Lunar Occultation of Saturn, 2019 August 12

[doppler]

Just a heads up for this event tomorrow evening, it starts early during twilight. Here's the details.
http://www.occultations.org.nz/total/2019/Saturn2019Aug12.htm


Rick

[The_bluester]

I bet it is cloudy tomorrow night, but for me near Melbourne it is a near miss! I might still set up anyway if the sky looks promising.

[Saturnine]

Am looking forward to tomorrows occultation, the weather forecast for here is pretty good, winds abating, calming jetstream and supposedly clear skies for the evening.

[Tinderboxsky]

It is a near miss here in southern Tasmania too, but always an interesting observation. I’ll have the scope out if the heavy cloud clears.

[bigjoe]

Hope this helps some .
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/universal-time.

As you can see if your in Eastern states non DSav now , ADD 10HRS to UTC... the Saturn Occultation will be not long after sunset here in Sydney..
And dont forget the Persieds meteor shower maxing on 14th August.

Bigjoe

[multiweb]

Setting up tonight if it's clear in Sydney west. Trying to a long FL shot of it with the CN-212 and a ZWO-120MM. I did a widefield of the last one in 2014 but want to get up close this time.

https://vimeo.com/102996667

Anyone had advice using sharpcap on this? I'm thinking saving SER 16bit files then make master frames from them then using the resulting frames in a small animation / timelapse.

Or am I better off just shooting a continuous video?
Also when using SER I noticed a 8bit or 16bit option. Defaults to 8bit. Worth going to 16bit? There is a significant difference in luminosity between the moon limb and Saturn so the more dynamic range the better? :question:

[Saturnine]

Will be shooting a continuous video of the disappearance and reappearance , should be about 1 minute each using an ZWO290mc. Then later extract individual frames to maybe make a gif as well as some single frames.
Correct me if my calcs are way off but from 1st contact to disappearance should take about 45 seconds and similar for 3rd contact to full reappearance.

[multiweb]

Oh wow! You're right. :lol: Just checked again. Not much time for single frames.

[Saturnine]

Just did a simulation with Stellarium and the times seem to be twice as long from 1st contact to disappearance and similar for reappearance, about 1'30". Could add up to a few more frames than I first thought but it's not an every day event. Weather is looking favourable with a calm jetstream too.

[multiweb]

I'll miss the first part. My Eastern horizon is hidden by the house. But I'll have plenty of time to see the reappearance. :party: Is it better to use an IR filter?

[Dennis]

Wow Marc – the link to the Vimeo animation blew my mind. That is the BEST Moon/Saturn animation I have ever seen, by far. The detail and clarity of the Moon along with a correctly exposed Saturn was superb. The detailed inset frames for the ingress and egress really put the icing on the cake.:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup: :thumbsup:

I’m not sure than anything can top that, so I may just kick back, relax and observe it with my eyes, if I can find an eyepiece that is.:)

Clear skies and good luck for tonight.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[seriousfun]

Its been raning solidly here since friday so not much chance for me. dissapointed.

[Saturnine]

That's the sky crying for the All Blacks.

[Dennis]

How good was that!:)

I set up the Mewlon 210 with ASI224MC and the Moon/Saturn just cleared the trees and I managed to grab a few AVI's.

Seeing the rings "disappear" as they passed behind the lunar limb, with the very bright illuminated portion of the Moon slowly creeping across the frame, was quite lovely.:)

Now to start the planning for the egress.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[doppler]

All clear here in Mackay for a change. Here's a couple of pics. It was surprising how quick it disappeared, it was only a couple of minutes.
Rick

[multiweb]

Just happened a few minutes ago. Managed to get videos. Waiting after 7:00 now for it to come back. Looked pretty cool.

[multiweb]

Looks great! :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

That's awesome! Looking forward to that. :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Those are great shots Rick, I really like how you have managed to contain the extremes of brightness so well.:thumbsup:

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Hi Marc

Thanks for alerting me to this event (via e-mail), I would have missed it otherwise.:sadeyes:

I captured an AVI of the Moon's limb just after Saturn disappeared, with exposure set for the Moon so I hope I can make a composite later.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Nice! I tweaked the frame rate to get a dim saturn but bright enough and trying not to burn the highlights on the moon. Not sure what will come out of it but I shot plenty so I might get lucky.
Gotta say I was a little disappointed not being able to see the moons. The stellarium animation looked really good. I though yeah that's gonna look awesome. :lol: But reality was hard yakka just to get Saturn and the moon.

