September 2015

Financials:

Beginning balance 8/1/15 $1689.67

8/18/15 New Hampshire Ins. Co. via Mercer Consumer liability insurance -$320.00

Ending balance 8/31/15 $1369.67

Attendance: 21 including 5 visitors. John Blasey was one and Melissa Clayton (teacher) is another.

Steve Plank’s email: If you want to email him, use his bvillepiper@sbcglobal.net email, not his gmail one—he’s having problems with that.

Upcoming events:

• Tri County Tech class: Jean Sanders needs an instructor for an astronomy-related course. Daryl Doughty has volunteered. He will even get paid!

• OU Tulsa Schusterman Library Galileo exhibit opening, Sept. 26, 4-6 pm. Rick Bryant is in charge of this. So far 6 people have volunteered to help; Rick Bryant (who works at OU Tulsa) is leading this project. We will bring a variety of telescopes and binoculars; a couple of scopes we will set up with solar filters to be able to view sunspots. Rick has sent Denise the latest version of his astronomy-for-beginners guide which she will print; she will also bring her binders with prints of photos taken from Astronomy Picture of the Day. The primary focus of this event is to bring in children and tell them about how to get started in astronomy but adults are also welcome. Fran Stallings will be telling creation stories. The library will be open at 1 pm on the 26th for setup. Rick has maps to the library, located at 41st and Yale. Here is a link to the event:

https://galileo.ou.edu/content/opening-reception-schusterman-library

• Hilary Kamplain is requesting a program for her Cub Scout Den. So far no takers on this project.

• Darcy Swanson is wanting an astronomy program for Dewey schools. So far no takers.

• Judy Moreland wants to have an OK Mozart showcase event next June 11—a star party at Girl Scout camp Wah-Sha-She, with a few telescopes. Denise volunteered to work on this. Steve will get in touch with her for initial contacts, both with OKM and the Scouts. Forms will have to be filled out, at least with the Girl Scouts.

• Night Sky Network: Steve asked if people have been to this site and not much response. He would like us to check it out. Because we’ve had at least 5 events so far this year he has been able to get an “exploring the solar system” kit which was duly given to Melissa Clayton, who can use this with the middle school earth science class she is teaching at Wesleyan Christian School; her earth-science curriculum will include space-related topics.

• The Reflector magazine (offered to all BAS members) is going online. Karen Cruce pointed out that you should check your email (if it’s registered with the magazine) for updates on this. One option is to mail you a PDF of the magazine which you could then print.

• Total lunar eclipse coming Sept. 27-28.

• BAS officer elections coming up at December meeting

Planetary Imaging by Daryl Doughty

He showed us many images. The first was of the Milky Way “coming out” of Mt. Rainier taken early August 13—along with exposures of Perseid meteors. The photographer said he saw 200+ meteors in 3 ½ hrs.

Daryl himself said he saw (early on August 12) about 16 Perseid meteors in an hour, and the next morning, August 13, about 26 during a period of time in the wee hours. Daryl said this was the best Perseid showing he’d seen in several years.

Daryl showed a number of images he has taken of galaxies and planetary conjunctions.

For galaxy images he will often use a 60-90 second exposure and then stack the images.

Other times he will use a 20 second exposure.

He showed images of:

Jupiter/Moon/Venus taken 8/23/14

Jupiter and Venus 6/30/15. (Daryl tracked and plotted the Jupiter-Venus conjunction development from early April to July 3 this summer and showed us the graph.) He took the Jupiter-Venus conjunction pictures with a 12mm focal length camera with a telescope with a Barlow lens 2.8 x magnification.

Moon and Venus 1/1/11 early morning

Jupiter/Venus/Mercury 5/11/11 with 135mm focal length

Moon/Jupiter/Venus 2/27/12 with 29mm focal length

Moon and Venus 8/16/12

Moon and Jupiter 1/21/13

Moon and Saturn 7/7/14 120mm. 8/10ths of a degree of separation.

Jupiter/Neptune/Moon 6/13/07 55mm focal length

Neptune/Jupiter and some of its moons 6/23/09 600mm focal length

Moon 8/25/15 (end-August supermoon) And he said the upcoming lunar eclipse later this month will be the biggest one in a long time. Will start during the evening of Sept. 27 and end in the wee hours Sept. 28.

Saturn 4/20/08 taken with 1200, 3000 and 600 mm focal lengths with Meade video camera. Magnification doesn’t give more resolution if the atmosphere is not that stable. You may just end up magnifying the atmospheric turbulence.

Jupiter 7/8/08 with Celestron video camera

Venus/Mars/Saturn 4/12/12 with 3800mm focal length. Has colors. Used Canon camera in video mode. Used maybe 400-500 frames out of a thousand.

Venus 4/22, 5/3, 5/28, all 2012. 3800mm focal length.

Sun and Venus 5/28/12. Venus 66 seconds of arc diameter. Sun 30 minutes of an arc diameter.

Jupiter/Mars/Saturn 4/25/14 3800mm focal length

Jupiter with 3 moons’ shadow on the planet 1/23/15

Jupiter 2/13/15, taken with C11 Meade 7400mm focal length. His best planetary image, striking detail.

Sunspots—favorite subject of Daryl’s. He usually takes about 28 pictures and then stacks them to get clear images.

(And he said there will be a total solar eclipse about 2 years from now—could see near Kansas City, MO. The totality would be about 2 ½ minutes.

What kind of equipment do you need to do high resolution planetary photography?

640 x 480 pixels

Each pixel is 6.3 microns in size

He uses:

Meade Lunar Planetary Imager

Celestron VGA 640 x 480, 3.6 x 27 mm which has pixels 5.6 microns in size

Canon 1000D DSLR camera 22.2 x 14.8 mm; 3,880 x 2,952 pixels; pixel size 5.71 microns

EOS movie record utility; 720 x 600 pixels, each pixel 5.71 microns. He uses with his Canon DSLR camera.

The smaller the pixel size, the higher the resolution.

Solar pictures: need solar filters to cover EVERY opening.

Celestron C-11, 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain scope with a Barlow lens

Registax alignment and stacking download (free software)

Nebulosity processing apo to use with a wide range of astronomical CCD or DSLR cameras. Costs about $60.00.

Adobe Photoshop C52 (not free anymore). Has powerful features and simplified workflows to deliver stunning images to photographers. Can save images as JPEGs when done.

Wavelet also does sharpening.

Why use a video mode in planetary photography? You can take pictures more rapidly than with multiple stacking.

Daryl showed an adaptation of a Snellen eye chart with the diameter range (as we view the planets) of seconds of arcs.

Refractor telescopes are better for planet pictures than Schmidt-Cassegrain scopes.

He showed a video movie of Mars. It “dances”. Stacking will automatically stack the best images.

When you use Registax you have to set alignment points. Then Registax plots each picture with the alignment points and selects the best images to stack.