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ZWO ASI290MM/EFW 8 x 1.25 (RGB)
Meade LX850 (12" f/8)/2.5x PowerMate
Losmandy G11
Five 60s RGB runs captured in Firecapture.
Preprocessing in PIPP
Best 50% of frames stacked in Autostakkert.
Wavelet sharpened in Registax
Frame and R/G/B derotation in WINJUPOS.
Finished in Photoshop.
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51.542 Long -3.593
Image captured using a Skywatcher 254mm Newtonian, Tal 3x Barlow Lens & ZWO ASI 120MC Astronomical Imaging Camera.
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.
Astronomical seeing was pretty decent when I captured the Jupiter data for the image immediately proceeding this one. My optics were starting to dew over, to I replaced the front cover, waited for an hour and found that the dew heater had completely dried the front glass on my SCT. I slewed to Mars and found that astronomical seeing had dramatically worsened. Being at the telescope and ready for another capture, I did 10 iRGB runs of 45s per filter at gain 400. In processing I found the B channel completely unuseable and the G channel not much better. I tried combining the colors anyway, and the image barely looked like Mars. The R channel, captured in IR, looked pretty decent, so I salvaged what I could.
ZWO ASI290MM/EFW 8 x 1.25"
TeleVue NP101is/2.5x PowerMate
Losmandy G11
About 20,000 frames per filter x 10 RGB runs captured with FireCapture
Best 60% stacked in Autostakkert
Wavelet sharpened in Registax
Finished in Photoshop
Probably my last view of comet C/2021A1 (Leonard). Schlepped out to Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife area in Greene County, Ind., a dark site with low horizons on a cold but crystal evening. The comet was very low by the time it got dark enough to emerge from the twilight so it appears redder than when higher in the sky. But I got enough exposures, to show some detail in the tail and coma. This is a composite, processed twice: registered on the comet and separately registered on the stars, combined in Photoshop.
30 15 sec. exposures, Explore Scientific 102mm f/7 refractor, ZWO ASI294MC camera, UV/IR cut filter, iOptron CEM25P mount, ASIAir Pro controller, processed in Astro Pixel Processor, Lightroom and Photoshop.
#cometleonard, #astrophotography
ZWO ASI290MM/EFW 8 x 1.25" (IR: 1 x 90s)
Meade LX850 (12" f/8)/TeleVue 2.5x PowerMate
Losmandy G11
One 90s IR run (1.1ms, gain 400, histogram 74%, 502 fps, 45,244 frames) captured in Firecapture.
Best 60% of frames stacked in Autostakkert
Wavelet sharpened in Registax
Finished in Photoshop
#TeleVue #PowerMate
#Meade
#Losmandy
#ZWO
#Mars
#Syrtis Major
#Planet
#Solar System
#Hellas
#Lucky Imaging
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51.542 Long -3.593
Skywatcher 254mm Newtonian Reflector, Tal 3x Barlow Lens, ZWO ASI 120MC Astronomical Imaging Camera.
Captured using Firecapture
FPS (avg.)=17
Shutter=57.95ms
Gain=68 (68%)
Brightness=7
Apparent diameter at time of capture 3·73"
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.
Seeing Conditions: Reasonably good.
Out of 7000 frames captured, 1900 used for processing. Final image enlarged by 175%
Waxing Gibbous Moon at 61.9%. 300 frames capturing using a QHY163 mono camera attached to an Altair Wave 115ED scope. Captured using SharpCap Pro and edited using Autostakkert2 and Registax6.
His birthday party theme was our solar system.
Cake decorations included the sun, jupiter, saturn, mars, and earth.
Sydney, Australia (Sunday 23 Sep 2018)
Sunlight filtering through the branches and leaves of a tree form eclipse images on the wall. No camera? No problem.
Mars through a small refractor with 360mm focal length and 2x Barlow.
William Optics Zenithstar61
Skywatcher AZ-GTI mount
ZWO ASI224MC- camera
(30sec avi-file in Raw8-format, gain200, 3847 frames)
...best 10% stacked in AS!3
Something Violently Shook the Surface of Mars. It Came From Space.
Scientists thought the InSight spacecraft had recorded some major marsquakes, but with another NASA mission’s help, they found what had really shaken up the red planet.
Cinemagraph
An animation using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter depicting a flyover of an impact crater on Mars that was made on Dec. 24, 2021 by a meteoroid impact. White flecks of water ice surround the crater. Animation by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
Kenneth Chang
By Kenneth Chang
Oct. 27, 2022
On Christmas Eve last year, Mars shook.
The exquisitely sensitive seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander dutifully recorded the burst of seismic vibrations and then dispatched the data, a gift of science, to Earth the next day.
