Astronomy Cafe – August 31st 2020

Posted by as Astro Cafe, Meetings

Video transcript of meeting

Sketch of fading Comet Neowise by Bill Weir

Bill writes: Using Stellarium as a guide, with my 15X70 binoculars it was an easy long star hop from Arcturus to the precise area where I should be able to see the comet. Due to the 1/4 Moon being maybe only 25° away and even though I had the Moon blocked by a tree the comet was invisible through binoculars so on to the f/3.3 508 mm Dobsonian scope. Bill’s persistence allowed him to glimpse and sketch comet C/2020 f3 Neowise.

What’s happening at The RASC?

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Impressive Images of Mars from Edmonton RASCal Abdur Anwar

Abdur Anwar dusted off his old Celestron 8 inch Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope and put it to good use using a lucky imaging technique to capture some amazing images of Mars. On August 25th Abdur experimented with the program WinJupos which can remove the blurring effect caused by rotation. Check out the before and after images below.

Mars on August 25th Image uncorrected for rotation
Same image as above with “derotation” corrections from WinJupos applied
Abdur’s derotated image of Mars taken on August 28th using Celestron C8 with 2X barlow and an ASI600MM camera with zwo RGB filters and a CG5 mount using 1/60s exposure time and a gain of 175. Images were stacked in Autostakkert, wavelets applied in Registax, and derotated in Winjupos.

Speaking of Mars check out this 4K video

The video in this link displays a collection of high resolution images taken on a number of Martian space missions. It is 12 minutes well spent.

Observing

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