Moon

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.

After waiting for may days for the good weather to come back to make some observation sessions, and what it is more important, begin taking astrophotographies, the evening  of February 14 looked quite promising. We thought that it would be a nice day to make our observing session in the Carretera de la Cabra, but last minute clouds made us change our opinion, so we decided to go to the Dornajo terrace in Sierra Nevada.

Once the van was fully loaded, we took the Sierra Nevada road and in the Centro de Interpretación exit we took the secondary road that goes near the terrace. Big error. The forbidden traffic signal, that we interpreted as "it is not recommended to use this road", was really more important than we initially thought. Half a kilometer up the road, the black asphalt turned into a quite good ice skating rink. The van could not go over the ice for more than five meters when it began to turn, getting crossed in the middle of the road and slipping back. At that point Antonio turned his head to say something to Zerjillo (the co-pilot) when he notices that he is already outside the van watching the show.