DAS BBQ, Jupiter & Friends

Friday 7th August: the annual Society BBQ took place at Austerfield. There was a good turnout by members and good food was had by all! Fortunately, the sky was clear which enabled the use of the 14" SCT. We toured the sky, viewing delights such as M13 and various Double Stars. Later when the scope became available, I unpacked my kit containing laptop and webcam. My targets were Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. Observing the Jovian planet in the scope presented a marvellous sight! Both Polar Regions and EQ Belts showed a clear contrast with the whitish disk of the planet The Galilean moons were readily visible to the east (following). Above is my final rendition of Jupiter. This is the result of hundreds of stacked webcam frames and some tweaking in Photoshop.

Uranus was next on my list and Brian steered the scope over to the planet. I grabbed a couple of videos and observed the planet in the scope. Not an awful lot to say about Uranus but it's always worth the effort. I have artificially coloured the disk and tried to smooth-out the final imaging to make it appear more natural. The final result is fairly pleasing to the eye.



Moving onto Neptune, I found that focusing the scope on the 7.8 star-like object was tricky. Brian as always offered advice and I managed to get as crisp an image as the sky and scope would allow. Another couple of videos were captured and the image below is the result. The quality of the video proved to be poor and the software used to align & stack the frames had some difficulty. But I manually selected 10 of the best frames. I decided not to colour the object as in the scope I couldn't detect any visually. My thanks to Brian for his advice and driving the scope. In the Dome with us also were Eddie, Sandra and Ian.

After imaging Neptune we decided to look at and image the Moon which was just about Full and close by. This presented new challenges as with it being almost Full, there was little relief to give the illusion of 3D. But I still took some and a couple of images are shown below, but I have not yet identified the specific areas.Looking at the central peak of this crater, the shadow is cast long, to me, a clear indication of the height of the peak.

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