Galileo's Camera

The entire last year has been a disaster on this blog. For the entire year I managed only one post and that too thanks to an accidental spotting. While I am determined to make at least one post per month this year, I am not entirely sure how the weather would work out. Thankfully, the year started with multiple events of astronomical significance. The 1st January was a full moon day that causes some interesting religious/cultural effects in Sri Lanka. It was also a supermoon. But this post is not about that. The month of January this year saw another interesting astronomical event; planetary conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. A planetary conjunction is an event where two planets appear at a very small angle in the sky. In laymen's terms, the two planets look very close to each other. In the conjunction that happened in January, the closest apparent angle between the two planets was about 0.25 degrees. What does that really mean? That means something close to half the width of ...

On 30th May 2016, Mars had a close approach to Earth (being only 46.8million miles from Earth). The photo below was taken few days after. Mars - 04th June 2016. Nexstar 4SE, Canon 550D with 2x barlow (Samyang mirror lens accessory) The photo is a result of stacking 25 frames of a avi made in 640x480 60fps movie crop mode. Since the image was a little small, I enlarged it 2x via Registax. The image was further enhanced with wavelet processing and for brightness and saturation. One of the questions I had when I heard about this close approach to Earth, was that whether it really makes a difference. In short, it does. Here's a comparison of a shot I took in 2014 Jan 26 with the same set of equipment. Mars - 26th Jan 2014 Mars - 04th June 2016 NASA has a page http://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/nightsky/mars-close-approach/ that outlines some facts about the closest approach. One of the most interesting facts I found there was the change in the apparent size of Mars....

I was going to wait till I get a good shot of Mercury before I posted this. But it is unlikely that I would be able to do stargazing in the next few weeks, so decided to put up what I managed to capture yesterday and today. Venus - 25th Jan 2014 Mars - 26th Jan 2014 Jupiter - 26th Jan 2014 Saturn - 26th Jan 2014 All the images were taken using Canon 550D's Movie Crop mode, exporting the file as a avi in Canon ZoomBrowser and then stacking them all on Registax. I guess I still have a lot to learn about wavelet processing! All the images above are comparable in their apparent sizes except for Venus. Venus looks like 50% of the width and height pictured above (yes even then, Venus looks larger than Jupiter because it is very close to Earth these days). I am quite ecstatic about the whole shoot because I managed to capture all the planets barring Mercury and to a reasonable detail. I didn't expect the GRS on Jupiter or the Cassini Divide on Saturn or the featu...