Lonely Pluto

[kinetic]

An animation of lonely dwarf planet Pluto made with
frames taken two nights apart on Apr 15th and 17th
I also have another object moving in the frames
towards top centre shown with a short line.

I plan to add a few more nights to this animation and so
will also see this mysterious object move some more
I hope.

It's a pity I took so long to re-centre the scope on
the Pluto field tonight because Adelaide experienced a mag 3.8
earthquake! (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=59900) I felt it in the dome.
If I had been capturing these subs at the time
it would have made an interesting shaky series and
documented the time very well. My dome capture PC
clock is accurate to about a second to UT.

Steve

[duncan]

Hi Steve,
Great work mate. Don't know what the other object is.
The two stars on the upper left of image might hold a third just above them as well. Can't be sure it might just be my eyes. Were these to exposures the same and processed the same? It doesn't look like it which might account for what i think i can see.
Cheers,
Duncan:thumbsup:

[kinetic]

Thanks Duncan.
Both results were 1sec exposures in a stack of about 60frames.
Processed as close as possible to match each night.
However, Apr 15th was shocking seeing combined with
quite low altitude. Apr 17 was this morning just after midnight.
Seeing very good.

Steve

[duncan]

Steve i'll be waiting and watching for more results from this.
For some reason i find this both very interesting and exciting.
Perhaps this is something i will get into once set up permanently.
Cheers,
Duncan:thumbsup:

[mithrandir]

There are a few asteroids including 1011 and 1689 CdC places around your FOV Steve. Can you identify the star close to the unknown?

Not trying hard. :) Get a Garmin GPS 18LVC (the bare wire version), NTP software, a USB cable, a DE9 plug (usually but incorrectly called DB9), and with a bit of soldering you can be within microseconds. I haven't got round to wiring mine yet. I settle for milliseconds.

[kinetic]

Thanks Andrew,

I think it must be a false movement artifact from the poor
first shot because this frame from Aladin Skyserver
shows a close visual double right where the object is.

Attached below: Apr 17 shot on left, Aladin field on right.

Steve

[FranckiM06]

Hi Steve,
It is great shot that you got ! If I would take Pluto with my TSA 120, which kind of camera I should use ? Do you thing I can captured it with my CCD 314L+ or my DMK 21 ? Also, what's about the exposure should I do ?
Thank you for yours advices and your help.
Franck

[Kevnool]

Thats great work there Steve.
Cheers Kev.

[mithrandir]

If I've got the field rotation right, CdC suggests the double is actually tripple:
18h21m58.21s -18°08'42.2" * 3UC 144-319879
18h21m58.56s -18°08'37.3" * 3UC 144-319891
18h21m59.15s -18°08'29.2" * 3UC 144-319902

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Steve
Great job - it is fantastic to see the little planet moving across the frame.
I think you are right about the second object just being created by the difference in image quality. Thanks for posting and I hope to see more!

[kinetic]

Thank you gents,

Andrew, which catalogued do you have plugged in to
Cartes? UCAC3? I'm only using Tych 2 and basic planets/asteroids.
Mag 12 at most.

Franck,
I think the 314 with the refractor should get something with
a time exposure of anything over a second or two, surely.

These are just one second, but of course, only a point source , so
limited by seeing, focus, tracking, the usual culprits.
My scope (12" Newt) easily gets Pluto....my 8" was only a limiting
mag of 13.5 with good , clean optics. A struggle visually for
Pluto.
In the 12" , Pluto is easily visible. The view looks like Frame 2 of
my movie with your eyes squinted until Pluto is the faintest object
in your view.

Steve

[Quark]

Top Stuff Steve,

Steve, I reckon you have at least another 2 Solar System bodies in this image and based on their rate of movement, they must be at significantly greater distance than Pluto.

If you align a ruler along the bottom of your image, there is a bright object about 4 cm from the left edge that clearly moves relative to the scale of the ruler.

If you measure down 65 mm from the top and in 13 mm from the right hand edge there are 2 points of light very close together, one above the other, again, if you place a ruler over the image the lower point of light clearly moves.

I found that using a clear plastic ruler with black mm increments helped.

Regards
Trevor

[kinetic]

Thanks Trevor,

gotchya, yes I do see them both...hmm, and they all move
differently to the optical double artifact pointed out earlier in
the thread....interesting :)

Steve

[mithrandir]

I have several extra catalogs including UCAC3 which those designations come from. It's "only" about 2.2GB to download. http://sourceforge.net/projects/skychart/files/2-catalogs/Stars/UCAC3/

I also have copies of:
BSC5 832KB
GSC-1.1 642MB
GSC-1.2 316MB
IC 7MB
MPC 104MB
YaleBSC 3MB
hipparcos 15MB
tycho 104MB
tycho2 1GB

I'm part way through generating prj files for the catalogs at http://www.stargazing.net/ASTROPC/external.html

[kinetic]

Andrew ,

how well / slow does CDC perform with the UCAC3 catalogue?

Steve

[mithrandir]

Steve,



It all depends on how silly you are with the settings. I only have UCAC3 enabled for FOV 0-2 (up to 2 deg) If you enable it for 3 (5 deg) there is a sharp slowdown. For 4 (10 deg) you could almost go make coffee.

Rather than accept the wait, I use Tycho2 for 3-4 and BSC5 for 5-10. I could use GSC-1.2 instead of Tycho2 but probably only for 3.

I'll screenshot the Catalog config pages. The FOV is along the bottom of the images. I have most of the catalogs, the biggest missing bit being DeepSky photos. These are from my Q6600 4GB ATI XT2950HD Linux box. The Windows laptop has the same catalogs.

What I don't understand is why the Linux version won't put asteroids on screen. The Windows one does.

Andrew

[kinetic]

Brilliant Andrew,
thanks for the heads up.
I honestly did not know you could use cross-catalogue choices:doh:
for different FOVs.....!

Steve

[mithrandir]

Lots of stars have entries in multiple catalogs. I noticed if I had both the Tycho2 and UCAC3 active for a FOV it would only put the Tycho labels on screen. Similarly if I had GSC-1.2 and UCAC3 it would only display the GSC labels. I suspect if all three were active you'd get the Tycho labels.

If you brought up the object list it would have them all, sorted by catalog, not RA+Dec.

Andrew

[kinetic]

Finally I had a chance to get another result!
Cloud ,thunderstorms...you name it...
4 days later.....
Tonight I also had exceptional seeing.
I wish all frames could be this good!:rolleyes:
This is a 5 sec set this time.
I took a 1 sec set and added it to the 2 frame animation
but I can't get it below 200k to upload now.
Until I work that out, without degrading it too much here
is the 5sec stack result.

Steve

[kinetic]

What else is there to do when it's raining.
Here is a comparison of part of my 21Apr frame
to the Aladin Sky server plate for the same region.
The only info I can find about the scope used to
capture the SERC plate is that it was possibly a 1m
Schmidt telescope at the ESO in Chile?:shrug:

Another object that my 5 sec set has captured is
the darker dust lane seen in the SERC frame bottom right.

It was certainly a good night of seeing. I hope some other
DS stuff comes in from the Adelaide people.
At 23:55 Pluto was only 25 degrees altitude according to
Cartes Du Ciel. It was only just clear of my neighbours fence
from the dome.

Steve

[stattonb]

great work mate its a shame how much Pluto is overlook in astrophotography.