For G.M. Berrow's contest on Twitter. Here we have a scene from Chapter 3 in Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds. Daring Do chills out after her latest adventure (and dealing rather messily with one of Cabaleron's henchponies hiding in the closet) while Professor Ravenhoof fiddles with the Doomed Diadem of Xilati. She doesn't rest for long, of course, because she soon sets out to find Brumby Cloverpatch- the only pony who has seen the mysterious city and returned.
So I forgot all about updating this site with all my latest projects. But you are patient, I can tell!
My last few posts here mentioned buiding an astronomy light to help see sketches and star charts at the telescope. And how about that, I actually made one!
The design is very simple: I found one of those clip on lamps you would use to read while your partner is being a vampire or whatever and can't sleep in a lit room. I replaced the LED with a red one but it was initially way too bright. The solution was to wire a small trimmer potentiometer to adjust the current going through the LED and make it dimmer or brighter (but with the current limiting resisitor still in series so you don't blow it out) with a small screw driver. I think I used a 10k Ohm trimpot simply because that's what I had in the lab. It was a bit fiddly to get it inside the battery compartment but with a little patience and removing a few standoffs, it fits surprisingly well.
I tried it with a pocket star chart looking for double stars and it works wonderfully. I tried to sketch with it but absolutely everything else went wrong that night so I don't have a great report regarding its performance there, but I did notice a very slight "bullseye" effect on the paper so I will have to look into frosting the lens somehow to diffuse the light.
If you can solder without maiming yourself (or even if you can't as burns on my fingers may indicate) and you've put together stubborn model kits, this is a super easy project and simpler/ more reliable than most plans I've found online.
I've been reading about lunar sketching and it sounds like an immensly rewarding hobby. I do enjoy electronic imaging but there seems to be this idea that if you don't have the newest and most expensive CCD cameras and $3000 tripods you aren't going anywhere as an astronomer. In sketching all you need is some basic art tools and some patience. It doesn't matter how wide your aperture is or if your sensors (in this case your own eyes) is peltier cooled. What's more, it will train you to notice little details and help you become intimately familiar with these celestial objects- making you a better astronomer faster than running an image through Registax will. At the end of the night, you don't need something spectacular to impress the people at work with like a highly processed astro image. It's enjoying your time spent in the field; just you on another world that's virtually free to visit.
The moon hasn't really coincided with my schedule lately so I attempted to practise using a picture from a book. It's not too bad, if I don't say so myself, but I'm not used to sketching without using outlines. If the sky remains clear this evening I might have a chance to sketch the real moon in the daylight and that would be the next easiest step as I won't need a red light at first. I may have to build something especially designed to illuminate my sketch pad without ruining my night vision or having to hold it with my other hand. It shouldn't be too hard.
Despite a clear sky, seeing conditions were deplorable. At the very least I got some ghost craters and a better image of Saturn that isn't a wonky shape. :3
Although I am not 100% happy with this image, it is still the best image of Saturn I have yet captured and more than I expected with the compression artefacty raw data I used. Next time I'm going to check to make sure it is good data before I start taking everything apart even if I am cold and tired.
I had originally planned to image Mars since it was a day after its opposition and it's the first time the weather was nice locally on this planet in weeks. Unfortunately the weather on Mars was less than ideal and I could see no surface detail at all. Unless the glare of the moon was washing everything out but I do not think this is the case.
Luckily my favorite planet, Saturn started peeking out from behind the trees so the night was not a total loss! In the image below you can see the Cassini Division even if it isn't very sharp and notice the vague cloud band on the planet itself. My processing wasn't kind to it, but if you look carefully you can also see the shadow cast on the rings behind the planetary sphere.
I tried processing this four seperate times with different reference frames and interestingly, the blurry frames yielded the best results. The frames where I could barely see the Cassini Division caused the final image to look even more distorted and unpleasant to look at.
Typically, I can get better shots of the sun using just my phone's camera pointed through the eyepiece, (with solar filter in place so my eyes don't burn out or my mirrors melt or something else as spectacularly tragic) but I could never tell if I captured the granulation of the Photosphere or if it was just electronic noise.
This is processed in Registax using the Celestron Neximage 5, which is a ginormous improvement over whatever the name of my previous imager is. I used fewer frames here than I would have otherwise liked and I couldn't tell if I was in focus or not (bahtinov masks don't work on the sun!) So it's less than ideal... but you can clearly see what I'm going to call convection cells. It was also imaged in white light and desaturated so it's not in a pleasing artificial yellow color you might see elsewhere.
As I understand it, no one really knows how to use Registax any better than I do and that makes me feel better.
