-
Saturday
16 September 2006 at 2300h BST
- Uranus
was very easy to find in the constellation Aquarius at RA 22h 55.9m
Dec -7.7°. It had an apparent magnitude of
5.7 and
could be easily located using the finderscope forming a distinct
triangular grouping with lambda Aquarii (mag 3.7) and 78 Aquarii (mag
6.2).
-
Equipment used:
8" SCT with f6.3 focal reducer, Nikon Coolpix 5700 digital
camera afocally attached to a 9mm Plossl eyepiece.
-
Camera settings:
4sec exposures, f/4.2, ISO400. 33/77 images were
stacked using Registax v3.
- At
all further stages of image processing the colour was unadjusted and
what you are seeing is the colour as it was through the eyepiece on the
night - it was wonderful. You could see the pale turquoise
colour
and reasonably defined disc using a 9mm eyepiece and f/6.3 focal
reducer. A 6mm eyepiece and f/6.3 focal reducer
clearly showed the colour, albeit a bit dimmer, but the disc was less
well defined. This
blue-green colour arises from traces of methane in its atmosphere.
which absorbs red wavelengths and reflects green.
-
Image
processing - Photoshop CS: HiPass filter (duplicate layer, radius 77.5
pixels, soft light, opacity 50%); Neat Image: (filter and sharpen),
Photoshop CS: crop and reduce image size (top image, lower image is
actual original size).
|