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03/29/06 Total Eclipse of the Sun from Salloum Egypt:
Click here for a high resolution 800 x 600 pixel version of this animation, ~14 MB.
11/20/05 Mars with the ToUCam:
This three frame animation shows Mars rotating over a two hour period. Images were collected with the Phillips 840 ToUCam Pro II at f/30. Eyepiece projection was achieved with a 12.4 mm eyepiece 72 mm from the ToUCam chip through a 10-inch f/6.3 SCT on a Losmandy G-11 Gemini mount. The final field scale was 0.15 arc seconds per pixel. Three 45 second video sequences were captured over a two hour period. Each sequence was about 1300 frames. RegiStax 3 was used for processing. Each frame is a stack of 30 to 300 of the best frames from each video sequence. Mars was crossing the meridian at 64 degrees above the horizon on the last sequence. The images were shot at Shaver Lake, CA at 5610 feet.
7/3/05 Deep Impact, Movie of Impact:
To start the *.avi animation, click here, 906KB.
This is a series of images that spans 1.5 hours. The animation starts 20 minutes prior to impact and ends 70 minutes after impact. There are a total of 78 frames displayed at 30 fps. Each image is a 1 minute exposure. The series of images were collected with a Losmandy G-11, Meade 10" SCT at f/5.2, SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera, 2x2 binning, Schuler photometric V filter with a field scale of 2.14 arc seconds per pixel by Greg Morgan and Fred Ringwald from Clovis, California.
5/9/05 Time Lapse Moonrise:
To start the animation, click here or on the image, 3.6 MB.
This time lapse movie is of the moonrise on 4/28/05. The sequence was shot with a tripod mounted Nikon D70 DSLR with a 18mm lens at f/3.5. Each frame is a 30 second exposure with a 3 second delay between each image. I used the DigiSnap 2100 intervalometer made by Harbortronics as an external shutter trigger. The series of images covers about 1 hour. The individual frames were converted to an avi movie file displayed at 15 fps. Jupiter dominates the upper right part of the movie while Arcturus is in the upper left. Spica is the bright star below Jupiter.
1/12/05 Comet C/2004 Q2 Machholz:
To start the animation, click here or on the image, 1.3 MB.
This animation is a series of sixty frames. Each frame is a one minute exposure with the Nikon 300mm at f/2.8 and ST-10XME through the blue filter.
1/6/05, The Pleiades M45 and Comet C/2004 Q2 Machholz:
To start the animation, click here or on the images, 818 KB.
This is a series of six frames of five minutes each. The left full frame sequence shows how far the comet moved in 30 minutes. The right image is a cropped section of just the comet. The optical set-up used is the Nikon 300mm at f/2.8 with the Nikon D-70, ISO 400. The camera and lens were riding piggyback on the 10" LX200, guiding was done with the SBIG ST-10XME through the LX200.
The Venus Transit Black-Drop Effect Animation:
Click here to start the animation, 378 KB.
The Black-Drop effect as seen during the Venus transit of June 8, 2004 over Cape Code Bay, Massachusetts. Images were taken with a tripod mounted Nikon 300mm f/2.8 lens with a 2x teleconverter (600mm f/5.6) and the Nikon D-70 DSLR. The individual frames were taken at about one minute intervals over about 30 minutes and were manually aligned and combined to create this GIF animation.
Venus Transit Sunrise Animation:
Click here to start the animation, 593 KB.
The moment of the Venus Transit sunrise on June 8, 2004 over Cape Code Bay, Massachusetts. This series of images was taken with a tripod mounted Nikon 300mm f/2.8 lens with a 2x teleconverter (600mm f/5.6) and the Nikon D-70 DSLR. The individual frames were taken at about ten second intervals over about 2 minutes and were manually aligned and combined to create this GIF animation.
Jupiter Rotation Animation:
Click here to start the animation, 466 KB.
The animation is made of 642 single frames from a series of 3,227 images shot of Jupiter over a time window of 4.2 hours. The images were taken with the CSU Fresno Campus Observatory 16” LX200 at f/38 and the SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera by Greg Morgan and Fred Ringwald on 3/25/03. Jupiter rotated about 150 degrees during this series. Io made a transit of Jupiter’s 42 arc second disk casting its inky black shadow onto Jupiter’s swirling cloud tops. Europa entered the field of view near the end of the sequence. The Great Red Spot crossed Jupiter’s central meridian just after the egress of Io’s shadow. The frames were assembled into a movie, with the help of Kevin Hansen, that allowed the Jovian system dynamics to come alive!
Asteroid Atalante #36:
Click here to start the animation, 462 KB.
Atalante was one of November 2001's fastest moving asteroids. I have always wanted to catch some pictures of the relative motion of an asteroid against the background stars. On November 7th 2001, I started a sequence of images. The asteroid was at magnitude 10.6 in the constellation Andromeda. I grabbed a 10 second integration every 30 seconds. After one hour, I had a stack of new images to play with. The next day, I did some post processing and co-registered the images and made a little movie of the motion of the asteroid. The individual frames were manually aligned and combined to create this GIF animation. The asteroid moved westward (to the right) 50 arc seconds. The images are 6 arc minutes tall by 4 arc minutes wide. North is up and East is to the left. The separation of the pair in the lower right corner is also 50 arc seconds. The images were captured with the 10" LX200, f/6.3, ST-7, 1x1 binning, no filter. The scope was mounted in the alta-azmuth configuration and tracked the asteroid nearly through the zenith. This was my first image stacking exercise, and there was a significant amount of field rotation during the hour, almost 90 degrees worth. Heavy dewing on the corrector plate was present during this sequence that affected the image quality near the end of the run.
Castor A & B under very high magnification, the effect of the AO-7:
Stacked images without the AO-7 (larger FWHM, left image) and with the AO-7 (smaller FWHM, right image).
The image scale is 0.15 arc seconds / pixel. The stellar FWHM without the AO-7 = 1.8 arc seconds or 12 pixels. The stellar FWHM with the AO-7 = 1.35 arc seconds or 9 pixels. Use of the AO-7 results in about a 25% reduction in overall size of the stellar profile.
Click here, 764 KB for a full description.
