Half an hour of raw video (>100k frames, tens of gigabytes) went into this picture of Saturn. The low altitude craves for the huge number of frames to … well, have enough luck for the lucky imaging. At 178°42′ elongation, this is just one day away from the opposition. The rings are surprisingly bright. ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5 guided by the soapbox on my balcony.
Saturn, 2019-07-10-11
Jupiter, Ganymede 2019-07-10
As usual, this is from the balcony observatory, ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5. Planet tracking is done by the soapbox project. The seeing had good moments, but the low altitude of the planet and the fact that I have one of Romania’s largest cities underneath is certainly not helping, these beyond the generally shitty astroclimate of the Carpathian Basin. After the many nights I was up at 4AM to capture the planet, it has well passed the opposition by now and its going away from the horizon of my vantage point. It was an interesting collaboration: me sleep-deprived while getting some good views and Jupiter… doing what it’s been doing for billions of years now.
37 individual videos have been recorded and processed for the animation below, from 2019-07-10T18-54Z to 2019-07-10T21-50Z, each video about 3 gigabytes, equal lenght of 90 seconds, and equal gaps between.
Jupiter’s weather – a quick look
Only five days apart, the planet has shown some interesting changes. More images are coming. From the balcony, ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5.
Home Observatory 2019
The balcony, as a temporary(?) home observatory
I am a lazy man, so I automate, leave in place, pre-program — and stuff like that. For Jupiter and Saturn, I made my rather humble balcony into a humble observatory, before the real estate developers (this is a politically correct name for what they really are) fuck up my horizon.
Since accurate polar alignment is not feasible when one can just accidentally kick the mount, just that tiny little bit, and I don’t intend to do deep sky from here, the whole thing is aligned by smell and then guided by the soapbox.
Jupiter 2019-06-30
ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5
The Soapbox MountPusher Guider
the interface on top of an image acquired with the guiding solution
I have the following problem at home: the balcony is small, the tube is big and I am lazy. This sums up to a constant problem of drifting, the planet or lunar surface being imaged slowly walks away. Though there are methods to polar align a mount even when there is no way to see the north pole, the small balcony part means frequent small bumps into the whole thing. The oversized scope is also prone to accidents. I also tried the feature tracker in Sharpcap, failed, and the autoguiding of PHD2, failed. So I came up with the soapbox ensemble. I call it noszogtató in Hungarian, for it means something like nagger-pusher-convincer. It got itself a soapbox, literally.
UPDATE 2019-09-30: I extended the hardware and the software.
UPDATE 2020-05-10: I extended the hardware and the software. Lots of additional functions added.
Contents
- rationale
- block diagram
- communication
- desktop app
- arduino code overview
- hardware
- side projects
- download
- conclusions, photos
Saturn 2019-06-20
ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5
Jupiter 2019-06-19
ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5, bad seeing
20190618-2111 Jupiter 8 pipp g4 ap5 reg1 ps
20190618-2135 Jupiter 9 pipp g4 ap5 reg1 ps
