Serge's World

The weather was clear yesterday so I took out the telescope to get a shot of the moon. The moon was low in the sky at 20 degrees elevation, just managing to poke over our fence, and with the hot day, the seeing was absolutely horrendous. I did manage to get this shot of the southern limb of the moon, centering on the crater Tycho.

I took 1800 frames of the moon, of which I used the best 225 frames to create the image.

(Click on image for full size)

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount.

I have now had a chance to process my image of the Mercury transit I took earlier this evening. I improved the contrast and made some other tweaks to get a decent image. This really highlights Mercury (near the centre bottom of the image) with a few sunspots visible.

Taken at 18:55 on 9 May 2016.

(Click on image for full size)

The image was taken with my Meade 4.5” telescope (untracked) and 32mm eyepiece, projected onto a piece of paper, and then photographed with my Samsung S6

On Friday night, we had a break in the overcast weather to actually have some clear skies. I managed to get some good imaging of Jupiter, with the highest resolution image I have been able to create so far. The image below comprises of 4 images. Jupiter itself comprises of 3 images taken through red,green and blue filters to get the colour. Each image was stacked from around 2000 frames each in Autostakkert, with wavelet filters applied in Registax 6, with the colour blending done in Gimp. The moons were captured in a separate video, without the Barlow, at a higher gain setting to bring them out more.

(Click on image for full size)

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount, using a 2x Barlow.

It has been overcast for the last week, but a few nights ago, I was working late into the night for work, when while waiting for a job to run, I noticed that the cloud cover had thinned out a bit revealing the almost-full moon.

The moon was covered in light clouds but was shining through, so took out my telescope, and managed to take a number of videos of the moon behind the clouds. This is about as bad seeing as you can get with actually being able to see anything, with many of the frames in the videos ranging from overexposed to barely visible as the clouds moved over the moon’s disk. The videos were taken over a time span of 5 minutes, before the clouds got too thick to do any more imaging.

Out of the usable video, I stacked the best quality frames using Autostakkert 2.6.1, followed by applying wavelet filters using Registax 6. I got 9 usable images out of the stacking, comprising an average stack of about 30 frames per image, which I then finally stitched it all together in Gimp to create the mosaic.

What was a real challenge, is that due to the huge variance in the seeing, each image in the mosaic was a different brightness, so I had play around with the contrast and the blending of the images to get it to stich together well.

There were two small gaps in my mosaic, which I filled in by stitching in pieces from the full moon image created by Fred Locklear on 2013-5-25 which you can find at https://www.flickr.com/photos/zamb0ni/8874270432/.
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I reprocessed my combined image of 4 images I took of the moon on the 12th of March 2016 to clean it up a bit.

The high-resolution portion of the image below is my pics I took of the moon, combined with a lower resolution pic of the moon to fill in the area I was unable to take.

The moon was at first quarter.

(Click on image for full size)

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount.

Last night’s pic of Jupiter.

This is the first colour image I have taken so far with my new equipment. This image comprises three video exposures of Jupiter, using R,G and B filters for each video, and then stacking the frames and merging the 3 resulting images.

The seeing was not great and clouds came over before I could get a decent amount of frames recorded, but turned out not too badly anyway.

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount, using a 2x Barlow and ZWO LRGB filters.

I got several shots of Jupiter on 12 Marth 2016. Here I have combined two sets of images to bring out both the planet and moons clearly. The 4 major moons are visible, in order left to right, Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto.

(Click on image for full size)

Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount, using a 2x Barlow.

I have finally started uploading apps to the Android app store. The three apps I previously wrote about (Scientific Name Search, Plasmatic and Dutch Public Holidays) are uploaded to the app store, as well as a few apps I created based on a version of my astronomical library ported to Java.

The crowning glory of these astronomical apps I have uploaded to the app store is Night Sky Tools (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smeunier.nightskytools).

The features included in the app are:

• Angular separation
• Astronomical Time
• Atmospheric refraction
• Coordinate convertor
• Eclipses
• Magnitude
• Precession
• Conjunctions and Oppositions
• Ephemerides of the planets, sun and moon
• Equinoxes
• Positions of Jupiter’s moons
• Planetary orbits
• Constellations
• Stellar Classification
• Telescope Airy Disc
• Telescope F-Ratio
• Telescope Magnification

Go ahead and check out the app.

UPDATE - Feb 2016: Since the original post date, I have subsequently sold this app, therefore am no longer responsible for the maintenance and distribution of the app

Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 9 Aug 2013

Spirals are a relatively easy shape to draw, but in order to draw a good spiral we need a bit of simple trigonometry.

The basics of the spiral are the radius of a particular point from the origin, at a particular angle, and for the code below, the radius increases as the angle increases. The exact relation between angle and radius determines the type of spiral.

In the simplest case, the radius will increase linearly with the angle, thus Radius = Angle * ScalingFactor

We can also use quadratic or cubic equations to define the realtionship Radius = Angle2 * ScalingFactor Radius = Angle3 * ScalingFactor
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Recently I decided to experiment a bit more with developing Android applications. I had played around with Android a rather long while ago, creating two rather simple apps - Dutch Public Holidays and Plasmatic, but decided to look at it again.

I have improved upon my two previous apps, making them much more useful, and created a third app, using webservices to look up animal and plant scientific names.

Thanks to the thousands of Android tutorials littering the web, it is not hard at all to get started in Android development, and the integrated Eclipse/Android SDK makes for a very pleasurable development environment.

Since there is nothing that can’t be found in other tutorials in the applications, I won’t list the code for the apps themselves, but you can download the source code for the apps from the links below.

Dutch Public Holidays This was the first app I wrote, and is rather very simple in construction. It merely shows a list of public holidays for the Netherlands for a particular year. Source available at https://github.com/sjmeunier/dutchpublicholidays

Plasmatic I ported some code from my C# fractal library I had written a while back to Java to draw plasma fractals. The application generates a plasma fractal based on a set of preferences, and is able to save the generated images to a file on the mobile device. Source available at https://github.com/sjmeunier/plasmatic

Scientific Name Search This app makes use of a webservice provided by www.itis.gov to search for information such as the scientific name and taxonimic classification of plants and animals. Source available at https://github.com/sjmeunier/scientific-name-search

Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 2 Feb 2013