Color contrasts in the Moon are interesting even beautiful. The following picture shows Mare Tranquillitatis area and the southern part of Mare Serenitatis in full color. It was taken 4 days after full moon. The shadows in the terminator show the orography of the landscape. Mare Tranquillitatis seems to be mainly blue. This is due to its peculiar chemical composition.
Pitiscus, Hommel, Ideler and Spallanzani are the only four craters of the picture with proper name. The rest of them are named by letter surnames like Ideler R or Ideler L. They are located in the South-East area of the Moon. The picture was taken on 2009-09-09 05h 20m U.T. and the terminator was passing across Pitiscus, Hommel, the two big and shadowed craters. Pitiscus is 85 km wide and Hommel is 129 km (76 miles). The smallest craters of the image are 7 km wide, that is 3.5 arcseconds, 1.75 arcseconds for the bright spot and 1.75 arcseconds for the shadow spot. Image detail could then be better for a 6-inch telescope (this is the equipment used to take the image, an scope capable up to 0.7 arcseconds of resolution). 622 subframes were recorded with the Manual-Crazy-Tracking system and stacked in Registax 5.
Posidonius is a big crater of the Moon on Mare Serenitatis. There is a lot of interesting details to observe inside: peaks, ridges, craterlets, … In the following image taken yesterday night, 4 km wide craters can be spot as small white points in the smooth surface of Mare Serenitatis.
Posidonius measures 95 km in diameter. The second biggest crater (a bit ghostly) in the picture is Chacornac, just below Posidonius. Inside it is visible a small craterlet called Chacornac A (it measures 5 km in diameter).
The third biggest crater of the picture is Daniell (31 km wide) located in the upper middle side. Its shape is not circular, but oval. This is the cause of a strange effect in perspective when comparing it with the craters nearby.
Dorsum Oppel is a wrinkle ridge of the Moon in Mare Crisium. 2 days after full moon is the best moment to observe it. It is a very large formation and the landscape along is quite impressive, full of small craters, tiny mountains and the smooth floor of Mare Crisium. It is important to reach a high magnification to enjoy the view (150x at least).
My setup is a 6-inch telescope, but I bet it is possible to observe it comfortably with a 4-inch refractor.
The bright and overexposed crater is Proclus. I have to work harder the dynamic range issue next time.
Swift and Peirce are the pair of craters in the upper side of the picture, near the lunar terminator. Below Peirce should be visible a 2 kms wide craterlet, but unfortunately my picture cannot yield such a resolution. According to a quick calculation, 3 kms is the smallest visible feature in theis image, and that corresponds to 1.5 arcseconds. A bit far still to the maximum theoretical resolution of a 6-inch telescope (that is around 0.7 arcseconds)
Yerkes is the big ghostly crater in the right side. Apparently there is a central peak in its center. I have been looking for a confirmation of the existence of that peak, but I haven’t found any reliable source where it is mentioned. Any hint here, I would be thankful…
Lacking of an equatorial mount I have built myself a kind of manual tracking system that keeps into the field of view of a webcam a planet like Jupiter, for 3 minutes. This is long enough to record useful data and then post-process it with aggressive wavelets.
The resulting tracking is not at all perfect. You may see Jupiter swinging around the screen. It is important to capture the data at a fast shutter speed (1/100 sec.) to avoid motion blur in every frame because the planet is always dancing.
In spite of this movement, the results after stacking are very good. Here I show this really simple system and the resulting yesterday’s Jupiter with the webcam:
As you can see the Manual-Crazy-Tracking is a very simple system that consists in a rubber band attached to the tripod handle. If you try to track manually directly pushing the tripod handle, the shaking is excessive and you would need a very very fast shutter speed to get some useful data. The rubber band is necessary to reduce vibrations and increase the shift movement control.
At beginning Jupiter is located in the center of the field of view with no need to any corrections. As long as it drifts due to its sidereal movement you will have to pull using the rubber band in order to keep it in the center of the screen (it is supposed you have a laptop there capturing and showing images from the webcam). This way you may have Jupiter centered in the screen for a long time. You will have time to focus (left hand pulling the rubber band and right hand tweaking the focuser) and time to expose.
