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Old 08-08-2007, 11:21 AM
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iceman (Mike)
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Gosford, NSW, Australia
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Thumbs down 3 out of 4 gas giants in one night

On the 7th August, I captured 3 out of the 4 gas giants. Unfortunately I couldn't get Saturn, it's behind the Sun somewhere

I've already posted the Jupiter and Uranus shots, and here's a horrible image of Neptune.

I don't like this image and hope to get a better one soon (Neptune reaches opposition in the next week).

My raw data has some horrible pattern noise in every frame. I'm not sure where it came from - it wasn't there earlier in the night for Jupiter. It affected the raw data terribly.
The conditions were also terrible, with a gusty breeze knocking the scope around and the seeing was only 5/10 at best.

Neptune is really faint - took ages to get it on the CCD and needed a long exposure of 1/2 a second but with the wind and my inaccurate tracking (did not drift align), this poor image is the best I could get.

It's LRGB with a few hundred frames of Luminance @ 1/4s exposures and a handful of frames of colour data @ 1/2s exposures. As you can see the colour data is basically non-existant.

Anyway I'll try for better in a few weeks.
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