Global Star Party April 2nd

Live Jupiter special!

It was a beautiful night in Melbourne, then about 10:30 just half an hour before "go-live" the clouds came from nowhere. Fortunately they didn't hang around for long - it must have been a moment of climatological rebellion with the impending ending of daylight saving several hours later.

It was a little bit sad that the Great Red Spot had already transited before we got to air - but I did get some great footage of it before the clouds swept in. By the time we were on air the clouds had cleared and we continued on with the "boring side of Jupiter".

I have been in a number of virtual events usually with my DSLR plugged directly into the laptop and screen sharing the Cannon EOS utility and using live view. The best method of course is a astronomy camera in a web cam setup. On this occasion I tried something a little different. Using the iPhone 6 and an eyepiece adapter, a 25mm eyepiece and the 645 App I was able to take some of the light of Jupiter out (its usually too bright to see any detail on the disk) by taking the ISO to 32 and setting the exposure time to 1/100 of a sec and the through the lens view adjusts to a "what you see is what you get" view. Then sharing that back to my MacBook using reflection, I was able to then screen share the Reflection App into the Google Plus Hangout. Pretty cool!

14inch Smart Dobbie>Barlow>25mm Plossl Eyepiece>Smart Phone Telescope Adapter>645 Pro [Application]>ISO 32 & 1/100 Settings>Reflector to MacBookAir>Reflector Screen record.

An excellent result, but more essentially here, what astronomy can we do with using equipment that we already have or that's relatively inexpensive, but easily accessible.

Thanks to the Global Star Party for hosting me on the show!

Jupiter Mar 13th 2016

Finally got some time on Jupiter tonight. I'm still not much of a planetary photographer but managed a nice single frame on my smart Dobbie and Cannon 550D. Io, Ganymede and Europa (Left>Right)

Also still playing with the Star Analyser on the iPhone. Interesting you can actually see the separate spectra of the moons. (note the different position angle due to a different camera and lens setup).

As its a long weekend its fun to have a bit of a play around with cameras, lens and such.

Here is the separated spectra, and bearing in mind here they were very faint and I am really just practicing technique here and having some fun - but you can tell some differences.

Io

Jupiter

Ganymede

Europa

Each was separated out in a thin slice and then had the vertical height changed to highlight the various light levels.