Capturing an Asteroid

Capturing an Asteroid

by JonathanNo Comments
Sometimes the happiest results happen by accident. This is the story of how I unintentionally managed to image a small, distant asteroid with my Nikon camera and a wide-angle lens! Shooting Orion with a Guided CameraSaturday night, January 5, 2019 brought North Carolina the first clear skies in what seemed like ages. I planned to shoot some nebulas with my telescope and specialized camera. But tonight I also wanted to try out a new wide-angle lens I recently purchased, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens for my Nikon D5500. My goal was to point the Nikon at Orion and see how much detail I could capture if I kept shooting exposures as long as I was in the field. I set up the Nikon on my iOptron SkyTracker Pro mount and a sturdy tripod. The SkyTracker is a motorized one-axis equatorial mount. Simply put, once you've pointed it at the celestial pole, it will follow the Earth's rotation all night long. This prevents...
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Saying Farewell to Saturn: Part 2—The Final Plunge and a Legendary Party

by JonathanNo Comments
Friday, September 15, 2017 I managed to fall asleep sometime after 9 p.m. Pacific Time Thursday evening. I awoke just before my alarm was set to go off at 2 a.m. Friday. I again felt grateful to the wise people in JPL media relations for making us go home Thursday afternoon so we didn’t have to stay “on Lab” overnight! When we left the hotel at 2:30, my colleague Stephen van Vuuren had already written his social media post to go live at 5 a.m. accompanied by a mosaic of Cassini’s final portrait of Saturn compiled by Jason Major, who has done much of the image processing for In Saturn’s Rings. The drive from our hotel in Arcadia was very smooth until we got near Flintridge. Caltrans had blocked off all three exits from the westbound 110 to the JPL area for road construction! Fortunately, we were able to get off at the next exit and double back. Thank goodness for GPS...
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Saying Farewell to Saturn – Part 1

by JonathanNo Comments
This is the first part of a three-part blog about the end of the Cassini mission to Saturn, and my small part as an observer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during mid-September 2017. Everyone remembers their first glimpse of Saturn through a telescope. It seems unbelievable that you could see a planet with rings—but there it is! I gazed at Saturn a few weeks ago with my new 90mm spotting scope, and I attempted to capture my first image of a planet that evening. I shot several minutes of video through the scope and then used image stacking software to make a composite of the hundred or so best frames of video. To my surprise, the image came out pretty well. The image in the video is much larger than Saturn appeared through the eyepiece. You can just make out some of Saturn’s atmospheric bands and maybe a hint of the Cassini division between the A ring and B ring…or am I...
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Perspectives on Saturn and Jupiter

by JonathanNo Comments
Last night, I captured the first photo I've ever taken of Saturn. I'm the first to admit that this isn't a spectacular or even good photo by any stretch of the imagination. I can find lots to criticize about it. However, I was surprised that a modest camera with a 300mm zoom lens was able to show the rings and planet so distinctly. This is probably as good as or better than the view Galileo had of Saturn when he discovered its rings with his primitive telescope in July 1610. He couldn't even see them as rings with his telescope. He thought they were smaller planets on either side of the the main body of Saturn. And I should count myself fortunate that my photo turned out as well as it did in the first place. The ten images I took afterward were all blurred by atmospheric turbulence, since Saturn was pretty low in the southeast sky when I shot the photos. Saturn is nearing opposition, which means that the Earth is...
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