[Theme] Show us your best moon (and solar system) images

[David H. Hartman]

Glad to know that.  Thank you for the follow up. 

FWIW, I enhanced, brightened and 200% enlarged the original raw file.  I don't know what the red dot below left of the Jupiter.  Another planet or satellite?  Or just a heat noise of the sensor?

The red dot looks to me like a classic stuck or hot pixel. I see a number of red dots like the one in this sample in shots from my D300s but Nikon Capture NX-D's Edge and Astro noise reduction will remove them. I believe Lightroom, Photoshop and other software will remove stuck and hot pixels also.

Not even Mars looks this red as I recall.

Dave

[mxbianco]

Full Daylight Moonset

From last summer's pictures, moon setting behind a mountain in full daylight. Highly polarized sky, shooting site was above 2000 metres.

Nikon 1V1 + FT1 + AFS-DX 70-300mm/4.5-6.3 VR @300mm (FOV equivalent to a 810mm lens)

Ciao from Massimo

[Hugh_3170]

This is quite different - I like it!

Full Daylight Moonset

From last summer's pictures, moon setting behind a mountain in full daylight. Highly polarized sky, shooting site was above 2000 metres.

Nikon 1V1 + FT1 + AFS-DX 70-300mm/4.5-6.3 VR @300mm (FOV equivalent to a 810mm lens)

Ciao from Massimo

[mxbianco]

This is quite different - I like it!

Thanks!

[Øivind Tøien]

mxbianco, nice contrast between the rocky surface and the moon, and impressive moon details further up the thread.

Nasos and Akira, well done catching Jupiter moons.

I had a go on Jupiter and Saturn for the first time in mid August from a location at about 60.5°  latitue with 300mm f/4 PF + Stacked TC14E+TC20EIII on Nikon 1 AW1. They were only at 12 and 10°  elevation above horizon, so I did not have much expectations as to the quality. (Here in Fairbanks it is even worse so I will have to wait to next fall for that.) However the mountain air was quite clear, so it was not a complete disaster.

The Red Spot hidden behind left edge and then The Red Spot clearly visible.
#1 & 2
   

First time able to image the rings of Saturn, but too little resolution to distinguish between inner and outer rings.
#3



Animated gif of Jupiter showing red spot moving from behind the left edge.
#4


Jupiter rotates fast, there is only about 20 minutes between the two frames with the red spot visible.
Exposure times were typically 1/60s for Jupiter and 1/8 to 1/15 sec for Saturn, non-tracked. The processing was similar to what I described on page 12, reply ##558 in this thread.

[Nasos Kosmas]

Oivid crazy catch!
Very clear and visible Jupiter stripes with your set up, bravo!

Massimo very nice catch too

[Akira]

Thank you, Øivind.  Your 2268mm equivalent rig is amazing!  Thank you for sharing.

[Øivind Tøien]

Thanks Akira and Nasos. I was surprised I got this much detail out of it considering the amount of atmosphere in the light path (the oval shape is caused by this distortion), but my previous processing of the Mars images taught me to not give up even if raw frames could look really blurry. The images were captured on two different nights as clouds quickly appeared on the first day when the red spot was visible. I captured about 1200 frames total of Jupiter divided up into 4 time slots of about 300 frames each lasting 5-8 minutes. I typically used stacks of 20-30% of the best frames (about 60-100 frames)  for each of those 4 stacks.

The Saturn stack was the 30 % best frames out 692 total frames captured over the two same nights (about 100 additional frames deleted), ignoring effects of the planet's rotation as there are not many non-circular patters to catch on the surface. However I might look into dividing this up into  tighter time slices, as there might be variations in the effective tilt during that period that could affect resolution.

Regarding the Red Spot of Jupiter, my initial quick processing of lower quality hinted that it was present in those two first stacks, but when I looked up in Stellarium (dialing in time and place, taking care of correct daylight savings settings), it indicated that the Red Spot was not going to be visible and only present at the very left rim of Jupiter (about 1hour time offset). I checked and rechecked, but came to the same result every time. But as processing progressed I became more and more convinced that I had captured the red spot, so this was driving me a bit crazy. Then finally before hitting the bunks, I got the idea to do a quick search to see if anyone else had similar problems, and yes, there had been a bug in Stellarium and my version was one year out of date. I upgraded to the latest 2021 version and immediately confirmed the Red Spot to be at the exact location I had captured it in. I went to sleep with great satisfaction.

Others be warned to make sure Stellarium is up to date.

[Bruno Schroder]

Great capture, Øivind. I'm amazed at what you get with this set up. Thanks for explaining your process.

[Øivind Tøien]

Thanks for the kind words, Bruno.

If anyone want to see how close Jupiter and Saturn was to the horizon, I posted some overviews in the night sky thread captured with the 10.5mm fisheye on D500:
https://nikongear.net/revival/index.php?topic=1992.msg177426#msg177426 

[HCS]

Oohhh ... well ... i cannot hold a candle to the great work presented here. Massimo, wow!

Anyway, i found one in the archives that could fit here.

[Akira]

Today (Nov. 19, 2021), the almost-total-eclipse of the moon was observed from Japan.  Unfortunately, it had started to become cloudy before the moonrise here in Tokyo, but I managed to capture some cityscape images with the half-eclipsed moon.

[Akira]

...and I managed to capture the almost-total eclipse.

[armando_m]

Thanks Akira and Nasos. I was surprised I got this much detail out of it considering the amount of atmosphere in the light path (the oval shape is caused by this distortion), but my previous processing of the Mars images taught me to not give up even if raw frames could look really blurry. The images were captured on two different nights as clouds quickly appeared on the first day when the red spot was visible. I captured about 1200 frames total of Jupiter divided up into 4 time slots of about 300 frames each lasting 5-8 minutes. I typically used stacks of 20-30% of the best frames (about 60-100 frames)  for each of those 4 stacks.

The Saturn stack was the 30 % best frames out 692 total frames captured over the two same nights (about 100 additional frames deleted), ignoring effects of the planet's rotation as there are not many non-circular patters to catch on the surface. However I might look into dividing this up into  tighter time slices, as there might be variations in the effective tilt during that period that could affect resolution.

Regarding the Red Spot of Jupiter, my initial quick processing of lower quality hinted that it was present in those two first stacks, but when I looked up in Stellarium (dialing in time and place, taking care of correct daylight savings settings), it indicated that the Red Spot was not going to be visible and only present at the very left rim of Jupiter (about 1hour time offset). I checked and rechecked, but came to the same result every time. But as processing progressed I became more and more convinced that I had captured the red spot, so this was driving me a bit crazy. Then finally before hitting the bunks, I got the idea to do a quick search to see if anyone else had similar problems, and yes, there had been a bug in Stellarium and my version was one year out of date. I upgraded to the latest 2021 version and immediately confirmed the Red Spot to be at the exact location I had captured it in. I went to sleep with great satisfaction.

Others be warned to make sure Stellarium is up to date.

Wow, Impressive results !!

[armando_m]

...and I managed to capture the almost-total eclipse.

Very nice Akira, what time was it in japan ? over here it hapened at about 3AM and I did not get up