Venus, false color

So I imaged Venus and deployed the technique describen earlier: the Calcium K-line got cyan, the visible light’s RGB got orange, and the false color outcome is featured here. Because I noticed that the ASI 178 tends to run at ambient plus 10-15 degrees Celsius, I made it a cooler, quite similar to the one on the ASI 224 MC, and reached ambient t – 5 degrees and maybe way less noise. Though imaging Venus like this, from a hole in a wall, on the daytime sky with two instruments may sound easy, or I may make it sound easy, it wasn’t. It was almost as hard as doing it for the first time.

HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (uv/ir filter, cooled), and ASI 178MM (Calcium K filter, cooled), home observatory, mountpusher

(tovább…)

Venus, false color

Now with the Calcium K line filter at hand, and some decent sky, I imaged Venus. The first problem was finding it, from my hole-in-the-wall balcony and not an exact polar alignment. To be able to pull such a feat, I had to build something: from some arduino modules, I put together an inclinometer to get the tube’s altitude, and then look for the planet at the suspected orientation for the given azimuth.

I used my usual gear, with the mentioned enhancement, with a mono camera and the Baader K-line Calcium filter, HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 178MM, Calcium K-line, and ASI224MC with the UV/IR,  home observatory, mountpusher

(tovább…)

Venus and its clouds

The literature tells us that it’s UV filters through which the clouds of Venus are visible. A Calcium K line filter is en route to me, but till then I still fired up my balcony observatory: it’s weekend, I am at home, and Venus is visible, so let’s take a shot. Actually, I took five shots with different settings, and then tried my best to squeeze out some clouds, cause why not. Initially, I thought the results were artifacts, but they were consistent on all five shots, even though I adjusted the ADC in the meanwhile. I was hoping then that someone else was imaging Venus at around the same time as me, so if the features proved to be consistent, then it’s no artifact. And so it happened, xcsabesz from asztrofoto.hu imaged Venus, through a filter, and the two pictures overlap nicely.

(tovább…)

The planetary equipment, used these month mainly to hunt down binary stars, turned to Venus this time, barely visible from the buildings blocking the western horizon.

HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher

Venus and chi Oph

This morning Venus stood, for a few hours, very close to a relatively bright star, χ Ophiuchi, and it really looked like Venus suddenly got a moon. The conjunction lasted only a few hours, and at around 9 am I could have imaged something even closer, but you know, it’s daylight at 9am. The picture below is a composite of several exposure levels, with Venus also recorded as a separate frame at a higher magnification, to get a smoother look. The instruments: ASI 224 MC @ N 150/750 on the HEQ5. Bad seeing due to the city looming underneath the view.

HIP 80569, HD 148184 [* in Oph] 7 Chi Oph, B2Vne, 525ly 4.22^m [simbad] [photo-planner]

Earlier I had the opportunity to see many Jupiter-Venus close conjunctions. Like this and this.

(tovább…)

Venus, 1.2% crescent, two days before minimum elongation

I observed Venus’ very narrow crescent at only two days before the inferior conjunction, ie minimum elongation, at less than 9 degrees from the Sun, with only 1.2% illumination. Since this is a personal record, besides the transit observed in 2012, let me just paste here some trivia from Stellarium. Due to the Sun being very close, this post is something with the label: kids, don’t try this at home.

Venus on 2017-03-23 at 11:30 UTC:
distance: 42 million km (during the 2012 transit, it was 43 away)
apparent diameter: 59.3″ (1/30 of the Sun’s / Moon’s diameter)
illumination: 1.2% (this year’s minimum will be 1%, in two days)
position: 10°10′, 9 min
elongation: 8°58’52″(this year’s minimum, ie the inferior conjunction is just under 8°17′, on 2017-03-25 at around 16:30 UTC)

The equipment was a Scopium webcam at the SW MC 102/1300 scope on an HEQ5 mount, with or without a 2x barlow.

Finding Venus
Maybe it’s my bad, but I found no obvious daytime alignment method (like use the Sun, the Moon beeing too far away) in the controller. Being a temporary backyard setup, with no alignment at all (I have a general idea where north is), I started at the Sun with an ND 3.8 Baader solar filter, in order to adjust both the focus and get an idea about the coordinates the mount thinks it is pointing to. Then, having the Sun’s and Venus’ position from Stellarium, I guided the scope to the assumed coordinates. Given the glare of the Sun, visual observations were off the table, even with the improvised shade. So all that remained was canvasing the area with the filter now off, through the keyhole-like narrow field of the webcam. (Yes, I could have used the aligned finder scope’s wide field with the camera, but then again: the Sun). After a while (Hofstadter’s law applied), I succeeded :)

Some pictures below, they show details like how the color of the sky is off due to the white balance being off while recording with the color webcam.

(tovább…)