Primera luz del nuevo Telescopio del Club.

Y por fin hicimos primera luz del nuevo Telescopio del Club, un Celestron 9,25 pulgadas EdgeHD CGEM. Una maravilla!

El tiempo era muy malo y amenazaba lluvia, así que sacamos el Telescopio sólo unos metros fuera del edificio B de ESAC.

Tuvimos algunas dudas !!!

A pesar de las gruesas nubes, la vista de Júpiter fue espectacular y al menos compensó no poder observar más cosas.

Estas fotos hay que agradecérselas a Carlos Anaya, miembro del Club, que tambien estuvo presente.

2009-03-17: ISS and Venus

2009-02-19: Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3)

2009-02-14: Venus again

Last Saturday, shortly after the sunset, I revisited Venus again to check the performances of the set of interferntial filters made by Edmund Optics. The objective was a new checking of the atmosphere detail discrimination using the equipment described in the last post.

The following image was obtained in the visible range by means of the stacking of 85 images with the original bayer filter of the camera CCD.

In order to the reduce atmospheric dispersion, the three channels were co-resgistered to produce the following real colour image of Venus.

The next images were produced with the filters. The first one is a NIR (R:880 nm), Blue (G: 450 nm) and Near UV(B: 400 nm) false colour combination obtained stacking around 80 images to reduce seeing and noise.

The second one is a combination of two NIR bands (R: 950 nm, G:880 nm) and Blue (B:450 nm).

The quality of this image is quite impressive because the atmospheric seeing seems to be better in the NIR range than in other regions of the visible and near visible ranges.

2008-12-23: Venus in UV, Blue and NIR

Equiped with a new set of interferential filters, I tried to image Venus from Majadahonda to check if something could be discriminated in the atmosphere using the filters that I have. The camera was the usual Phillips Toucam Pro with the following set filters manufactured by Edmund Optics: 400 nm, 450 nm and 880 nm with respectively 50, 80 and 50 nm of FWHM. The telescope was my Celestron 8" SCT. As Venus is still very far from us, I used a 2x Barlow to increase as possible the size of the disk in the camera detector. The following image is the result of the stacking of 80 images with the false colour combination R:880 nm, G: 450 nm and B:400 nm.

It is well known that the Venus atmosphere presents some UV absorvers. They are distributed in atmospheric dark bands that could be constituted by chlorine or/and sulfure compounds. It is known since the Mariner 10 captured the firsts closed images of the planet. At present, Venus Express is observing the atmosphere in UV to better understand the composition of these bands and their paper in the atmospheric circulation.

In order to detect some atmospheric detail, I tried to exploit that the Phillips Toucam Pro has some sensibility in the UV and the 400 nm interferential filter has some band pass in the near UV. However, anything was observable. Maybe the band pass of the filter should be shorter to detect better the radiance contrast produced by the different molecular especies or perhaps the scale of the atmospheric bands is very low and their removed by the stacking required to reduce the seeing.

2008-12-01: Triple Conjunction

To be completed...

2008-08-17: Green Flash

To be completed...