Moon

The January 31 night Antonio was making some tests with the telescope from La Azotea in the Albaycin. He took some videos of the Moon even when he tought that seeing was not good. To his surprise, after an initial processing he discovered that seeing was not affecting the quality of the takes. In the following we show a photo of the Appeninus mountains and a small panoramic photo which explores in a more ample way the surroundings of this famous mountain range.

Last Friday we made the following mosaic of all the terminator of the Moon. The image is composed of 35 individual images. Each of them has been obtained from a 60 seconds videos (around 350 frames, QHY-5 monochrome camera). Seeing that night was fair to bad and all the recordings where made in an hour timespan.

Last September 5 we took some videos to create a mosaic of the Moon with the QHY-5. The result is quite good even with poor seeing conditions. Our only big problem was to skip a small portion of the moon :-( . The image also have some light artifacts in dark areas because some of the takes were made with too much sunlight.

¡UPDATE!: The Jupiter photo in this page has been awarded with the first prize in the Astrophotography Contest of the XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference. 

Checking Internet one realizes that one of the most common ambitions of any amateur astronomer is to have an observatory. A place where you can easily observe without the hassles of mounting, connecting wires, adjusting your alignment in every observing session. In fact we are pretty sure that the best observatory is not the one with the best sky, less light pollution and best seeing but the one which you can use more often. Professional observatories don't choose their location in places with better sky but in places where the sky is good the maximum number of nights. Nights with good seeing conditions are almost everywhere and the important thing is to be there even if it is not a weekend or holidays.

From the beginning of the “La Azotea” project of making astronomy from a urban environment we have tried different places: Granada, Armilla and currently Churriana de la Vega in an attic oriented to the East. After some observation sessions we have noticed that Vega de Granada (a flat area near Granada, where Churriana is located) even having quite heavy light pollution presents some quite good seeing nights.

¡UPDATE!: The Moon mosaic in this page has been awarded with the first prize in the Astrophotography Contest of the XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference.

After some months without taking out the 25 Obsession Telescope, we go up to the observation place called “Dornajo” in order to take some shot of Jupiter trough the webcam. The operation began at 5 in the afternoon picking up the whole necessary material distributed in several places. 

After several hours, we had the 25 inches telescope mounted above the equatorial platform and polar aligned. It began what seemed a fantastic, windless and clear night. Some time later Javier Algarra arrived and also mounted their impressive Taka. While we spoke about the new astronomical gadget a bank of fog didn't allow us to see anything in the sky. The humidity also at this time overtook the saturation level soaking the whole material. After a half hour, the sky cleared up and we could begin with the planet Jupiter. 

The seeing was not bad but the wind blew in gusts that made very difficult to maintain the planet inside the small ccd of the webcam. Some hours later the moon rose over the horizon and we waited to a better position close to the zenith to tray a mosaic of its surface. In order to get that we used the QHY5 CCD, but once again, the wind hinders us vastly and prevents us taking some quality videos and it didn't give us time to cover the whole surface. In spite of it, a good frame selection, the use of the appropriate software (including our new ManualFrameAlignment) and many processing hours, allowed us to obtain these results:

Remark: Even though we could have incremented the contrast in the Jupiter image, we have tried to obtain a result as close as what we really saw that night through the telescope's eyepiece.

ManualFrameAlignment is a small utility that allows and initial manual alignment (but not very precise one) of the frames of a video. This manual alignment helps other programas like Registax to be able to obtain a much better frame alignment, avoiding in many cases the typical artifacts in very bad aligned videos.

The program is specially prepared to process Moon videos in which weather conditions (wind, bad seeing) makes the frames to be greatly moved one from another, thus not allowing precise automatic aligment. ManualFrameAlignment does not pretend to e a big application but just fulfill its original goal.

Its inner working its quite simple. The frames to be aligned must be in a certain directory (PNG, TIF and JPG formats are allowed) and an output directory must be specified. Then the program present a window in which the user has to select a feature (a creater, for example)from the first frame. Then the program starts showing each one of the frames of the video and the user must follow the feature in each of the frames moving the mouse. Once all the frames have been presented the application will align all the frames according to the movements of the mouse that the user has made.

Some additional of Jupiter and Moon takes from last Sunday. Seeing was much better than in previous attempts and we tried to use two barlow lenses (3x and 2x) together. Click them to watch them at full resolution:

After several bad weather days, and what it is much worse, loads and loads of work (congresses, end of the academic year...) the Friday evening look promising to go out and enjoy the sky. Both Antonio and myself wanted to go for a visual observation session in Sierra Nevada for a long time. La Azotea is a great place to learn astrophotography, but for visual observations it has lots of drawbacks.

The evening was quite complicated because I had to go to Cullar Vega to finish the preparations for the photography exposition Cosmos: Vistas desde la Nave Tierra of the S.A.G.. It took more time that we initially planned and we finished it  at 8PM. After that I went to Armilla where we loaded Antonio's Pequeñín in the van. Around 10PM we went to Granada to pick up more gadgets, supplies and, of course, some additional winter clothes. Finally, we began our trip to Sierra Nevada around 11PM.

The night of Saturday March 14th, was again very good for astronomy. After the set up of all the devices, and done a precise alignment to the Polar star, the main goal for this night was the Orion nebula through the refrigerated QHY6 CCD, besides other type of objects as galaxies. The humidity oscillated in the whole night around 50 - 60% and the temperature was about 10 grades which was very bearable.

On Friday, after a spectacular SAG (Sociedad Astronómica Granadina) meeting, we continued to cut our suitcases foam to store the last equipment that we have acquired. The technique to cut the foam is quite easy to implement and the results are also quite good. It is done by using a hot wire that cuts the foam following a paper pattern. In the photograph you can see an example of the cutting of a 2" prism shape. In the future we will publish a tutorial on how to cut foam.