Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Nov 11, 2009 10:54:35 GMT -6
Lunar and Saturnian Imaging Session
11 November 2009
Continuing my lunar observation and imaging series, this early morning Veteran's Day was a clear one and ready for a session. Starting out at 4:00 am, I set up outside my garage, polar aligned the mount and ready for a quick session.
Temps were in the low 40's and the sky looked deep, but observing conditions through the eyepiece were turbulent and unsettled...and the following images not as clear as other sessions....
Clearing my neighbors roof and finding itself in a clear section, I took the whole Moon shots thru the 63.5mm finderscope...
There was now a nice Earth glow on the lunar dark side...
Attaching the Canon Powershot S3 to the Celestron C5 SCT, I started the shots....
The terminator made a perfect 1/2 slice through Copernicus this morning...
Staring the crater right in the eye, it's quite a spooky interior.
Kepler crater has great star shaped ejecta rays...dousing crater "Enke" to the left.
Further to the right lays "Aristarchus", with very bright reflection properties.
Sinus Iridum getting ready for sunset and "Pythagoras" crater still in full sunshine to the far right.
I spent some time enjoying "Lambert" crater - (18 th century German Mathematician), with the interesting riles running in the vicinity. "Mount La Hire" to the left and a ghost of an ancient lava filled crater (Lambert R)....on the way to "Pythéas" (4 th century BC Greek Navigator and geographer).
The elongated scarf of a crater, "Schiller" (17 th century German Monk, Author of the 'Coelum Stellarum Christianus Atlas' showing Bible inspired constellations), caught my attention and the triplet crater "Hainzel" - (16 th century Danish Astronomer and collaborator of Tycho Brahé), has cool lookin' mountain peak shadows on it's smooth floor.
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With a successful, (although kinda blurry), imaging session, I saw that Mars was high up and Saturn was out of the muck.
I choose Saturn..(Mars is still too small - but wait until January when the planet is at opposition!...
)I could see the nearly edge-on rings making their way back to open status and decided to take some pics...
The first image showed promise and I pushed magnification...
Considering my Lunar shots were not sharp earlier, I am pleasantly surprised at the details, including the transit/shadow the rings were casting on the planet.
I switched the white balance from normal to Flourescent...
And to Florescent 2...
...and finally to Tungsten setting...
Perhaps I should stack these sometime and see what kind of image I would get.
Lastly, observing Titan in the eyepiece, I attempted to image it with Saturn....
Overexposing, I managed to capture the satellite on the far right - along with three unknown points.
Could I have captured four Satellites...? Titan, Enceladus, Hyperion and Mimas...? They are not star-like in the image.
If so...quite cool!
(Saturn doesn't require long exposures surprisenly...only about 1/4 of a second or so. Nice....
It was now 6:00 am, sunrise quickly brightening the sky and time to pack tools of science away and document another nice imaging session.