[Dennis]

Here is a quick and dirty composite from the back garden.

Not sure if I have processed this correctly as I don't have a good handle on the ASI 224 MC just yet.

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Hah - yes, I gave up on the moons of Saturn as soon as the over-exposed lunar limb hit the edge of the frame.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Geez! :eyepop: That is very neat! :bowdown:

[bigjoe]

GREAT view of the Occultation tonight in my 130mm Triplet Apo..with my Takahashi TOE ORTHO 4mm beating my 3mm Delite for Contrast!
910mm focal length scope..WOW views both sides of the Moon.
Now for a look in the CPC 925!
Bigjoe.

[bigjoe]

Lovely ..saw all the banding in my scopes!
Bigjoe

[Dennis]

Hi Marc

What a shock to see Saturn pop out of the other side - no dark terminator to moderate the brightness difference.

I almost burned out the screen!:)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

I know. Me too. I was waiting for it then looked at the time and thought bloody hell it should be here already. Sure enough by slowing down the frame rate I saw half a smudge. I had to completely burn the moon limb to see Saturn, barely. Big difference from the ingress. Nearly missed it on its way out. I tried to look for Titan prior. Good luck with that. :lol:

[Dennis]

Hi Marc

I have found that when I try to stack the AVIs in AS!3 using COG, the burned out lunar limb causes some aligning and stacking problems, so I switched to Surface and anchored the Green Box on Saturn and that has worked for the 1 AVI I just processed with Saturn close to the burned out limb.

Cheers

Dennis

[doppler]

Used a dslr for the ingress and was able to get a good compromise with exposure of the moon and saturn in a single shot. Switched camera to the zwo120mm for the egress and couldn't get anything till I burned out the moon. Here's the burnt moon and a composite. A hard task but good fun doing something different, no second chances with these events it's all over in a flash.
Rick

[h0ughy]

master class the image difference between both is huge

[mental4astro]

Ah, what the heck...

Phone pointing into a 14mm Vixen SSW in an Intes 715D Mak.

Yeah, as Rick said, had to burn out the Moon in order to pick up Saturn.

Alex.

[Dennis]

Really nice work Rick - you have shown the dynamic range so well with these shots and I love the composition - top stuff.:thumbsup:

A difficult day at the office eh!:)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Here's a quick stack of one of the videos. I reckon I can work with what I've got tonight and get some nice frames. Still transfering from the laptop. So many files...:rolleyes:

[Dennis]

Oh my, Marc, that is just lovely. Congrats on balancing the extremes of light so well. Moon is sharp as.:thumbsup:

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Here is a matching pair from very close to the Ingress and Egress phases.

Both are compositions of dual shots exposed for the Moon and then shots exposed for Saturn. The light bleeding into the frame from the Moon made it quite challenging to get the optimum exposure for Saturn and then blending the 2 together took all the might of Photoshop.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Great phone shots Alexander, they really do show the massive difference in size and brightness of these two objects.:thumbsup:

Cheers

Dennis

[h0ughy]

300 gig of data and i still cant process them properly. this is a composite image of the night - the first of many to process. there are many excellent images taken of this tonight - sadly none were mine.

ed80 with asi174mm . still have heaps to process taken with gstar ex3

[doppler]

Those shots are excellent, love the second one the moon is so crisp.
Rick

[Dennis]

Hi Dave

I'd hate to be your IT Support with that amount of data.;)

That is a stunning wider field view with excellent contrast and detail, well done.:thumbsup:

I'm off to bed now, way too much excitement for one night.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[OneCosmos]

Great shot David. It was beautiful to capture with my organic camera. Unfortunately nobody has found a way to transfer the image to SD card yet! Still the views of Saturn being occulted and even just being so close to the moon provides an amazing realisation of the mechanics of the solar system.

[Saturnine]

Well that was a most interesting occultation, when's the next one. So many excellent images from earlier tonight, well done to everyone that posted them.
After all the planning and anticipation I managed to muck things up. For reasons unknown I stuffed up polar alignment and by the time I managed to get the scope aimed in the right direction, ingress had already started but did manage to get some video.
For reappearance I got the position on the limb wrong and was looking too far north and by the time I realised that I should be seeing Saturn and went hunting along the limb for it, it had already fully reappeared. then getting the adequate exposure of the planet with the bright limb was trickier than anticipated.
But at least I saw most of it on screen and managed some video for processing.

[Dennis]

Okay, after a good night’s sleep I managed to grab some single frame screen grabs and have shown the “Raw” and “Processed” versions for both the ingress and egress phases.

