Mercury (IR) 2013-09-14 (with WinJUPOS comparison)

[lepton3]

While continuing my ongoing Venus project, I imaged Mercury low in the west yesterday at around 6pm local time. The seeing was pretty poor, but the IR filter improves things.

Here is a stack of 7200/12000 drizzled 1.5x, rather heavily sharpened then scaled by a further 1.333x to bring out some features.

Equipment is C11 + 2.5x Powermate + Photometric I filter + DMK21AU04.AS camera.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming elongation.

-Ivan

[EricB]

Great shot Ivan! One can even see some detail. :thumbsup:

Eric

[Larryp]

Great image, Ivan:thumbsup:

[Shiraz]

that is an excellent image Ivan - convincing detail. regards Ray

[Solar]

That's a really great result.:eyepop:

[cometcatcher]

Crikey, features on Mercury through amateur equipment. Never thought I'd see the day.

[lepton3]

Thanks for the comments Eric, Laurie, Ray, Ralph, and Kevin.



I can't claim this is the first amateur Mercury image with some features -- I've seen some better images earlier this year on Cloudy Nights forum, for example. And years ago there was a write up in S&T mag about a fellow who was imaging in broad daylight with a special ventilated SCT (I believe he cut holes out of the carbon fibre tube of a C9.25!).

Anyhow, the latest WinJUPOS has an updated Mercury texture, so I did a comparison with a screenshot, scaled down and gaussian blurred. I think several of the features correspond reasonably well to the Messenger map!

-Ivan

[strongmanmike]

That's awesome Ivan and yes the features seem to match very well, congratulations :thumbsup:

Mike

[Curt]

Absoultley amazing. I love your work. Blows me away everytime.Congratulations.

[lepton3]

Thanks Mike, and thank you Curt for your generous comment.

-Ivan

[John Hothersall]

I'd love to get Mercury. detail is wonderful.

John.

[lepton3]

Thanks John,

All of my positive outcomes so far have been leading up to elongation, shooting in the late afternoon, having a long dew shield and umbrella shading the scope tube, and using an IR filter. Having Venus around to do and initial sync on is a must.

Will be giving it more attempts in the next week if the weather would just clear for a change.

-Ivan

[h0ughy]

fantastic work and what a pearler of a result. top shelf!!

[rustigsmed]

Hi Ivan,

your Mercury/Venus results are truly impressive and you know your stuff on planetary filters.

I have been considering getting the clip in filter http://www.astronomik.com/en/photographic-filters/proplanet-742-filter.html for my canon EOS, I know you run a mono, do you think it would be possible(on a DSLR) to blend a couple of minutes with the filter and a minute or so video without the filter to combine the UV/IR with colour? (i'm assuming the output video would be black and whitish whitish even for a DSLR?)

Or would the colour frames counteract the work done by the UV/IR?

Thanks for your time and sharing your photos.

Cheers,

Rusty

[sjastro]

Quite outstanding.

Steven

[lepton3]

Thanks David, and Steve.



Hi Russel, thanks for the comment.

I have tried using an IR sensor on a colour CCD, and it actually works reasonably well, as the colour filters on the chip are usually quite transparent to IR. I think the Canon CMOS sensor might not be quite as sensitive as a Sony CCD to long IR, but I expect it would still be reasonable.

You would be aware you need to remove the built-in IR block filter before fitting an IR longpass filter.

Even though the IR pass result will look mostly mono, you still need to de-bayer the frames when stacking, as the RGB pixels have different sensitivity due to the colour filters, and will give a noise pattern if you do not.

Combining an IR layer to RGB images often gives better contrast, so would be worth trying.

Have not tried UV with a colour sensor, I've read it gives poor results as the bayer matrix colour filters block out too much UV.

-Ivan

[blink138]

just genius! never thought i would ever see an exciting photo of venus from a backyard
pat

[rustigsmed]

Thanks for the heads ups and tips Ivan - I thought about giving it a go last year but never got around to getting the filter - thanks for inspiring me to have a crack :thumbsup: i'll get off my butt and order it.

Cheers,

Rusty

ps - yup i have full spectrum conversion on the canon :thumbsup: