Posts Made By: Mike Wirths

Ok here goes images like this are gonna be anticlimactic after Wes's!! Still for this image scale I'm pretty happy with the detail.
So heres Lacus Mortis right on the terminator, very similar lighting to Wes's image from last month!

--Mike

Hi all,

Remember we said this crater pair were not often imaged? Well heres my attempt! I like the cool mountain/plateau at the lower left!

--Mike

Heres one of my favorite cater combos!

--Mike

And lastly Posidonius right on the terminator. A cool v-shaped graben to the bottom of the crater....



--Mike

Hi all,

Paolo and Ihave been chatting a bit about this topic on another forum. Hes going with his scope this feburary (hey Paolo will you be bringing one of your new cameras too 8) ), and I will be going (driving down with my pop-up camper) too, possibly even with my 30" if it all fits in my vehicle!

Heres the website for the event which takes place Feb 12th-18th.

http://www.scas.org/wsp.htm

For imaging the planets Saturn should be well placed but the moon will be waning last 1/4 and on the low side even at Florida keys latitude! Still if the great Florida seeing happens then hi/res is possible even with the moon at less than 40 degrees! I'm actually thinking of e-mailing them to ask if its OK to set up a few days early to image the moon, if its possible then it will have a pretty good altitude during the last 1/4. Really a shame Wes could'nt make it with his back surgery coming up at the time (I hope that fixes you up and your healing is quick Wes!) but it would be so cool to meet a bunch of you in person and share some of our pooled knowledge!

any thoughts on this idea??

Mike W

Hi all,
I took a lonngg hiatus from both the internet and imaging since getting back from Baja in October. The weather of course this fall was impossible, so instead of fighting it and getting down I switched my attention to another hobby which is my home theatre (this area BTW you can spend more $$ than even astronomy!!).
So I'm posting an old image I got from home since I got skunked weather wise in Baja too! (of course the short lived system lasted only while I was camped out :S )
This is Meton with a 2.5 barlow in 6/10 seeing. Infinty 2.2 camera

cheers

Mike

OK, I'm back a couple days now, it was nice to get a break in the winter (I missed the worst of the cold weather) but apparently according to WSP veterens the weather this year was the worst ever! I was watching the trend a couple weeks before the party and was a bit worried because it seemed that it was very cloudy and rainy.
We had 2 nights of poor transparency and wild dew, the seeing never got past average (I think the jet stream was parked over us the whole time).
Still I got one spectacular view of Omega Centuri through a Zambuto equipped 24" Starmaster!! There were great talks from Don Parker and Sue French, and best of all I finally got to meet Paolo who was very disapointed and depressed about being shut out again by bad weather!
Still, I had a good time in spite of the conditions, Key West is a very funky culturaly diverse town. I guess I'll have to go again next year!

-- Mike W

Hi all,

no new images...yet but finally a start of a website for all my best stuff. A buddy of mine has set this up for me, take a peak a let me know what you think. Still have to add image info and equipment info and commentary.

http://equuleus.pooki.net/index.html

The Saturn and jupiter images are pretty old, still done with my venerable Toucam.

cheers

Mike W

Hi all,

After seeing Jims image with a interseting white spot I got to wondering if it isn't better to keep capture times for Saturn on the short side. The rotational period for Saturn is only slightly longer than that of Jupiter so any fine details would be smeared by overall capture periods of longer than probably about 3 minutes (depending of course on what FL you're imaging at) maybe 4 if you don't mind a bit of smearing.
The whole trick is to get enough useable frames to beat down the noise, so I can understand why some people opt just to go for a more aesthetically pleasing image and therefore forego any possiblity of capturing fine details. Another factor if one has a colour camera its much easier than if you have a colour wheel. What are the capture times that are being used by most here? I know John B used about a 10 minute capture time for his amazing WSP Saturn image... and that image showed wonderful banding detail that could'nt probably be had with a short capture time. So perhaps its just a matter of a trade-off?

cheers

Mike

Hi all,

Finally back to a little bit of imaging, last night I had the 1st usable seeing since October!! :S
Still it was only 6/10 seeing of the fast type, very jittery hard to scrape together enough usable frames. Still nice to be able to play with some new data.
18" Starmaster, Lumenera 2-2, red filter, 2.5 X's powermate
Stack of 132/950

a couple more to come

Mike