Mercury

[Retrograde (Pete)]

This is my first ever image of Mercury.

It's a tough little object to image - currently measuring 6.8" of arc and obviously at a very low elevation. Still this current apparition is the best it will be for quite a while so I decided to give it a go last night.

I captured 20000 frames with a ZWO ASI120-MC attached to my 190mm Mak-Newt plus 4 x Powermate and stacked the best 10%.

As you can imagine the atmospheric dispersion left a full spectrum of colours across the tiny planet so I removed them as best I could in post processing.

It's times like this you wish you had an ADC!

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

Nice one!

Good job getting rid of the atmospheric refraction, I have a couple of little rainbow images of something that might be Mercury

Andrew

[Retrograde (Pete)]

Originally Posted by Tulloch

Nice one!

Good job getting rid of the atmospheric refraction, I have a couple of little rainbow images of something that might be Mercury

Andrew

Thanks Andrew!

I had another quick go at processing this. I removed most of the dispersion prior to stacking this time. It's perhaps a tad smoother but still no real detail of course.

[Wavytone]

Well done, indeed.

If the insane weather would finally give me a chance I'll try aiming BigMak at it, now that I have the backfocus where I like it, collimated and ready to rock.

[skysurfer]

Nice catch !

But you can simply evade the atmospheric dispersion issues: look up the planet in full daylight, in most cases (unless close to inferior conjunction as will happen on 11 November) it is bright enough to show up in the bright daylight sky.

[Retrograde (Pete)]

Originally Posted by Wavytone

Well done, indeed.

If the insane weather would finally give me a chance I'll try aiming BigMak at it, now that I have the backfocus where I like it, collimated and ready to rock.

Thanks Nick!

Hopefully you'll get a chance to aim BigMak at it soon.

Originally Posted by skysurfer

Nice catch !

But you can simply evade the atmospheric dispersion issues: look up the planet in full daylight, in most cases (unless close to inferior conjunction as will happen on 11 November) it is bright enough to show up in the bright daylight sky.

Thank-you!

Yes that would be the way to go in theory. In practice it's not so easy for me at least as I'm not comfortable with leaving my scope set up from the night before (after rebuilding our house we lost part of our fence so the backyard is completely open to the street at present). Not sure about doing an alignment on objects during the day - I assume it's possible?