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
Last edited by lepton3; 15-09-2013 at 06:38 PM.
Reason: Added winjupos comparison
Thanks for the comments Eric, Laurie, Ray, Ralph, and Kevin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cometcatcher
Crikey, features on Mercury through amateur equipment. Never thought I'd see the day.
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!
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.
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/photogr...42-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?
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/photogr...42-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
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.
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
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 i'll get off my butt and order it.
Cheers,
Rusty
ps - yup i have full spectrum conversion on the canon
