Could well be one of the last astrophotos I publish, the fuck knows. The balcony observatory is over, thank you real estate maffia, thank you. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, automated filter wheel, ASI 462MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher.
Apparent size: 10″
Showing a 5+0 setup, 5 minutes main time with zero increment
At the end of this stupid year, ravaged by GovId-19 too, not just by covid-19, I put together a chess clock. Even though the number of people I can play with physically is really limited — obviously not everyone thinks, like me, that a calculated risk is worth a decent amount of freedom, poor old BF with who does or does not deserve what exactly — I just wanted to put together the clock, cause why not. Although it is a microsoft site, I published the project on github.
One thing a friend of mine noted: the lunch box… I find it one of the greatest challenges about home made gadgets to find the right box for them, without the 3d printer black magic. I also wanted this one to be transparent.
Another thing, more of a philosophical nature: the more I play around with arduinos, the more I realize how much effort went into the whole thing to be easy like a toy, instead of the PITA it could have been, to enable one to really create on top of an abstraction layer, in contrast with such mindfucks as that of manually calculating the value of a register to attain a baudrate on some obscure microcontroller I ran into at work, because libraries, because bootstrapping, and because it’s the business logic we are focused on, not reinventing the wheels of bit counting. Really, it’s almost 2021.
This is a cross-eye 3D rendition of the data captured on 2020-09-10 at around 19:07Z, both frames a stack of 90 seconds, with only two seconds apart. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, automated filter wheel, Baader IR-pass 650 filter, ASI 462MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher The frames are arranged so that Io does indeed look to be closer to the viewer.
Jupiter, Callisto, and Ganymede’s shadow are featured. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, filters, ASI 462MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher
IR-pass 650
Callisto, Jupiter, Ganymede’s shadow and Ganymede. UV/IR cut filter
There’s a legend among amateur astronomers that, without derotation, Jupiter supports only 90 seconds of raw video. Anything above it: derotate.
It always felt fishy to me, even before I started doing planetary photography. Due to other reasons, like capturing the moons’ movement, and the interplay of shadows, I always tried to keep the videos short.
However, the subject is evergreen wherever there are newcomers. So, now I made the math, and since we are people, not mathboys, here’s a handy little table one can play with or scroll below, the same calculator loads into this article.
