Mars/Saturn last night/this morning

[iceman (Mike)]

Well it was 40°C during the day yesterday.. it was hot, damn hot! And I was out on Sydney Harbour for my work xmas party! Ouch!

Last night wasn't much cooler, of course there was no such thing as the scope "cooling down" in that temperature. The skies were clear, I set up and imaged Mars.

Seeing was a little below average. Three images are shown in the attachment below, the left one has had VC deconvolution, the middle has had LR and the right has had ME. I think ME worked best on my poor quality image.

One highlight was while realigning looking through the finderscope using the "two-eyes-open" technique, and zoom there goes a fireball from the Taurus region, heading northwest. Wonder if it was a southern taurid?

Was expecting clear skies this morning for Saturn, but patchy low cloud frustrated my whole morning session. It really was a case of chase the sucker hole. I had to have the gain at 90%+ just to get a 110 white level in k3ccdtools, and that was in a clear patch. I got bits and pieces of avi's (some only 10 seconds long!) which i stitched together in VirtualDub and then gave the usual treatment (including ME deconvolution).

The end result was a very noisy grainy image which took some effort (including a 20% size reduction) to blur back to smooth Bad seeing and bad transparency What is it with Sydney weather lately.

Anyway, the result is attached.

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Thanks Mike - I was out chasing Saturn this morning as well, but the seeing was back to terrible again... I guess I should have known from the jetsteam prediction, but I'm a sucker for punishment :-)

Do you find the jetstream prediction to be accurate/useful? It seems very good to me, but I'm wondering how much I can rely on it.

Bird

[ving (David)]

mars looks great, you can tell its getting smaller tho.

saturn looks washed out again tho... whats with that? the middle of it looks burnt out too. still it looks pretty good tho. you have banding and the rings look good too

[iceman (Mike)]

yeh I wasn't expecting much either, based on what I saw on the jetstream map.. nice bright blue area over sydney. But like you, sucker for punishment. Chasing sucker holes for 45 minutes wasn't much fun.. but during the cloudy times I processed some of the Mars avi's from last night

The jetstream maps seem fairly accurate to me.. but it's not 100%.

That is, if there's no jetstream it doesn't guarantee good seeing.
But if there is a jetstream it almost always means average (or below) seeing.

[davidpretorius]

it is a road that once you are on it, you always want to improve on your last image!!!

I find i get down on myself when the processing is not producing an image, but at the end of the day, there are lots of things out of your control! I always remind myself of this!

they are still great, but not as great as we want them!

[asimov (John)]

Good effort Mike. Mars looks nice, plenty of detail there. Me still being a n00b to the webcam I noticed the other night I had to have the gain way up to get the image of saturn on the lappy to get it looking 'normal'.....I'm thinking the tranparency sucked at the time. Took one test AVI, reviewed it & went back to bed.

[Robert_T]

Hi Mike, the ME version of Mars definitely looks best to me, smoother but without loss of detail. Saturn is pretty much a triumph under those conditions - and I've played the sucker hole game times before with much less a result!


cheers,