Neptune's Travels

[middy]

Paul [1ponders] beat me to it by a couple of days.

Here is my effort at animating Neptune as it crosses the sky. This is a sequence of 3 images taken roughly a week apart (20/7/06, 26/7/06, 3/8/06).

Each image is a stack of 6 images using Registax (64 sec, ISO400, f5.6). Fancy overlays and boxes added with Photoshop and Paint. ADGif used to create the animated gif.

[Ignore this paragraph now] Unfortunately to keep it under the 150k size limit I had to shrink it down a lot and convert it to greyscale. It just doesn't look quite as nice as the original which was 800x600 and colour.

[Update: Worked out how to keep the image size large now. Image swapped for the full size colour version ]

[Dennis]

Hi Andrew

Great job! First of all, in finding the planet and then capturing the set of 3 images which show the orbital movement very well. Was this done with the dob and the camera afocally?

Maybe the additional magnified layer and graphics you have put into your image has blown out the file size?

Cheers

Dennis

[middy]

Thanks Dennis. There was no telescope involved. The images are a crop from widefields taken with the camera mounted on the StarTracker.

[jakob]

That's fantastic! What is the 'star' that pops up in only one frame? Excuse my ignorance.

[Dennis]

Wow - the new image is a fantastic improvement and really brings the dynamics of our Solar System to life.

Cheers

Dennis

[middy]

Thanks jakob. You're not ignorant, I didn't know what it was myself at first. I asked about it a couple of weeks ago in here (See thread "Mystery Object" in this forum).

It only appeared in 1 of the 6 frames used to make that image. The consensus was that it was a cosmic ray hitting the sensor in the camera or a micro meteorite that was travelling straight towards the camera.

I should have edited it out of the first frame as it detracts from the show. Maybe one day I'll fix it up.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Great work Andrew. Did you crop a copy of each image, enlarged it and then layered it back onto the orginal, to work the inset?

[middy]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Great work Andrew. Did you crop a copy of each image, enlarged it and then layered it back onto the orginal, to work the inset?

Affirmative. It was a lot of fiddling and messing around.