Let's find Neptune. - reprocessed

[[1ponders]]

I've been wanting to track down Neptune now for a while and with the seeing being as it is this week I thought I'd try for some semi-widefield through the ED80 and try for an animation.

This gif is from the 30th July and 1st of Aug. I'm hoping to catch 6 or 7 nights and make a longer animation. Frankly I was surprised how far it moved in just two night. Let's hope for clear skies on Thursday and Saturday to catch another two.

BTW if yo look closely you will see that the two frames aren't perfectly aligned and with one frame having stronger curves than the other you can see slight movement and brightening of stars. There is I believe,one Asteroid in there. Can you find it ;)

[ballaratdragons]

Great find and great animation Paul!!!

And here's ya Asteroid Paul!

[avandonk]

Brilliant! I love action movies.

Bert

[iceman]

Nice one Paul! Great to see a Neptune, we don't see much of these littleuns.

Give us the technical data!

[Dennis]

Very nice captures and animation Paul. Well done!

Cheers

Dennis

[Robert_T]

Impressive!!!

:thumbsup:

[[1ponders]]

Thanks guys. Good one Ken, now all we need is a name :P

Ok, details. For both captures.
Canon 300D, 6x120sec @ ISO800. Dark and flat subtracted. Converted, calibrated, individual image alignment and combined in ImagesPlus, curve adjustments, final frame aligning an cropping in PS, animation in Advanced Gif Animator (unregistered) See attached for field of view and placement details

[Lester]

Hi Paul,

Great effort. Tried to identify tha asteriod in The Sky ver6 but it showed asteriods everywhere.

[ving]

nice one paul! :)

how about a close up, cant see any surface detail in that pic :P

[h0ughy]

Who's a clever Boy then Eh? Well done Paul

[Striker]

Nice presentation Paul...well done

[ballaratdragons]

Easy - Ponderosa2006A :thumbsup:

[Lee]

Awesome work Paul..... :thumbsup:

[jjjnettie]

Cool!

[ving]

i noticed a binary down the bottom where it look like the B star (smaller) has moved about 5 degrees... is this an optical illusion?

i think it coule be...:rolleyes:

[[1ponders]]

I'll go back and reprocess both images to get the tonal ranges and levels the same. That will help to identify "strange lights" in the night sky. How about putting a ring around the one you have identified ving?

[ving]

I'll put a ring around you in a minute sir!!! :P

(yeah ok, brb)

[ving]

here ya go...

[[1ponders]]

There is probably a fair bit of misalignment in the two images ving, I'd say that is the case for yours, though I've been looking closely at the images and I can see at leas 6 possibly 10 suspect movements. I've got my fingers crossed for a clear night tonight to get another round of images to stack and then add to these two. Once I have three finalized images I'll process the levels more carefully and accurately align them as closely as I can, then we will have a "possible" asteroid hunt and see how many we can come up with.

[RB]

Hey that's only one third of a telrad vingo!
:confused:

Very nice Paul, amazing amount of movement there for two nights.

:eyepop:

[ving]

i dont use a telrad andrew :P

i suspect you are right paul. and that asteriod looks suspect too... well to me it does.

:)

[mojo]

Have you tried loading both images as layers in photoshop and change the top layer's blending mode to 'Difference'. You might more easily see what has changed in the two images.

[[1ponders]]

Yes Terry, that's how I initially aligned them, it's a great tool for this sort of alignment. But because the centers of both images weren't at exactly the same position in RA and DEC trying to find the center of rotation for alignment was a bit challenging, as it wasn't the center of the images.

I wasn't too concerned about it at the time as these two were just a preliminary animation while I waited to catch a couple more nights. But after seeing how well they turned out I'm tempted to go back to the originals and do a better job of the processing and alignment.

[iceman]

Can't you use registar to compensate for that rotation?

[[1ponders]]

I would Mike, but I don't have it unfortunately. It would be perfect for the job. It's one of these things I'd love to have but keeps getting put back on the shelf when other "must haves" come along :P

I've reprocessed the images in PS to get them closer in appearance, one is still slightly brighter, plus I've realigned them. For some reason this time I couldn't get under the image size restrictions with the original image sizes so this animation is slightly smaller.

I've also had a closer look at those "UMO"s (Unidentified Moving Objects). Sorry to disapoint, but they are hot pixels that didn't get removed during dark subtraction :P :lol:

[middy]

Great effort Paul. Great minds think alike. I just posted my effort that I have been working on for the past 3 weeks (see Neptune's Travels thread).

I don't know how you managed to keep your image so large and still keep it under 150k. I had to shrink it right down and convert it to greyscale. :shrug:
It lost a lot of its appeal after that. :( [Edit - Worked it out now....]