The InSight scientists were busy celebrating the holidays. When they studied the tremor in detail in early January, it looked different from the more than 1,000 marsquakes that the stationary spacecraft had recorded during its mission to study the insides of the red planet.
“It was clearly a seismic event, and it was a big seismic event,” said Mark Panning, the project scientist for the InSight mission. “And we were excited about it right away.”
In scientific papers published Thursday, scientists using data from two NASA spacecraft reveal that the seismic event was not the cracking of rocks from the internal stresses of the red planet. Instead, it was shock waves emanating from a space rock hitting Mars. The discovery will help scientists better understand what is inside Mars and serves as a reminder that just like Earth, Mars gets whacked by meteors too.
Mars lacks plate tectonics, the sliding of pieces of the crust that shapes the surface of Earth. But marsquakes occur nonetheless, driven by other tectonic stresses like the shrinking and cracking of the red planet’s crust as it cools. The largest marsquakes are modest by Earth standards.
The December shaking registered as among the most powerful that had been recorded, at a magnitude of 4. But it did not occur in the tectonically active region where most of the bigger quakes have been observed.
Most crucially, the Christmas Eve seismic event was the first time that surface waves — vibrations traveling along the outer crust of rocks at the surface of Mars — had been detected. For all of the other marsquakes, InSight’s seismometer had only observed what are known as body waves, vibrations traveling through the planet’s interior.
That the epicenter was not close — more than 2,000 miles from InSight — added to the mystery. That suggested a quake that was not only large but shallow.
“It was difficult to determine why we had surface waves,” said Philippe Lognonné, a professor at the University of Paris who serves as the principal investigator for the seismometer.
This remained a mystery until two months later when scientists on a different NASA spacecraft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — discovered that this seismic event was not a marsquake after all.
It was instead the thunk of a space rock hitting Mars.
It was not a tiny space rock either, estimated at somewhere between 15 and 40 feet in diameter, said Liliya Posiolova, the orbital science operations lead at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which built and operates two of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cameras.
The impact released the energy equivalent to somewhere between 2.5 and 10 kilotons of TNT, Dr. Posiolova said. (The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II was the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT.) It left a crater wider than a football field.
During a NASA news conference on Thursday, Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who leads InSight’s impact science working group, said a meteor this big enters Earth’s atmosphere about once a year.
“We see those pretty regularly,” Dr. Daubar said. “But because Earth has a thicker atmosphere, asteroids of this size burn up and are generally pretty harmless.”
Scientists including Dr. Panning, Dr. Lognonné, Dr. Posiolova and Dr. Daubar reported the findings in two articles published on Thursday in the journal Science.
When InSight — a shortening of Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — landed in November 2018, scientists expected to observe not only marsquakes but also a few meteor impacts a year. Instead, for more than three years, they saw no meteor strikes at all in the seismic data.
That indicated a shortcoming in their knowledge of the Martian crust and in the computer models simulating expected seismic signals.
Last month, scientists reported identifying four small meteor strikes within a couple hundred miles of InSight based on chirps of sound as rocks entered the Martian atmosphere.
Now, they also know of larger meteor strikes farther away.
In early February, Dr. Posiolova and other scientists were working to take a three-dimensional, stereo image of a part of Mars. They already had one image of the region from a few years ago, and now they were taking a second image from a slightly different angle.
But the second image included a big blotch, a blast zone of disturbed dust radiating outward more than 10 miles that had not been in the first image.
It was so big that it was visible in daily global weather images taken by another camera on the orbiter. “Then we pretty much start marching back from that February image,” said Dr. Posiolova, the lead author of one of the Science papers.
The blotch was present on Dec. 25. But not on Dec. 24.
She said she remembered in the back of her mind that InSight had recorded one of its bigger seismic events on Christmas Eve. “It was like, ‘Could this be it?’” she said.
It was.
Higher-resolution images showed that the meteor carved a crater about 500 feet wide at the center of the blast zone and even kicked up water ice from below the surface. That is the closest to the Martian equator that ice has ever been spotted.
Now that they had definitively identified the seismic signals from a meteor impact, the InSight scientists went back through their data to see if any earlier marsquakes were actually meteor impacts.
Indeed, the shaking of a magnitude-4.2 seismic event three months earlier, on Sept. 18, looked similar. So the orbiter’s cameras looked around that epicenter, located about 4,600 miles from InSight, and spotted a crater there about 426 feet in diameter.
Dr. Posiolova said these were, by far, the two largest new craters that the orbiter has spotted during its 16 years studying Mars. The two impacts are unlikely to be related, Dr. Panning said; that they occurred only a few months apart was lucky, random chance.
Connecting the seismic signals with freshly carved craters offers a sharper view of the planet’s internal structure. Dr. Lognonné likened it to a movie. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided the images while InSight recordings are the soundtrack.
“You are able to better understand the movie than with just the sound or just the picture,” he said.
