Posts Made By: Roland Christen

Images taken with our new 130 GT refractor, Advanced Barlow set to 3x, QHY CCD camera, at intervals over a period of about 1/2 hour. Seeing was not great, typical Midwest skies with Jet Stream overhead. Exposure times of 60 seconds at 100 frames per sec., stacked in Registax.

Rolando

Taken with 130 GT refractor last night, using Advanced Barlow with QHY planetary camera.

Rolando

You would not think that an observatory should be located in Rochester, since they get an average of only 50 days cloud free per year. But, on my recent visit there, I stumbled across this unique observatory located right in the heart of town at the airport.


Rolando

You would not think that an observatory should be located in Rochester, since they get an average of only 50 days cloud free per year. But, on my recent visit there, I stumbled across this unique observatory located right in the heart of town at the airport.


Rolando

Io just emerging from the front of Jupiter. Io's shadow on the planet. Taken with 180mmF4.5 Mak-Newt and AP Advanced Barlow. QHY-5II Cmos camera.

Rolando

Here’s a monochrome H-alpha image of IC 4628, The Prawn Nebula, taken last night with the AP 12" F8 astrograph located at Las Campanas in Chile. Imager was Dave Jurasevich, assisted by Howard Hedlund of AP.

The Prawn is located down in the tail of Scorpius at -40 dec, making it a perfect object for our southern installation but pretty tough from the US, even So. California. This is a composite of 11 x 1200 second exposures at 50% of full resolution. Image taken under medium windy conditions.

Rolando

Bottom of the 1st quarter Moon on May 27, 2015.
Taken with 130F6.3 EDF refractor, QHY5-2 Cmos camera, AP Advanced Barlow. 300 video frames combined.

Rolando

Same equipment, Plato and Lunar Valley

Rolando

Same equipment as previous image. This mosaic consists of 12 separate panels.

Rolando

Deep sky objects are limited in resolution due to atmospheric motion. Planet imagers have used video stacking techniques called Lucky Imaging for years now to get very high resolution details on the planets. Sub-arc second detail is possible using medium aperture scopes (10" to 16") on the surface of the planets and even their moons.

Deep sky has been limited to above 1 arc second, and in most cases between 2 and 4 arc sec FWHM because the atmospheric motion smears out the image even when guiding is excellent.

Last night I tried Video imaging of a fairly bright object, M13, using a QHY5-II Cmos camera attached to my 16" F8 astrograph. By stacking approximately 600 individual video frames I was able to get down to 0.765 arc seconds FWHM. And this was in so-so seeing, not a really good night. Over the next few days I plan to shoot more as the seeing improves, and add color to the image.

The attached image shows the resolution obtained in the core of M13. Video is of course limited in how deep you can go, but it might be possible to get fairly faint by stacking several tens of thousands of individual video frames. Planet imagers do this routinely now.

Rolando