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Daily Notebook
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2026 March 1 |
Some astrophotography at last Due to a remarkable spell of bad weather, I did no astrophotography at all in January, and only finally got around to doing some on the last day of February. My main goal was to test guiding software and a guidescope (I'm trying out an unofficial fork of PHD2). I had the Celestron 8 EdgeHD set up with the f/7 compressor and Altair 26C (24-megapixel) camera, but the gibbous moon was in the sky, so the first thing I did was take a picture of the moon. To be precise, I recorded 99 video frames, then stacked the best 75% (presumably 74 of them) and turned up the color saturation to bring out differences in the minerals on different parts of the moon's surface. Here's the result. | |
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It came out admirably sharp. I also have a higher-resolution version. Moon: Aristarchus Here is the region of the lunar crater Aristarchus (a crater with a spooky reputation, and possibly a history of outgassing, raising dust). This is taken the same way, but not scaled down; this is full resolution. Stack of the best 50% of 2000 video frames.
Moon: Mare Crisium
Favorable libration (an effect of non-circular orbits) enabled me to see past Mare Crisium all the way to Mare Smythii, the dark spot right on the edge of the visible moon. This picture is rendered in black-and-white (grayscale) because parts of it were slightly overexposed and did not go through color correction correctly. Stack of the best 50% of 1008 video frames. Jupiter Although definitely not using the right optical configuration or camera, I decided to see what my f/7 deep sky setup would get when I aimed it at Jupiter. Not nearly as much detail as when I use the planetary camera at f/10, but definitely something.
Satellite IV (Callisto) is visible; I brightened it up separately, since it is much darker than the face of Jupiter. By the way, I've decided to join the ranks of the astronomers (many, since the time of Galileo) who call the first four satellites I, II, III, and IV, as Galileo initially did, rather than Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, the names proposed by Marius and Kepler but not widely used until the twentieth century. If you want to know the reason, look up the mythology, and how Jupiter (Zeus) acquired those four companions. Zeus is not an example of behavior to be emulated. Although nobody ever talked about it, I suspect this may be why generations of earlier astronomers were not particularly fond of that set of names. M78 and NGC 2071
Finally, an actual deep-sky image. Because of the bright moonlight, this is not a great picture, but it proves that the equipment worked. Stack of 150 30-second exposures. These are two reflection nebulae, clouds of dust that reflect the light of nearby stars. M78 is the larger one. |
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