These show quite graphically the difference between "as seen" and "as processed".:)

The Moon’s limb really rushed up to Saturn (I was tracking on Saturn) and sometimes AS!3 would Align on Saturn, producing a stack with multiple offset lunar limb images and an aligned Saturn, and sometimes it would Align on the lunar limb and produce multiple offset Saturn images.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Crème de la crème mate! :eyepop: Sub zero cool. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

Now... me trying to put together my videos. :computer: :bashcomp:

[Retrograde]

Great shots and observation reports everyone! Fabulous to see/hear so many different perspectives on the same event.

I've posted one of my images in the Solar System section.



They are simply awesome Dennis. :eyepop:

[Dennis]

For the egress composition, the lunar disc was completely blown out, 100% white with no alignment features.:(

So, for the composition, I had to match the profile of the lunar limb on the correctly exposed Saturn image with that of the correctly exposed lunar image, by "blinking" the 2 frames and adjusting their overlap.

This morning I had an idea to do the same with a screen capture from The Sky X Pro, just to double check that my positioning was accurate.:question:

Here is the animation of a Sky X Pro screen capture and my composite showing a very good correlation.:)

Pity I did not record any BG stars like The SKy Pro X.;)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Your background bitmap looks better than the skyX :lol: :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

Here's a quick cut of the interesting bits for the ingress over my roof. I thought I'd miss it but it cleared the gutter earlier than expected. It starts a little jittery but settles down when the occultation starts. Captured SER 16bit at around 9fps, playback is 25fps 1080.

https://vimeo.com/353516960

[Multiverse]

Great work there Dennis - your processed egress image has now become my latest desktop background image.

[Dennis]

Excellent work Marc, what magic dust did you sprinkle on your Tak mirror to manage the huge dynamic range difference.:):);)

Your Saturn looked a bit steadier than the live views on my screen in Brisbane; up here is was wobbling like a jelly (my wife's comment :)).

Such an exciting event and your excellent animation brings it to life - well done, a lot of work in preparation and processing.:thumbsup:

It was interesting to see what appears to be a slightly more slanted angle of ingress from your location - I wonder if this is the result of our different imaging locations, sort of a parallax effect.

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

I wish I had some magic dust, I would have used it on the egress. I just tweaked the capture frame rate trying to see Saturn while keeping some details on the limb. If I had to do it again I would under expose Saturn. It's easier to lighten up than deal with burnt data.


And I thought mine was wobbly. :lol: How did you get so much details.


Yeah I wondered about that too. I could correlate Alex's limb details in his wideshot but not yours. Angle was also different. There is 7 degrees difference in latitude.

[Dennis]

Hi Marc

Problem solved; I plugged Brisbane then Sydney into The Sky 6 Pro and it showed the effects of geographical location and local solar time differences. :)

Cheers

Dennis

[multiweb]

Cool. Big difference. Must have taken longer for us too. Shallower angle.

[h0ughy]

another shot processed

[multiweb]

Nice one mate. :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Good capture Dave, I like how this image shows more clearly the dramatic difference in perceived size of Saturn and our Moon.:thumbsup:

Cheers

Dennis

[h0ughy]

There are a lot of people with great captures. The scope and camera make the difference. Lol I mismatched mine completely. Getting a framerate with a nice proportion would have taken planning. Not setup something the afternoon of the event. Your camera looks to be the goods for this. Seeing the other shots on facebook and this site shows some great shots which still begs the question as to what is the best way to grab that scenic view :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Hi Dave

As astronomy is for me at least, a hobby and a (mostly) pleasurable pursuit, in my opinion there is no “perfect” ‘scope/camera – just the one(s) you have, enjoy setting up, recording an event with and then processing the results.:)

I have enjoyed seeing all the posts here, with each one providing a different view on this exciting conjunction. I really appreciate all those different views, as I only had the one based on my particular ‘scope/camera, so would have missed the variety seen here.:thumbsup:

Providence was kind to me for this event; Marc e-mailed me to alert me, I had a couple of hours to plan and set up, the skies were clear, the Moon just cleared the tree line for the ingress phase, I had no equipment failures, etc.:)

It is also good to hear of the difficulties and setbacks from the community, as these are not easy events to record; to read of others experience all adds to the knowledge base for the next event.:thumbsup:

We are not on social media, so I haven’t seen any Facebook results, etc. We enjoy the quiet life.;)

Cheers

Dennis