Dr. Lognonné said the current models work well for the crust of Mars, but not as well for the deep mantle. “This is unique data to get more information on the interior of Mars,” he said.
One of the possible surprises is that the surface waves appear to be traveling at roughly the same speed through the crust of the northern hemisphere as the southern hemisphere.
The topography of the northern half of Mars — what may have once been covered by an ocean — is much lower than the southern highlands. But the velocity data suggests the crustal rocks in both hemispheres are of similar density. On Earth, the crust beneath of the oceans is denser than the crust of the continents.
“We are beginning to sort of uncover the mystery of this dichotomy,” said Doyeon Kim, a planetary scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the lead author of the Science paper describing the InSight findings.
The Science papers are the latest findings from a busy year for the InSight mission even as the spacecraft is dying because of dust piling up on its solar panels, cutting off its energy supply.
During the NASA news conference, Bruce Banerdt, the InSight mission’s principal investigator, said that the expectation was that the spacecraft would fall silent in the next four to eight weeks. “That’s a sad thing to contemplate,” he said.
A regional dust storm in the southern hemisphere did not directly pass over InSight, but it did kick up more dust into the atmosphere that eventually settled on the solar panels, further reducing the power output, Dr. Banerdt said.
“We had cut off the seismometer for a few weeks,” he said. “We’re now operating the seismometer again, only one day out of four at this point to conserve our power. But even at that relatively small amount of use, the batteries are still slowly being depleted.”
In another paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Thursday, scientists used InSight’s seismic data to study Cerberus Fossae, a highly fractured, 750-mile-long region where most of the seismic rumblings of Mars originate.
Heat from magma from a volcanic region to the west is heating the crust there, said Simon C. Stähler, a seismologist also at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper.
“You are basically causing this weakening, this local weakening, which allows quakes to happen,” he said.
The InSight scientists are also studying a magnitude-4.7 marsquake in May, the largest detected during the mission. That one appears to be an actual marsquake, because no crater has been seen near the epicenter, which lies close to Cerberus Fossae.
Once InSight shuts down, there again will not be any seismometers operating elsewhere in the solar system. But a spare seismometer built for InSight is being modified to be sent to the far side of the moon in a few years, and NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, will also carry a seismometer.
“Planetary seismology is an ongoing field,” Dr. Panning said.
Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. @kchangnyt
تصويري لكوكب #المشتري والقمر #أوروبا
#my_astrophotography
#Jupiter and it's #Europa moon
تم التصوير باستخدام التليسكوب:
Taken by:
Telescope 🔭
Celestron CPC 800
وباستخدام الكاميرا:
And with the camera:
ZWO ASI290MC
2x Barlow Lens
تم التكديس والمعالجة باستخدام:
Stacked using:
Autostakkert
Registax
Photoshop
Enhanced RGB with F635, F546 and F437 filters
Image taken by Hope probe (Emirates Mars mission) : May 13, 2024
Image credit : Emirates Mars mission/EXI/Thomas Thomopoulos
Crescent Moon on February 24th 2023. Today my astronomy club in Maryland - Howard Astronomical League - lost one of its longtime members and former Presidents Bob Prokop. Bob was a great admirer of the Moon and knew it like the back of his hand. In memory of Bob when I got home tonight I took this image of theMoon. Taken with a Meade 12" LX200 scope and Canon T7i camera.
Haha ... I wish !
Of all the places in our solar system , this is the one I am most curious about .
Europa , icy moon of Jupiter ... there is a strong belief that there is an ocean under that ice and therefore the potential for life ( like giant sea cucumbers maybe ... one can dream ... )
There was a show about Europa on TV .
Click !! ... and with the help of NASA and my trusted Moulinex for special effects , voila ! ;-)
Moon taken by a remote telescope.
Process/crop
Capture date : 2025
Shooting parameters : I telescope
Processing: Thomas Thomopoulos
Image credit : I Telescope / Thomas Thomopoulos
First image of Jupiter obtained last evening. Red spot is crossing Jupiter`s disk. Managed to get a few images in a window before the next Atlantic depression made its presence felt. Now blowing a gale!
46P/Wirtanen is a periodic comet, discovered in 1948, by the American astronomer Carl Wirtanen. It is will make its closest approach eight days after this image was taken, on 16th December 2018, as it makes its way out almost as far as Jupiter’s orbit.
I was still suffering from the unreliable alignment of my SkyWatcher EQ6-R mount and had to manually locate the object.
Well…… to be honest, I found it with the guidance of my friend John Rombi, who patiently aimed his laser pointer at the target while I battled with the controls, using my red dot finder from an unnatural position somewhere in the tangle of cables below my ‘scope.
Object Details:
Comet 46P/Wirtanen
Constellation: Eridanus.
