Tuesday night found me outside trying to record the elusive Miranda, a 16.5 mag satellite of Uranus, never appearing more than 9 arc secs from the glare of the planet’s mag 5.67 disc.
On the computer screen it was easy to distinguish the 4 brighter Uranian satellites; Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, but Miranda was nowhere to be seen, hidden in the glare.
I took a series of 1 sec, 2 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec and 30 sec images so that I could later search for Miranda and the best series appeared to be the 60 x 10 sec frames, so I processed them in AS!3 and as luck would have it, a Miranda candidate appeared, frustratingly located in one of the diffraction spikes of the ‘scopes 4 vane spider.
After a little teasing out of the data, I did find a faint collection of photons that coincided with the plotted position of Miranda as displayed in SkyTools 4. I overlayed a Screen Capture from ST4 to show the plotted position.
I probably would not bet the house on this result, but it is my best effort to date.
Name Mag PA° Sep"
Ariel 14.3 181.2 13.8
Umbriel 15.0 351.0 19.5
Titania 13.9 182.7 31.4
Oberon 14.1 340.5 42.0
Miranda 16.5 190.5 9.1
At the time of these observations, the planet Uranus (51,118 km dia.) was some 18.8 AU from the Earth with a Sun Distance of 19.8 AU.
Tak Mewlon 210
Tak x1,6 Extender
ASI1600MM Pro Cooled.
Cheers
Dennis