Screencaps from some Astronomical videos I took almost 20 years ago

[Lew Zealand]

Howdy, I took some pics of the eclipse a few months and posted them here so I'd like to post a few other things I took pix of many years ago because I just found them again for the first time in a long time! There were taken with a webcam 18-19 years ago and are single frame captures so the quality is ahem, rough. However they are also a noisy indicator of that anyone can see in a telescope if they look through. Instead of the webcam noise you see here, your eyes will see these as sharp and crisp, though very much subject to the whims of our roiling atmosphere. I'll post some more here and maybe a movie or two if I can figure out getting these old bangers to play on modern computers.

Mars at maximum opposition, 9/27/2003. This was at it's closest for about 50,000 years and will not approach as closely for a similar timeframe. That said, it gets close enough every 2.2 years and really damn close to this every 20 years or so, it just happened to be a whisker closer this one time. Take it easy, Jake. It's just orbital Mechanics.

Jupiter with Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jan 23, 2004

Saturn, Jan 23, 2004. Well what else would it be??

And just for fun:

Rigel, a blue supergiant star, the brightest star in Orion, with its white dwarf companion Rigel B

Edit: Rigel B is not a white dwarf companion, instead it is a likely a very close triple-star system of its own. Sirius (brightest star in the sky) is the one with a tiny white dwarf companion and is more difficult to split than Rigel and Rigel B here.

 

[FairyRing]

Those are outta this world!

 

[Potatoes]

Those are outta this world!

Yeah they are, both metaphorically and literally!

 

[Pangaearocks]

Very cool pictures! Impressive you managed to take so nice ones 20 years ago, with just a webcam??

Particularly liked Jupiter with 4 of its moons.

At this point Pluto was still considered a planet, which was nice. It has since lost that status. I grew up learning we lived in a 9-planet 'world', and then it was suddenly only 8. It always was a bit of an odd-ball, but still :-/

 

[Lew Zealand]

Very cool pictures! Impressive you managed to take so nice ones 20 years ago, with just a webcam??

Particularly liked Jupiter with 4 of its moons.

At this point Pluto was still considered a planet, which was nice. It has since lost that status. I grew up learning we lived in a 9-planet 'world', and then it was suddenly only 8. It always was a bit of an odd-ball, but still :-/

Thanks for the kudos! And yes, we still had a 9-planet solar system at this time, I hadn't thought of that! I have seen Pluto with my telescope at a very dark sky site about 4 times but it has receded in brightness (slowly moving farther from the Sun in its orbit) and I may no longer be able to see it without getting a bigger scope.

The technique of:

1. take movie with webcam (mine was the Philips TouCam, highly recommended at the time)
2. discard all but the clearest, sharpest frames of your movie
3. align and additively or averagely stack those best frames to increase signal to noise ratio (see Saturn above)
4. adjust to taste in post-processing software

...is very effective for brighter targets like solar system objects as they are bright enough to register decently in a webcam, especially 20 years ago. In fact that Mars picture above is freakin' fantastic for a single frame. I'm amazed it turned out that well.

Search "Christopher Go" if you're curious of what you can extract from a webcam, a good scope, and just tons of dedication, patience and refinement. He is by far not the only one but in the early days, he was The Best.

These same techniques are still used today with much better imagers because the problem has not changed: the atmosphere is what creates all the cruddy frames that need to be tossed, and you're waiting for that magic split second (literally) of perfect seeing for that pristine frame. Got one? Great!

Now get 100 more.

 

[LRangerR]

View attachment 11553
Saturn, Jan 23, 2004. Well what else would it be??

Jupiter with a hula hoop! @Lew Zealand

Very cool pictures! Impressive you managed to take so nice ones 20 years ago, with just a webcam??

Particularly liked Jupiter with 4 of its moons.

At this point Pluto was still considered a planet, which was nice. It has since lost that status. I grew up learning we lived in a 9-planet 'world', and then it was suddenly only 8. It always was a bit of an odd-ball, but still :-/

Bit o' celestial trivia: Those 4 moons are 4 of the biggest moons in the solar system, with only Titan (Saturn) and Luna (look up) being of comparable size. Triton (Uranus) is the next smallest after Europa, and then we get to Pluto sized moons

And if you really wanted a 9 planet system still i guess you could try to make an argument that Ceres (asteroid belt) is a planet.

P.S.- Ganymede is only slightly smaller than Mars

 

[Pangaearocks]

A tangent if you don't mind, but have any of you watched the TV show "The Expanse"? I thought it was absolutely wonderful.

 

[NextPaige]

Howdy, I took some pics of the eclipse a few months and posted them here so I'd like to post a few other things I took pix of many years ago because I just found them again for the first time in a long time! There were taken with a webcam 18-19 years ago and are single frame captures so the quality is ahem, rough. However they are also a noisy indicator of that anyone can see in a telescope if they look through. Instead of the webcam noise you see here, your eyes will see these as sharp and crisp, though very much subject to the whims of our roiling atmosphere. I'll post some more here and maybe a movie or two if I can figure out getting these old bangers to play on modern computers.


View attachment 11548
Mars at maximum opposition, 9/27/2003. This was at it's closest for about 50,000 years and will not approach as closely for a similar timeframe. That said, it gets close enough every 2.2 years and really damn close to this every 20 years or so, it just happened to be a whisker closer this one time. Take it easy, Jake. It's just orbital Mechanics.

View attachment 11549
Jupiter with Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jan 23, 2004

View attachment 11553
Saturn, Jan 23, 2004. Well what else would it be??

And just for fun:
View attachment 11551
Rigel, a blue supergiant star, the brightest star in Orion, with its white dwarf companion Rigel B

Edit: Rigel B is not a white dwarf companion, instead it is a likely a very close triple-star system of its own. Sirius (brightest star in the sky) is the one with a tiny white dwarf companion and is more difficult to split than Rigel and Rigel B here.

That’s so long ago! AHEM OLD

 

[Lew Zealand]

That’s so long ago! AHEM OLD

Ehhh??? Schpeak up sonny, you keep a-mumblin' and a-nobuddy's a-gonna hear you!

 

[Odin]

A bit late to the thread, but those are really impressive! The image of Jupiter seems to be especially clear.