Visual magnitude: +4.2, brightening.
Actual diameter of nucleus: 1 km
Actual diameter of coma: tbc
Period, 5.4 years.
Distance: 0.09 AU or 13.7 million km (for a comet, that’s close!)
Altitude: 59°.
Tail: not seen.
Image:
Exposure: total 19 minutes over 25 frames.
Date: 2018-12-08.
Location: The Oaks, NSW.
Sky: semi-dark rural.
Cloud: no.
Moon: no.
Image acquisition software: SharpCap.
Image post-processing: PIPP; Deep Sky Stacker > GIMP.
Cropping: slight.
Gear:
Imaging telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 120ED Super APO triplet refractor.
Focal length: 840 mm, focal ratio: f/7.
Telescope mount: SkyWatcher EQ6-R.
Optical: field flattener yes; filter no.
Imaging camera: ZWO ASI 071 MC Pro.
Polar aligning method: QHYCCD PoleMaster.
Polar alignment error: 1′ 42″ (Synscan).
Guiding: none.
SharpCap Camera Settings:
[ZWO ASI071MC Pro]
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Output Format=PNG files (*.png)
Binning=1
Capture Area=4944×3284
Colour Space=RGB24
Hardware Binning=Off
Turbo USB=80(Auto)
Flip=None
Frame Rate Limit=Maximum
Gain=337
Exposure=45.767742
Timestamp Frames=Off
White Bal (B)=61(Auto)
White Bal (R)=59(Auto)
Brightness=72
Temperature=-12.9
Cooler Power=100
Target Temperature=-15
Cooler=On
Auto Exp Max Gain=300
Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000
Auto Exp Target Brightness=100
Mono Bin=Off
Anti Dew Heater=On
Banding Threshold=35
Banding Suppression=0
Apply Flat=None
Subtract Dark=C:\Users\Roger\Desktop\SharpCap Captures\darks\ZWO ASI071MC Pro\RGB24@4944×3284\13.4s\gain_503\dark_5_frames_-14.1C_2018-12-07T11_17_24.fits
#Black Point
Display Black Point=0
#MidTone Point
Display MidTone Point=0.5
#White Point
Display White Point=1
TimeStamp=2018-12-08T11:47:34.3748894Z
SharpCapVersion=3.2.5871.0
TotalExposure(s)=1144.19355
StackedFrames=25
Observing Notes:
Another test night for the EQ6R, following eleven months of unreliability. It failed to align again, with an errot of over 5° and will be returned to the manufacturer for the third time.
Taken a few weeks after this year's opposition. Very chuffed with this one!
Skywatcher 400P Dobsonian
ZWO ASI178MM
Baader IR-Pass filter + RGB
2x Barlow
Stacked in AutoStakkert!
Processed in Registax
Assembled in Photoshop and Lightroom
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows a region of Mars known as Caralis Chaos, where copious water is thought to have once existed in the form of an ancient lake.
Numerous labels have been placed across the terrain, highlighting features and regions of note. Be sure to click on these labels to explore the landscape in detail!
This image comprises data gathered by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on 1 January 2024 (orbit 25235). It was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the colour channels of the HRSC. North is to the right. The ground resolution is approximately 15 m/pixel and the image is centred at about 38°S/177°E.
[Image description: This tan-coloured slice of ground is smoother to the left and becomes covered in small hills and mounds to the right. Wriggly, uneven ridges cut horizontally across the frame, while two prominent fault lines cut down vertically on the left and right. Large and small craters are peppered across the terrain. The worn-away boundaries of a once-colossal lakebed can be seen curving up and away from the bottom-centre to the top right; this skirts around the largest crater seen here, which sits in the middle of the picture encircled by rough, irregular valleys and channels.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Jupiter and Europa. Taken using a QHY IMG132E, attached to a Altair Wave 115 ED Triplet Refractor with a Tele Vue 2 x Powermate to increase magnification. It is the result of 500 images, stacked using AutoStakkert 2 and processed using RegiStax 6.
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51·542 Long -3·593
Skywatcher 254mm Newtonian, Tal 2x Barlow, ZWO ASI 120MC
Captured in daylight using Firecapture
FPS (avg.)=44
Shutter=0.262ms
Gain=38 (38%)
Apparent diameter at time of capture 27.36"
Phase 43%
Magnitude -4.60
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.
Seeing Conditions: Reasonably good.
Out of 7000 frames captured, about 2000 used for processing. Final image enlarged by 150%
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51.542 Long -3.593
Obtained using a 254mm Skywatcher Newtonian, Tal 2x Barlow Lens & ZWO ASI 120MC Astronomical Imaging Camera.
Captured using Sharpcap.
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.
Clouds part as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft roars into the blue sky after an on-time liftoff at 2 p.m. EST aboard an Atlas V rocket from Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.