Following our observations mainly of Saturn in early
2007, we did little more with the Bethune-Cookman 14-inch
telescope for three years. Matt left his job at the school for
other employment, so we no longer had easy access to the
observatory. We came to depend on Professor Narsing Rao for
admission, and he understandably was available only occasionally.
But we had other problems.
Our equipment and methods for capturing and
recording electronic images had reached the point of
no-more-improvement, at least with the telescope’s tracking
irregularities and the poor sky conditions we often experienced.
Videotaping CCD-camera images yielded a huge number of frames
that were exhausting to examine visually for a few good ones worth
processing, and no more than four to eight of the latter could be
stacked one by one. Also, Phil’s TV+VCR unit recorded images from
its TV display, which added TV noise to other sources. Using a
computer to image the camera output created different problems, notably
dependence on the old Apple Video Player and an older copy of Avid
Videoshop that was missing some image adjustments--both players needing
to be run on older Power MacIntosh computers.
During 2008 we considered trying to capture and
record images with a computer running a version of the Windows
operating
system and hopefully having better video-handling software
than we had been using. This change proved laborious and
frustrating, resulting in a few forgettable sessions at the B-CU
observatory from late ‘08 to almost the middle of 2009. A Hauppauge USB
Live device and video card failed repeatedly with two versions of WinTV
to display an image relayed from the Polaris camera. We started
using the VLC Media Player, which is a multi-platform application,
which we were using on a Windows PC. Unfortunately, the night sky
conditions were lousy. Our best image of Saturn
in 2009, with its rings nearly edge-on, obtained in May, had to be
heavily Photoshop-processed to be recognizable. A copy is shown
in Figure 1. Uncertain at the time whether the new imaging system
was contributing to the poor images, we skipped trying Jupiter during
the summer, when it was near the bottom of the Zodiac. Early 2010
offered the prospect of better sky conditions, and Mars would come to
opposition, albeit a poor one.
In the evening of February 20, 2010 we had an
opportunity to observe Mars, three weeks after its opposition and with
an angular diameter of 13 arc-seconds, about half that reached during
the 2003 opposition. The sky was clear but the outdoor
temperature was abnormally low for the date, so the Science Building’s
heat was on high and the warmed air rose into the cold just outside the
observatory dome. The “seeing” was accordingly so bad that
focusing Mars’ image was only marginally possible. But that image
on the computer monitor was bright and the best we had obtained with
the new equipment, an achievement by itself that relieved us from two
years of worry. Copies of the best raw images and two processed
singles are shown in Figure 2. Excessive redness of the raws was a
camera setting issue ignored at the time. Compounding our success was
the presence of our enthusiastic and helpful friend Diane Murray,
who contributed several digital photographs of us and our equipment;
see Figure
3.
It remained for us to determine if the
satisfactory observation of Mars would carry over to Saturn when it
became observable at good altitude during evenings a few months
later. On May 15 we arranged for Prof. Rau to open the
observatory in the early evening, which proved to be a winning
choice. The sky had been partly cloudy all day, the air
temperature mild to warm, and the Sun’s heating of the observatory
dome moderate. At around sunset, when Phil arrived to join
Matt, the clouds were fleeing or thinning and Venus soon appeared
in the western sky, so much better placed for viewing from the
observatory than expected that we got the telescope up and running
quickly and saw the planet’s fat gibbous disc at 100X. That the image
was sharp enough at low altitude to show the phase was a good
portent.
As twilight faded toward 9:30 PM, Matt readied the computer, and
Phil wired the Polaris camera. Saturn became visible at
approximately 60° altitude and near culmination, but it was
somewhat dimmed by remaining, thin mid-level cloud. We decided to wait
for a clearer sky and Phil took a break, including a glimpse at the sky
from the ground outside the Science Building. A southerly
breeze had developed in under ten minutes and had completely cleared
most of the sky! Phil rushed back to the observatory and aimed
the telescope at Saturn. In the 9X50 viewfinder, stars dimmer
than ever visible before appeared, and the planet at 100 and 150X was
amazingly sharp with two satellites in line with the very narrow rings
on each side of the ball.
With the Polaris camera replacing an eyepiece and
the VLC Media Player running, Saturn’s image on the computer
monitor was the best we had seen since 2007. With the camera’s
sensitivity at 2x minimum and exposure ~1/100 sec, the rings were
bright and sharp enough to show both front and back sections,
though the planet’s disc was somewhat overexposed, reducing definition
of surface detail. Matt shot several pictures at minimum
telescope magnification (f/11) and the camera zoom off, three
being shown in Fig. 4. Zoom magnification of 1.5x yielded
images just as good so we recorded several more; see Fig. 5 for some of
the best. (All shown to here are minimally processed.) A few were sharp
enough to enlarge with Photoshop to improve visibility of disc detail;
see Fig. 6. But alas, the breeze that had cleared and stabilized
the air over us died as quickly as it had come. As Phil was
adjusting the camera gain upward to display the satellites, and
thinking about installing a Barlow lens on the ‘scope, the sky turned
murky and Saturn’s image on the monitor dimmed to bare
visibility. Soon the sky was almost totally overcast so we began
shutting down our equipment. But we had done better than
expected in a magical half-hour!
What our future observing with the B-CU telescope
will amount to is very uncertain at the time of preparing this article
(July 2010). We have recovered our 2003-2007 electronic imaging
capability and to some extent improved it. Jupiter and Uranus
will be well placed for evening observing in the autumn.
But whether we will have timely access to the observatory remains to be
seen.
