Venus, 2021-08-15 through a solar continuum (green) filter

Alright, let’s go after Venus with whatever I have at hand. The local time is 16:45 (13:45Z), Venus is at around the meridian at around 45 degrees high. Behind a brightly lit blue void. The available rig: ASI 120MM (cooled), Baader Solar Continuum Filter 1.25″, barlow lenses, TS-Optics 76/342 TS76EDPH, mountpusher, EQ3-mod. Fun part: the bright sunlight and the bright blue sky made it next to impossible to spot Venus, using a mount that’s not properly aligned, thus almost no coordinates. However, I cheated. I used the Sun — fairly easy to find — to get an idea about the RA of the unaligned mount, drew lines onto the mount (it has seen worse), and I hacked together a few lines of arduino with a dev board and an MPU 9250 to show me the attitude of the scope. Have I mentioned how handy these little ESP32 dev boards are, and how arduino in general solves decade old problems, making the pedestal of obscurity embedded is in general shake a wee bit? However, I feel literally, physically tired of having to outsmart and circumvent, or just brute force every possible issue the universe (or better call it real estate maffia, then govid-19, among other issues) has in store for my hobby. Given the instruments, this picture is nowhere near the quality of my epic Venus season.

(tovább…)

Venus, Oiii and CaK

I used my usual Venus gear: EQ3 with the added ST4 port, N150/750, filterwheel, OIII + VenusU and CaK, ASI 178MM cooled.
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Venus, full spectrum

This time I used a very modest setup: the sky wasn’t promising, and indeed, the seeing was quite bad. So I put together the MC102/1300 with a barlow and an ASI 120 MM with an UV/IR cut, to capture Venus. Otherwise the unguided EQ3 did its job, given the lower magnification.

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The gear is the same, but I deployed a new workflow: I start the editing on the raw stack, before applying any wavelets. The reason for this is that Venus has a nasty habit of its edge going easily overexposed. The pictures are through the Venus U and the Ca K-line filters, combined with the OIII filter.

2020-04-22. Venus U and OIII

2020-04-23 CaK and OIII

So the steps:

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Same gear, this time I pushed ten minutes into the CaK and also at around ten into the OIII, though for the latter without a particular reason (I forgot to press stop).

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Venus in CaK and Oiii

The gear, as usual, was the N150/750 on a modded EQ3 autoguided by the soapbox project. As a camera, it was the modded-to-be-cooled ASI178MM, with an automated, originally manual filter wheel. I used the OIII and the CaK filter this time, to create to bicolor combo.

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Same gear as before, too lazy to write it down yet again. The green and CaK filters got into this picture.

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Venus, green plus calcium K

The same exact gear, it’s getting boring to write it down. Only this time, it was between passing clouds, quite annoying.
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Venus green+U

The same gear, but now the fully automated filter wheel with its hand controller optionally connected to the soapbox project and the desktop app now controlling sharpcap — telling it which filter is active. This day the Venus U filter yielded the best result.

In fact, the pros and cons in my experience with Venus, two different barlow lenses and two different scopes, the N150/750 and the N250/1200:

(tovább…)