Comet Impact...

[Peter Ward]

OK...this image is around 20 years late.....and only exists, due spouse person's insistence that I have a big time "tidy-up".

Consequence one was I sell (or toss) a lot of cool (albeit ancient) stuff, but, also I found my original 3.5" floppy-disk data from Shoemaker-Levy!

Problem was the ST4-X format it was saved in, proved to be "unreadable" to much of my 2013 software.

Thankfully CCDops said "yep..so what?" (OMG I wish my Solar-Ha data got processed so quickly! )

Hey....while there is only so much you can do with 192 pixels of data eg:

no stacking of thousands of frames.
no in-camera gamma/noise reduction.

Just one shot of raw data.......

So, what do you think?

Please, just don't ask for a re-shoot

The link is here

[h0ughy (David)]

thats pretty cool history Peter - and taken from earth!!!

[gregbradley]

What an amazing event that was. Great shot. Imagine what amateurs could record today if it happened now.

Greg.

[U.K.Cowboy (Stuart)]

Remarkable image! What sort of detail could we capture today....that would be something I'd be out every night cloudy or not lol

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

So glad you dug that one up. Great memories for sure.

[dvj (John)]

Thanks for the memories Peter! I recall the shock I had when I turned my 6-inch f/7 on Jupiter, not expecting to see any impact scars. How surprised we all were at the magnitude of the event.

jg

[multiweb (Marc)]

Awesome! That spring clean-up is sounding more like a trash and treasure.

[DavidU (Dave)]

Very nice image Peter, re shoot for more data !

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

I don't think my floppy's from that era are even readable, even if I could find a drive to put them in. My impact data is on super VHS-C tape with the camera long dead. Formats change over time too. Have to wonder if today's data will be readable in 20 years time.

[SpaceNoob (Chris)]

Such an historic moment, this event is what got me hooked on Astronomy as a kid at ~10 years old! The fact you got to capture this, regardless of the comparison to current day technology is completely awesome.

[Derek Klepp]

Thanks for the history it is amazing how far technology has come.

[Star Catcher (Ted Dobosz)]

Wonderful Peter! Brings back fond memories of getting my first decent scope, an orange tube C8 and seeing these impacts. What a surreal intro. to the hobby

Ted

[Peter Ward]

Thanks guys for your responses.

I suspect this must be up there in the longest ever re-pro

I'm really chuffed that many have got a kick out of seeing this data.

[kinetic (Steve)]

Great stuff Pete!,
is that really a single frame!?
Wow.

I'm going through some old floppies too.
One of my first Mars apparitions in 2001 I must have
saved either subs or stack results on 1.4Mb diskettes.
I found some of these the other day along with some
of my 2000 circa home made weather satellite receiver pics.

The only two working 1.4Mb drives are in the dome!
one is a 1997 vintage Compaq laptop, with its original 1Gb drive still
working. This laptop drives the homemade Stepper drive GEM in DOS.
Still going strong despite a recent keyboard fritz.

Funny how I seem to place more importance in keeping ancient data
like this safe......but have a year or two worth of recent kids photos
on the home PC still not backed up, one HDD failure and it is gone forever!

Steve

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by kinetic

Great stuff Pete!,
is that really a single frame!?

OK. Yes, it's a colour image, I did take one filtered frame of red, geen, blue

[DavidTrap (David)]

Very impressive Peter - 1994 was when I got out of Astronomy after high school.

What optics did you use for this??

DT

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by DavidTrap

What optics did you use for this??

DT

It was a Celestron 11 OTA on a Losmandy GM-100.

[Paul Haese]

I remember seeing this happen through an 8 inch Newtonian I had at the time. I was amazed that I could see dark spots like that on Jupiter. Jupiter was high in the sky for us too. Southern apparition. Not a bad shot for a single frame. Lucky imaging now would have an image about 4 times bigger and with incredible detail that would rival images taken by Hubble at the time. It will be another year before Jupiter will be worth imaging from my location. It seems like forever since I imaged it myself.

[renormalised (Carl)]

Nice piccie there, Peter

Yep, remember watching the impacts through a 14.5" dob. Pretty impressive.

[noeyedeer (Matt)]

nice capture! just as good as some pictures I've seen in books. I'm glad your missus made you clean up and hope you find some more memorable items in the stash :p

matt