From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: October 3, 2007 4:45:24 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Uranus satellite transits?

Hi Tim;

Nope - It was cloudy that night and we had wind gusts to 80 kmph, which up on a 10th story balcony is not conducive to any form of imaging. The Jet stream was parked right over us (as usual) too and uranus only gets 29° above the horizon here at peak.

I did try imaging Uranus on September 26 at midnight (-7gmt)  when Miranda and it's shadow crossed Uranus. However imaging with a C8 at 2000 mm focal lengths was really bad that night and all I got was a fuzzy blue ball with 250 ms exposures. Actually imaging anything that night was pretty well hopeless, even the full moon at 10 ms exposures was bad.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com

www.outcastsoft.com

Proud Supporter of the "Party of Alberta"

http://www.partyofalberta.org/

On 3-Oct-07, at 3:36 PM, Tim wrote:

All:

I didn't take any video of Uranus last night for a couple of reasons:

1:  I "oopsed out" and forgot to convert S&T's conversions from UT to

EDT to PDT, until I got home and realized that Uranus was too low in

the sky when the two key transits were underway.

2:  I realized that my house would block the view from where I

typically set up my 12.5" Cassegrain, so I opted for the Nexstar

9.25GPS in my roof.

I got the 9.25" trained on Uranus about the end of the 2nd transit,

and by the time I was focused and scaled with the appropriate barlow,

it was over.

The image through the 9.25" is not sufficiently bright for my typical

seeing to try to resolve detail on Uranus that small.  I couldn't get

enough light with less than 1 second exposures.

Regrettably, the seeing wasn't too bad - better than the night I

imaged the planet with the Cassegrain.  So, I probably could have

improved on the prior image if I'd set up the Cassegrain instead of

the 9.25".  But then, there wouldn't have been any shadow transits to

look for when Uranus was out from behind the house.

Did anybody else try this?