Good seeing yesterday too (2009-08-27 23h05m UT). Wesley impact scar is fading day after day, but it is still there. I made an animation that shows Io approaching Jupiter’s limb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78zJtv569y4
I have a good seeing last night. So I got my best Jupiter yet. Here it is:
It is 4x resampled via Registax Mitchell and PS. After resampled I can spot more details in bands and polar zones.
As always I used the 6-inch no-EQ mounted newtonian reflector, the 14mm eyepiece doing afocal projection over the Canon EOS 450d (Rebel XTi) body and recording video using “EOS Camera Movie Record” free software. Three times Jupiter crossed over the field of view. Registax and VirtualDub added and stacked the footage properly.
Yesterday night I had the chance to enjoy a multiple moon transition in Jupiter. Ganymede and Europa were crossing Jupiter and throwing their shadows to the big planet. Here it is an image of the event. At 23h 24m U.T Europa’s shadow was not visible yet. Io also appears at the photo but it was beneath the planet. In a minutes it would disappear.
The picture was taken with my digital reflex body (EOS Rebel XTi) and using the video capture software that converts it into a high quality webcam.
15th August 2009 was the day that Jupiter reached its closest position to Earth. Its apparent diameter was 49 arcseconds, so this is the best time to do planetary astrophotography with the giant planet. Using the afocal technique and a Canon EOS 450d body I took 2 video sequences and processed with Registax 5, Photoshop & Pain Shop Pro.
Several days ago a comet hit Jupiter leaving a dark spot near one of its polar regions. Today this spot is still visible with a powerful telescope. Maybe if I have a high power Barlow lens I could have observed it visually. But fortunately there exist astrophotography, a technique that lets you observer indirectly what you can’t spot directly through a telescope.
In this same picture I include a Jupiter from the day before yesterday. The lack of atmospheric turbulence gave me a chance to get closer to the maximum theoretical resolution of a 6-inch telescope.
Just some minutes ago.
Hommel is a big crater with nice craterlets inside, a Clavius-style set, but smaller, measuring 76 miles (129 Km). It is located in the South-East area of the visible Moon face. This area is pledge of small craters. It is similar in appearance to the sand of a beach. Pitiscus, Nearch and Asclepi are some of its neighbors.
The picture was taken at 19 days of lunation, that is 4 days after full Moon. This is the best timing to get sharp images of the crater’s walls’ shadows. The image is an integration of 27 subframes, each one taken at 9 Megapixels single shots with point-and-shoot digicam Casio Exilim EX-FS10.
Two days after full moon Mare Crisium shows a nice landscape of mountains and shadows. Some of its inner crates are visible in this picture. The small crater Swift is on the limit of visibility. The big impact called Proclus and its rays are remarkable.
To take this image I used the Canon EOS 450d, Rebel XTI DSLR camera recording video subframes and later I stacked them up with Registax 5. Some small tweaks on Paint Shop Pro 9 and ready.
In order to catch the Moon, I took 4 single shots at prime focus through my 150/600 telescope. As I lack of a T-mount adapter I had to take them in handheld mode. After de-rotating them accordingly, I stacked them up with Registax 5 and removed the noise a little bit. I used the body camera Canon EOS 450d (Rebel XTi) at high resolution, low sensitivity (ISO 100) and high shutter speed 1/2000. This is the result after a blow up in saturation:
As Io passes in front of Jupiter, a big shadow is cast over the planet. In this picture I took tonight, it is clearly visible the dark point of shadow in the dead center of Jupiter. At its right a small spot that you may barely watch is Io.
In order to get a sharp image I used a Van Citter deconvolution process.
Jupiter occultation of 45 Cap tonight:
Here I have integrated my best images of Jupiter taken with 3 different cameras:
* Casio Exilim EX-FS10
* Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XTi)
* Webcam Philips ToUcam Pro
Trying to find out which are the best colors and contrast to apply to a Jupiter I have come out with this comparative picture, between what Voyager I spacecraft could see and what I could spot last night with my humble newtonian telescope.
Computer Physics Lab 