It’s about a total 3 hr exposure with a 11in CPC1100, using a canon 60d (iso 2500). 30s exposures, throwing away bad exposures (about 60 %) to yield this using deepskystacker (using about 50 dark frames). The arrow indicates the supernova.
Supernova in M101, August 25th 2011, about a 3 hr exposure with an 11in scope and 2500 iso on a canon D60.
Clearly an improvement of the first attempt which only included about 12 minutes of ‘sky time.’
Right, now back off to the pass to do the same thing again tonight! Me= CRAZY! :-p
-All images available under creative commons license, attribution Thunderf00t 🙂
So after much driving around looking for a good observing sight I eventually found one north of Klamath Falls Oregon (good clear view north).
(‘Klamath Falls’ astronomy site, 25th August 2011)
I then brave the moquitoes, and yeah, there were a LOT of them, to get the scope set up.
The scope acquired data for several hours, this is thus far only processed from 6 minutes worth. I’ve also not got round to sorting the colors out which is why the new exposure appear blue compared to the old one.
Uranus is frequently overlooked and for many reasons. Firstly, lets just say its name hasn’t phonetically aged well. Secondly it’s small and faint, barely visible to the naked eye, and even the most powerful telescopes show little more than a tiny featureless grey-green disk.
Most powerful telescopes will show the five main moons of Uranus, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. The innermost of these Miranda, has, if memory serves the highest cliffs in the solar system (due to being previously (presumably) smashed by an impact) and has an orbital period of about 1.5 days. That means you should be able to easily see its movement over the period of a night.
Now I had tried this previously, and had been surprised that the planets movement was comparable to the movement of its moons, but that night had been scuppered by a flat battery.
The stars in the background are fixed. The two picture of Uranus are taken a few hours apart, and while the moons (relatively close to the planet) don't move much, the planet conspicuously moves against the background stars!) (click to enlarge)
So it was that I set out with my scope on the evening of 22nd Aug 2011 to see what could be captured. I decided to head up to an observatory site that had previously seemed good up near the top of the somewhat active volcano, Lassen Peak. The site is high, almost 2 miles up, but the seeing was less than perfect (a very constant ~ 5mile an hour wind, which was probably a blessing in that it bought warmer air from somewhere, but was also a curse due to the wind chill- I was surrounded by snow fields!).
Nonetheless, at prime focus of the 11in CPC1100 with ~1000 iso and 4 second exposure on a canon 60D seemed to bring out easily at least 4 of the moons of Uranus.
After that, I just had to maintain the kit for 8 or so hour. A pain in the ass, as there were several pieces of kit that all need to work or the night would be ‘lost’. So you basically have to periodically check all the batteries on the various time lapse and tracking kit are working functionally. The bottom line is you can actually get quite a lot of sleep, but its horribly disjointed. The practical upshot of which was the next day I was wiped out to the point where I had actually planned to head up into Oregon to do something, but for the first time ever on a road trip I did something I’d never countenanced before. I stayed a night in a motel!! First time in 5 years! A motel 6 I should add! All I wanted was somewhere where I could get a shower, a bed for the night, and damn, just sit back for a moment, put my feet up, and have a glass of wine……ahhhhhh.
I was REALLY happy when I processed this, not really for what I had hoped to achieve, which was to get the motion of the moons, as while it was visible, it wasn’t that great. But what was great was the motion of the whole Uranus system against the background stars. I knew this MIGHT be visible, but I really didn’t expect it to looks as cool as it did! Now it should be said that most of the motion you see here is probably not due to the motion of Uranus, but due to the motion of the Earth. Nonetheless, its still really cool!
1) The scarlet A, coined by RDF and used in the ‘out campaign’.
2) ‘Awesome’ is a great, ‘young’ word to have associated with atheism!
3) The message is subtle to the point where you could put it on a bumper sticker, get wide-spread visibility from other atheists, but get relatively little stick from the unhealthily religious crowd (it’s unlikely many of them would recognize the scarlet A in such a subtle role).
4) Its shameless America. Time to show that atheism is American. Never again should a President issue the words that ‘Atheists shouldn’t be considered as Americans’. Atheism is as American as Awesomeness! 🙂
However, I’m a noob when it comes to this sort of thing (graphic design), I’m sure there are people out there who can do MUCH better.
If you think you have what it takes to create a WINNING logo for a campaign like this, please submit it below (with some form of contact details), and I’ll see what I can do about convincing as many of the US rationalist organisation to use it as I can!
Thunderf00t 