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Well I had a real fun night with some new objects. OK, so the title is a bit misleading. These objects aren't really small, but compared to the planets and stuff I normally image, they are pretty darn tiny. I decided to separately film each of Jupiter's moons and the asteroid Vesta, which is currently brightening for a very favourable opposition later this month.

I'm pretty happy with the moons. I managed to get a disc for all of them, and the colours seem to be fairly close to what they should be. It also looks like I might have gotten some detail in Ganymede. Once again I'm choosing to be pretty skeptical about it, but that big chunk taken out of the side seems to correlate pretty well with the detail shown at the JPL Solar System simulator. I tried to post a link to the image when I first uploaded this image a few minutes ago, but the link had some characters in it that lined up to make a smilie face, so the link didn't work. I'm still very happy I got each moon to a disc though.

Vesta was a fun object to track down. Due to the fact that the moon was only a few days after being full, and Vesta was fairly close to the moon, I think I must have been insane to even bother trying to find it. Either way, I was there with my star chart star-hopping my way from Antares for nearly 30 minutes till I could find this little gem. It's currently at about magnitude 6, so when I got to it it stood out fairly well. I wasn't expecting to take images of it with my video camera, but when I saw how bright it was irregardless of the moon, I gave it a shot and I'm pleased with the result. I'm looking forward till my next outing so I can see if I can get a better shot of it. This is my first asteroid shot though, so I'm happy enough It will eventually brighten to around magnitude 5.5, thus making it a naked eye object.

Each of these images was filmed with my 10" F5 Newtonian telescope on an EQ6 mount. I uploaded the AVIs to my computer using WinMX and used Registax to stack and combine the images. I then used Photoshop to adjust the brightness and contrast.

Description
Well I had a real fun night with some new objects. OK, so the title is a bit misleading. These objects aren't really small, but compared to the planets and stuff I normally image, they are pretty darn tiny. I decided to separately film each of Jupiter's moons and the asteroid Vesta, which is currently brightening for a very favourable opposition later this month.

I'm pretty happy with the moons. I managed to get a disc for all of them, and the colours seem to be fairly close to what they should be. It also looks like I might have gotten some detail in Ganymede. Once again I'm choosing to be pretty skeptical about it, but that big chunk taken out of the side seems to correlate pretty well with the detail shown at the JPL Solar System simulator. I tried to post a link to the image when I first uploaded this image a few minutes ago, but the link had some characters in it that lined up to make a smilie face, so the link didn't work. I'm still very happy I got each moon to a disc though.

Vesta was a fun object to track down. Due to the fact that the moon was only a few days after being full, and Vesta was fairly close to the moon, I think I must have been insane to even bother trying to find it. Either way, I was there with my star chart star-hopping my way from Antares for nearly 30 minutes till I could find this little gem. It's currently at about magnitude 6, so when I got to it it stood out fairly well. I wasn't expecting to take images of it with my video camera, but when I saw how bright it was irregardless of the moon, I gave it a shot and I'm pleased with the result. I'm looking forward till my next outing so I can see if I can get a better shot of it. This is my first asteroid shot though, so I'm happy enough It will eventually brighten to around magnitude 5.5, thus making it a naked eye object.

Each of these images was filmed with my 10" F5 Newtonian telescope on an EQ6 mount. I uploaded the AVIs to my computer using WinMX and used Registax to stack and combine the images. I then used Photoshop to adjust the brightness and contrast.