.

As time went by, I got more interested in the photography aspects and so moved to the faster refractors.

However high magnification can be useful for looking at the Moon and a dim view through the scope is offset by the very brightness of the Moon itself.

Ive been waiting for an opportunity to put my old Nexstar 8SE on an equatorial mount and combine it with a good quality CCD camera and a red/orange filter. Last night seemed ideal and overall, Im pleased with the results.

For some reason, Firecapture wouldn’t let me capture more than 783 frames of video at a time whereas ideally, I would like to have stacked the best 3-5% of about 2000 frames and the atmosphere was fairly turbulent but overall, I am happy.

Will be interesting to compare repeating this with my Equinox 120ED refractor – I will need a x2 Barlow lens to achieve similar magnification – 900mm x2.

Nexstar 8SE SCT
PGR Grasshopper 3 CCD camera with red 2c filter
Firecapture acquisition software
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount

The Alpine valley (L19) is seen centre top.
Archimedes is the largest crater in the lower left quadrant (L27)
The Apennine mountain range lies below and to the right (L4)
Bright rays from Copernicus also lie lower left edge (L69)

Eratosthenes is the lowest and leftmost crater.

Difficult to see here but there is a dark line between 2 craters – almost like a hair on top of the image. This is the Straight Wall (L15) a 400m high scarp which casts a shadow.

Alphonsus crater (L47) is to the right of top centre.

Clavius is (L9) in the Lunar 100. In this image I can see all the subcraters down to the smallest set which are blurry.

Copernicus (L5)
Iconic terraced and twin-peaked complex crater with a diameter of 96km. The small double crater at 7 oclock is Fauth
A very small crater surrounded by dark lava at 5 oclock to Copernicus is Copernicus H (L74). Near the bottom of the image are two side-by-side eroded craters with a larger eroded crater above – the larger crater is Fra Mauro (L17) it is filled with ejecta from other impacts.

Windy morning DSLR image of AR 2192 on eastern limb

Click to enlarge

Was keen to image monster sunspot on Eastern limb but very windy here this morning. I thought setting up a long refractor and doing 2 minute long video runs wouldnt really work so I went back to basics and took this with a DSLR through a squat Nexstar 8SE with Baader safety film on the front end. The Nexstar won’t align on the Sun but I set it to Venus which seemed stable enough.

Canon 5D mark 2 ISO 100 at 1/640s.

AR 2192 has already thrown off a couple of M class flares when it was far side.

On 18/10/14, AR 2192 produced a M1.6 flare.

On 19/10/14, AR 2192 produced a X1.1 flare.

On 24/10/14, AR 2192 produced a X3.1 flare.

Catching a white light flare from AR 2135

Solar flares are mostly comprised of X-Ray and extreme UV radiation, sometimes they can leak over to visible light. Observing the visual component of a flare is said to be quite rare, so very happy to have picked this up.

Fat Old Sun

A hot sunny day.
Even the Sun is too hot to be active.

Taken using SAFE Kendrick solar filter. NEVER look directly at the Sun.

Nexstar 8SE with Canon 5D mark II. ISO 100 at 1/400 second.

Enlargement of Active Region 2121 showing dark bipolar sunspot pair, grey penumbrae and network of lighter faculae towards the limb. The larger sunspot has a bright linear feature, possibly a light bridge.

 

AR 2121 produced a C2 flare on 24th July 2014.
AR 2121 produced a C2 flare on 25th July 2014.