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David,
As someone who is next to useless with Photoshop (I do all my image adjustments in Microsoft Paint (!), Faststone or Microsoft Powerpoint), I found your instructions most helpful, thank you. It still took me about an hour to get to grips with layers, but once I got the hang of it I was well away. Many thanks for this guide.
James
Finally managed to find the time (many hours) to get my head around PhotoShop (with help from David Basey) to make a composite image of my images showing the transit from Monday, as view from Nottingham. It was blowing a gale here and there was intermittant heavy cloud, but I was taking an image every 20 seconds during the transit so have managed to find a reasonable image about every 15 minutes which I’ve superimposed onto the first image where Mercury just starts to take a bite out of the Sun. I’ve had to crop the planet everso slightly as the background intensity of the Sun differed grealy between the images, so the planet too perfectly round I’m afaraid, but its position is as close I could get it using the whole face of the Sun to position each one; I suspect the slight wobble on the planets track is due to movement in my set up and camera in the gale, but I felt this was more realistic than making a false straight line which my data doesn’t support. I’ve nearly given up with the time lapse video as the cloud after the first five hours just makes stacking the frames nearly impossible, but if I can face wasting another 6 hours on it I will try again.
James
I’m working on a time lapse, but cloud and wind are working against me 🙂 Here is a link to a very rough and ready and low res time lapse of the first three hours of the transit:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1673286/Mercury%20transit%20the%20first%20three%20hours.avi
Skywatcher ED80, Baader solar film, Tal 2x Barlow, Canon 6D; one shot every 60 seconds for the first three hours, stacked into an AVI (on a loop) in PIPP.
James
P.S. I should add there are numerous dust bunnies which also look like they are trying to transit the sun 🙂 I’m not sure yet how to process these out as I can’t think how to take flats with solar film!
Thank you all.
I was attempting to image Jupiter the other night with my new camera and whilst the seeing was excellent, the results I got the next day were awful. I’ve just realised the window in the camera is just glasss and not an IR blocking filter. Doh!
James
Thanks Bill.
I think my question 1 was poorly phrased; it probably should have read: “with a colour sensor, is it desirable to block IR when imaging the moon and planets? If so, why?”
What about UV? I presume UV is blocked by clear glass.
James
It apparently passed us by at about 10x the distance of the Moon:
http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2013-tx68-uncertain-trajectory-closest-earth-mar-5-2016
Phew 🙂
Jame
A copy of this book arrived this morning, and while I probably won’t read it from cover to cover, I’m looking forward to flicking through it at some stage and reading little bits and looking at the lovely pictures:
Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science Hardcover – 26 Feb 1998
James
Yes, there is now a full frame version. It doesn’t fit into the body of the camera in a stunningly conventional way, but it does the trick. One has to flip the mirror up, and drop the oblong filter in the hole. It seems a bit Heath Robinson, but is easy to put in and relatively easy to take out.
james
On one of the subs there was a bright meteor. After checking the time on the DSLR (and correcting as the camera was two minutes fast and on British Summer Time), I submitted the sub to the NEMETODE network to see if anyone captured the event. Sure enough at least two have captured the meteor on video, and initial analysis shows it was a meteor over Galloway, and had a bright terminal flash. It’s good to combine the widefield observation with video meteor detection.
James
A lovely capture. Well done.
I found it was quite hard to get the settings correct on the camera as either the remaining illuminated arc was too bright, or the rest of the Moon was too dark – you seem to have got a good balance. Nice work. It was well worth staying up late for.
At 5am though I was surrounded by mist and fog and it was like a scene from the Hound of the Baskervilles, and I was worried the beast might smell my remaining mini pork pie 🙂
James
Bill,
Thanks for this. I’m already making contacts on the family history websites and doing some digging.
I went to look at Robert’s grave on Tuesday, but the writing at the bottom remains elusive to me, even after trying a wax crayon rubbing. I’m waiting on the cemetery people to get back to me to say if they have a written archive of what was originally engraved on the head stone.
I think I have found Walter and his father on the mid 1800s censuses, and it looks like I’ve also found Walter’s paternal grandfather, John, on the 1841 census. I am still trying to work out what link, if any, exists between Walter and Robert.
Professor Ian Inkster who wrote this article about Robert in 1980 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1980JBAA…90..245I) is coming to Nottingham in October, so I am hoping to catch up with him then for a coffee and a chat – even if I don’t learn any more about either Goodacre, it will be a great opportunity to just chat with a fascinating academic.
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