Astronomy shots

Speak for yourself - growing old is compulsory, growing up is optional :crazy_face:

Seriously though, mad respect for anyone and everyone involved in getting kids interested in STEM.

Something new for me
 and a real learning curve because comets are hard. This one is only at a decent altitude about an hour before the dawn twilight starts washing everything out. My framing was off because I was overly optimistic about how much of the tail I could capture. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the limit of what I can get with my 75mm refractor with an hour’s worth of exposure time. The comet is brightening though, so maybe I will get a better result if I try again later this month.

Processing involves stacking the comet (using the nucleus as a reference) and stars separately, and then merging the resulting two images. I’ll take it as a good result for a first attempt, but it took the best part of the day watching YouTube tutorials and playing with the data.

Comet Lemmon A6 :

Here is a link to Space.com’s article on Lemmon 6A, with some images from some very talented folks who actually know what they are doing! :astonished:
Astrophotographers capture dazzling new views of Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) as it brightens for October skies | Space

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Why the Green Color?

The emerald hue of Comet Lemmon results from fluorescence:

  1. Solar ultraviolet radiation excites diatomic carbon (C₂) molecules in the coma.
  2. These molecules then emit light at 518 nm (green) when returning to their ground state.
  3. Cyanogen (CN) also contributes to this color (emission at 388 nm, violet).

:thinking: Still not entirely convinced. Will be keeping an eye out for Triffids.

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Here is a very quick and dirty stack of data taken with my new planetary/solar system setup


It’s not the greatest image of Saturn, but for a first attempt with a new scope, camera and software, I will take it. The Moon will be up later, so I will see what I can get with that
 and Jupiter in the early morning if I can get up and go outside.

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looking forward to some moon shots, need a new wallpaper :grinning:

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Working on it Lee! :smiley:

My new camera is killing my laptop with the size of the video files it is taking. I had one that was over 9GB ! So I’m sat out under the stars, moving files to an external hard disk. Lol.

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A couple years ago my daughter and I were driving home from a play. It was a clear October night and for a moment or two we were facing a stunning full harvest moon. Rin, who was 18 at the time and is no fool when it comes to science or math, said, “I guess I don’t understand how moons work. Why does it seem so much bigger than normal.” From that night on, variations of that question have been a running family joke:

“I guess I don’t understand how forks/trees/showers/eggs/tissues work
” And so on.

So it is with the most humble embarrassment that I admit: I guess I don’t know how planets work. How can the rings be edge-on in some shots the 3/4 views in others? The rings are on Saturn’s plane of rotation. And Earth roughly shares Saturn’s orbital path about the sun. Seems to me we should always see something like the lovely perspective that Paul captured.

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Check Out the animation under the section “Orbit and rotation” on Saturn’s wiki page, it’s pretty eye opening :blush:

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The first of my lunar shots from the early hours of this morning. I still have much to learn, it’s very different from processing the deep space images I have been doing for the past couple of years. Different scope, different camera, different software
 I’m getting there though.

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A pretty good start. I learned a lot from last night’s session. Here is Jupiter, which was maybe 40° above the horizon when I took this. ‘Seeing’ wasn’t great, but all things considered, this came out well.

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Great shots. Does the software filter out the moons?

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Absolutely fantastic shot 
.how big must some of those craters be
Simply awesome @PaulRix

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Sorry for the late reply @miRage. No, the software doesn’t filter out the Moons. I’m guessing that it might have something to do with my exposure and gain settings I used. It might also simply be that the moons were out of the field of view at the time.

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That could be the case indeed.

Do you know the exact UTC time when you took the shots?
Then you could put it in here and see where the moons were:

https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/jupiter_moons/jupiter.html

A quick shot of the Moon from last night, taken with my deep sky rig, which is pretty neat because it gives a sense of scale for my other recent images using the same setup.

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Apologies for the late reply
. Yes, the file is time stamped. I will take a look.

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Looks like my timing is slightly off, but Ganymede would be slightly out of the field of view. I am surprised that the other moons are not visible though.

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