Planet observation with methane band filter

Projectmanager/Author: Silvia Kowollik
Page 2
Update 06.05.2008

In the night of May 5th 2008 the next test took place at the 80 cm mirror telescope of the observatory with the methane band filter. The night was very clear, with 6.1 mag it lay somewhat over the annual average of the location. The Seeing with 3-4/10 however was below the average. In the course of the night wind arose and worsened the image quality additionally.

		rough raw pictures with 1 sec. exposure time
		rough raw pictures with 2 sec. exposure time
		rough raw pictures with 4 sec. exposure time
		rough raw pictures with 8 sec. exposure time
		rough raw pictures with 12,6 sec. exposure time

The camera was placed with the filter directly at the secondary focus of the 80 cm Mirror telescope of the Observatory. We took pictures with exposure times between 1 and 12,6 sec. in each case.  The treatment of the pictures was divided into 4 steps:

- Dark subtraction
- subpixelexact averaging
- contrast rise
- sharpening

Here the finished Saturnpictures with the methane band filter:
 

		1 sec. exposure time
		2 sec. exposure time
		4 sec. exposure time
		8 sec. exposure time
		12,6 sec. exposure time. Unfortunately the exposure row had to be broken off prematurely, since heavy gusts of wind led to strong Seeingproblems. With only 33 usable frames the picture rushed strongly. With the next test we will try to average more pictures.

With suitable weather conditions further tests are accomplished in the months May and June 2008.

In September 2008 Uranus will be seen at the night sky and we will observe Uranus during the following month also with the methane band filter.

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