Seeing forecast (Meteoblue) was for seeing ranging from 3/5 to 5/5 in the first half of the night.
Meteoblue also predicted full cloud cover. The ECMWF predicted almost clear skies with intermittent cloud cover.
From experience I will bet on(ie setup scope) but not have absolute faith in the Meteoblue seeing forecast. I place a lot of weight on the cloud predictions by the ECMWF model. I find that it is correct most of the time in this region.
So just after sunset, I set up and in a different location than usual so that I wasn't looking over the rising heat from the house. I didn't light the fire. The flu heat /smoke plume would drift past the scope looking at the Moon & Jupiter with the prevailing wind direction.
During twilight, I collimated the scope. Then around 6:15pm, I took a quick look at the moon. Even though the Moon was only about 20 degrees above the horizon, the image was relatively steady. Hmmm...maybe?
I went inside, made some dinner and sent this envy picture to my friends who were clouded over, 100km south east of me.....Evil, just pure evil I am.
I decided to grab a couple of shots of the Moon and Jupiter before observing. The
Most of the lighting at full Moon is very flat but these craters along the limb were nicely lit. [below]. The landing site of Russia's Luna 9 is within frame though of course not visible. It is near the crater at the 10 o'clock position just above and to the left of Cavalerius.
The compression on this forum downsizes the image a bit so I have provided a web site full size image. Big enough that you can see the faults start to appear. This picture of the Moon is 13 subs each 1/2000s ISO1600 stacked and average. Processed in Lightroom, Photoshop and Topaz Ai
Grimaldi, Hevelius, Cavalerius, Kepler craters.
https://joe-cali.com/astronomy/forum-il ... 0943UT.jpg
Capture
* Telescope 18" f5.5 Focal Length 2500mm
* 2x barlow. Effective focal length 5000mm
* Full frame
Processing
* Raw processed Lightroom
* Stacked and averaged in Photoshop
* Noise reduction and sharpening in Topaz Ai
* Annotation in Photoshop
This is a single frame of Jupiter taken with a
It's no award winner but I was pleased with how well it turned out for a single frame.
Visual Observations
Next I put the camera away and put in an eyepiece. I started with a Nagler 17mm (147x) on the Moon. The image was remarkably stable. I progressed to a Denkmeier 14mm (178x) and again as I scanned along the rim lit Grimaldi, Hevelius, & Cavalerius craters, I again noticed how steady the image was.
In with the Pentax XW10 (250x). Beautiful fine detail was showing up along the limb. The atmosphere was beginning to show some movement but still I was seeing periods of 8-20s of stillness before thermal cells disrupted the image. My Pentax XW5 was primarily purchased to use with my 6" f7 newtonian. But I thought why not give it a go.
For the first time since buying it a few months ago, I put the 5mm into the 18" and wow 500x. The image really flies across the 70 deg eyepiece field at this mag. In between longer unclear periods, I was getting stable clear images for periods of 3-10s. I soaked in the view of these craters and nearby Kepler when I could.
Cloud that had been predicted was moving in so I quickly moved the scope to Jupiter and briefly enjoyed some fine views of Jupiter at 250x before losing it in cloud. I took a break and went inside to wait for the cloud to pass. After an hour, the cloud broke and I again had clear sky. Unfortunately, and also true to prediction, the seeing had deteriorated and having spent so much time on the Moon, I missed the opportunity for high mag views of Jupiter and Saturn.
Oh well, better luck next time.
Joe
