Author: Philip Masding

Pictures taken on 13/05/2014. This one with the colour DBK camera:

and this one with the monochrome DMK camera and a red filter. The result with the red filter is amazing given the seeing was pretty poor. Both images are based on a video of 10000 frames using the best 25% from Autostakkert.

 

On 15/05/2014 the seeing was better than on the 13th.  I also switched the camera frame rate down from 60 to 30fps which seems to have got rid of the slight ring effect seen on the western hemisphere above

 

 

On 15/02/2013 a small asteroid called 2012 DA14 passed by the Earth at only 17000 miles. The asteroid is 50m wide and was closest at around 19:30. I imaged at 21:30 hours  when it was quite faint. Nevertheless it was easy to see through the LX200 and could be seen moving against the background stars. This image is a series of 8 second exposures at f3.3 with the HX516.

Images with a Canon 450D around 7am on 11/12/12

 

01/12/12 Much better seeing than the last Jupiter post on 19/10/2012. This one taken at 22:15. At around 03:00 Sirius looked very steady through the window. But it was just too cold to have another go!

 

 

05/12/12

 

Jupiter’s 4 major satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are easy to see even with binoculars. After that it gets tricky, the next brightest is Amalthea at magnitude 14.1 which is already beyond what I can see with my telescope and it’s also very close to Jupiter. On 21/11/12 I imaged the next 2 which are Himalia (J6,  magnitude 14.9) and Elara (J7, magnitude    16.6). I also tried Pasiphae and got it but the scope had dewed up so another image is needed.

Compare this with a map from Guide 9 (a superb program). The map goes to about magnitude 17

Also Elara taken at f3.3 with LX200 and HX516

Finally Pasiphae J8 which was magnitude 17.0 when I took this photo. Pasiphae is about 20km wide and 624 million km from Earth. If that seems a long way then the galaxy PGC15841 is 220 million light years away, which according to Google is 2000 million, million, million km. Looks like magnitude 17.0 is as low I can go.

 

In October 2012 this comet suddenly brightened from magnitude 15 to magnitude 10 which is 100x brighter. Here it is in Pegasus in a single 2 minute exposure image taken at f3.3 with the 10″ LX200 and the HX516 camera

Here is a stack of 6x1minute images made with Deep Sky Stacker in comet mode

 

Below a video of frames taken over about 15 minutes showing how the comet moves relative to the stars as it orbits the sun.