Contains:  Solar system body or event
The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours, Niall MacNeill

The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours, Niall MacNeill

The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

I've recently been setting up my Hyperstar for the C14, with ZWO ASI 6200MM camera with a view to really fast wider field imaging.
I have had some fun imaging the Moon as my first target with the new rig. The very wide field of view (3 x 2 degree) easily accomodates the whole of the Moon (0.5 degrees), where my planetary set up which gives very high resolution has such a small FOV, that I only do small areas of the Moon or attempt to mosaic, which is never easy. 

Being such a fast system the images are very bright and I used the ZWO ASI 6200MM in high speed mode, with low Gain (~ 25) and very short exposure times of ~ 1.5ms. A 3 minute video run gave me about a1000 frames, constrained by the large files and download speed even with usb3. 

The other evening I set the run up and happily gathered my Red and Green videos, only to find that clouds suddenly rolled in before I got more than a few frames for the Blue capture. I waited and waited but it wasn't until over 2 hours later that the sky cleared again when I finally made my 3 minute "Blue" video. Perhaps stupidly, I had just assumed I would be able to use the Blue data, but it was immediately clear that was impossible. In the two hours there was a sufficiently large change in the appearance of the Moon to make the alignment and integration of the images impossible. I was really surprised at how much the appearance had chaged in just 2 hours and 10 mins. 

I did produce a colour image from the first dataset by using the limited data for Blue to make a fairly noisy image....which of course matched the Red & Green perfectly. I then copied the Green image and used Photoshop to match the brightness of the Blue image. The resultant pseudo RGB colour image can be seen in Revision C.

However, in order to demonstrate the shift in the Moon in just over two hours, I animated the monochrome Blue image from 2 hours later, with the earlier pseudo RGB image now converted to greyscale. I had a discussion with [url=https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100029164039522&comment_id=Y29tbWVudDoxMDIyMDcyOTExMDM3Njk4Ml85NjQwNTgyMTE3NTExNzY%3D&__cft__[0]=AZUS7VIQ3WHkM_ZmWIuk5coz99lT2SF_njeSNW6DD7bdjNMEgXn_AlEMRY7wQJv21QEycYn0TS6AW17ieDH962TcWDLTKoCJt73nZI7MXi95kSXQTIYYj4s0bYbl981UXeM&__tn__=R]-R]Jerzy Łągiewka[/url] and he was able to add the technical details to explain the change. "For 30 degrees south latitude the "geocentric parallax" is about 1.5 degrees, so 1/6 (2h) is about 0.25 degrees. If we add the libration correction (0.1 degree), the total will be 0.35 degrees."...thanks Jurek. So the mind blowing effect of the Earth's rotation was to move me and my telescope by about 1500 to 2000kms in those 2 hours, so I then had a different angle on the Moon. Add to that the smaller libration effect and the total change is manifest.

It also stuck me that these two different angles provide an opportunity to produce a 3D stereoscopic image of the Moon. In effect our 3D vision comes about by each eye seeing objects from different angles. Revision B therefore is the result with the greyscale RGB image at left and the monochrome "Blue" image at right. If you are not familiar with how to produce this 3D effect, you basically need to get your right eye looking at the right image and your left eye at the left image and a 3D version will appear in the middle. It may be necessay to get the two images to be quite small on your screen such that their centes are about your eye separation apart. Stare through the images and hopefully you will see the 3D version between the other two...it is quite amazing when you can do it.

For those of you who are interested in why I am looking at my C14 and the Hyperstar in combination with the ZWO ASI 6200MM here is the rationale:

The f/1.9 imaging gives a 3 x 2 degree FOV compared to the C11/ SBIG 16803 combination which I operate at prime focus and where the f/11 focal ratio gives a 0.75 degrees square FOV. This opens up a world of new imaging opportunities for me, which is quite exciting. The penalty, when one decreases focal length is of course image scale. However, the smaller pixels (3.8 microns) of the ASI 6200MM go a long way to offsetting that disadvantage and the f/1.9 configuration has an image scale of 1.1 "/pixel which is not too shabby. The SBIG 16803 which has 9 micron pixels still gives a better image scale of 0.67 "/ pixel due to the hugely long focal length (2.8m). If the pixel sizes of the cameras were the same, the f/1.9 configuration would be 33X faster than that for f/11, however, the smaller pixel size  of the ASI 6200MM, which, as I mentioned has a big image scale benefit, greatly reduces the signal benefit.......it varies with the square of the ratio of the pixel sizes. The nett out for the two systems is as follows.
Signal Comparison_C14EdgeHD-Hyperstar_ZWO ASI 6200MM vs C11 EdgeHD_SBIG 16803.jpg

So the f/1.9 Schmidt focus imaging with the Hyperstar will by just over 8X faster. So where I currently do my prime focus LRGB imaging over 16 hours I should be able to get the same signal and SNR in just 2 hours.
The other factor with imaging at f/1.9 with small pixels is the huge sensitivity to sensor tilt. I have been using an Octopi tilt adjuster and the Hocus Focus add-in in NINA to estimate the necessary screw adjustments. The system, once I came up the learning curve, has been working very well.

Comments

Revisions

  • Final
    The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours, Niall MacNeill
    Original
  • The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours, Niall MacNeill
    B
  • The Moon_parallax & libration over 2 hours, Niall MacNeill
    C

B

Description: 3D stereoscopic image, grescale RGB image left (18:20) and monchrome blue right (20:40)

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C

Description: Psudo RGB (colour) image 2024-04-17, 18:20

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