Planets

Cheers lads.

Bill - as I said before, it *may* be a teapot, but it could equally be any other culinary item. So eyes open for spatulas, carving knives, microwave ovens or indeed, any other white goods...

Michael - I'll have another go at Pluto tonight to see how much it has moved (weather permitting) - should be about 1 arcmin.

Bart - funny you should say that, I'm not sure I've seen many, if any, in the mags before. Loads of jupiter, saturn, a few of mars, venus and mercury etc but I dont't think I've seen any of these three...

Cheers

Dave McD

Dave I had a bit of fun trying to establish the time the photo was taken by comparing your photo (pluto) with various charts. From that I deduce around 23H UT last evening (11 Jul). Am I right? From what I can see Pluto will have moved 1" 22' to the right if you photograph it tonight, you could do a lovely blinked animation.

Bang on the money Dave! 11:38 UT

I'll shoot again tonight and we'll see what we come up with. Any ideas as to where I can get me hands on an animation utility so I can post it up here?

Cheers

Dave McD

Dave I use animation shop which comes as part of Paint Shop Pro. Does a great job. Do you have PSP?

If not just mail me the two images and i'll mail u back an animated gif.

Dave G - just saw your earlier post. Yes, 'those' artefacts are in the image but I airbrushed them out... In fact, they're on all my bloody images now! I'm drawn to them every time!

Funny how the dark frames didn;t seem to get rid of them. I might just shoot some new darks tonight.

Funnily enough, they also show that the mount has a bit of PE that I need to calibrate out. But then I need to buy MaximDL for the PE program to work...

Cheers

Dave McD

Funnily enough, they also show that the mount has a bit of PE that I need to calibrate out. But then I need to buy MaximDL for the PE program to work...

Dave from my understanding it is virtually impossible to manufacture a mount free from PE at any price. You could calibrate it out, but I suspect that if you want to get into *relly* long exposures at high f ratios you'll be looking at autoguiding. Even with the superb mount you have stuff like differential refraction (seeing) flexure in the telescope, minite polar misalignments will all add up