My best Uranus - 15/09/2006

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all

Here's Uranus, captured on Friday night 15th September, with my 10" dob on EQ platform, DMK21AF04 with both 3x barlow and 5x powermate.

Like Neptune, I really could've done with some longer exposures but my tracking couldn't support it. Even with 1/2s exposures, I got a little trailing/elongated shape on some frames where the tracking jumped around.

There's some resampled images in here as well, which held up quite well thanks to the planet being devoid of detail

180-200 frames were stacked in each channel. The last 2 images were also combined with a luminance layer. Each channel was captured for 1 minute.

I'm very happy with these, they're my best images of Uranus so far. I doubt I can do much better than this without more focal length, more accurate tracking and a longer exposure.

Thanks for looking.

[John K]

Great images Mike. You should perhaps consider submitting these to the ALPO Japan website where there are some interesting observations being submited at the moment examining potential polar brightening on Uranus.

http://www.kk-system.co.jp/Alpo/Latest/Uranus.htm

[EzyStyles (Eric)]

im not really a planet person but those pics ...

great work!

[Dennis]

Gee Mike, those are excellent images. Thanks for the useful capture details too - all grist to the mill for convincing me to get a DMK! Hopefully soon.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys..

And Dennis, for more reasons, these were captured at 100% gain.. The background is BLACK!!!!! I didn't even need to clip the blackpoint to get a black background.

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Very impressive work Mike.

[davidpretorius]

mike, these are simply fantastic!