Planets & Astronomy NHAC Neal Site

Using the Celestron "NexImage" and Takahashi Toa 130 telescope, 2x barlow, 22 seconds of video processed in Registax.

4/26/03 NHAC Neal Site

This image is a "stack" of 29 individual images (each about 1/4 sec. exposure time) of Saturn, combined and averaged together. I did some sharpening and minimal color correction in Photoshop. Despite the fact that Saturn was fairly low in the sky, conditions & seeing were very good. You can see the planet's shadow against the rings quite clearly. Can you identify where the Sun is, relative to the planet?

-- Taken through my telescope with my Olympus C4040 digital camera & a Teleview 5x Barlow
-- I did the stacking & averaging in a program called ImagesPlus

Jupiter. You can see the moon IO's shadow on the right. If you look closely, you can see the moon itself about 1/2 the planet to the left. Same details as above.

A couple of other items below...

Above are M81 and M82 in Ursa Major. These are galaxies, with M82 being on the upper left looking like a small cigar. M81 is the rounder galaxy in the lower middle. I had hoped to take several images of this to stack, but that didn't work out. This is a single, 16 second exposure with my Olympus C4040 (16 seconds is the max. exposure of the camera) coupled to my telescope (Tak FS 102) via a 40mm EP (no barlows). As of 2006 I have a much better shot of these here.

M81 and M82

Above is the beehive cluster, M44, in Cancer. This was an experiment to see what I could do with the digital camera. It's not too bad, but I think this one would show better color with film. Same data as previous.

Dick Locke's Saturn and Jupiter Pix (newer & better?)

Saturn

4/26/03 NHAC Neal Site