Mars on a calm Lowestoft night

 

Mars on the 26th October 2020. 127mm Meade Apo Refractor, x3 Televue Barlow and QHY5-11 colour planetary camera, 15% stack of 2500 video frames captured over 2 minutes. Credit: Reggie Stax - Jodell Plank Observatory.

" Full credit to our student and assistant Reggie in taking advantage of the excellent stable atmosphere over the Jodrell Plank Observatory last night to capture some great videos of the planet Mars. I think this Mars image is the best we have managed to capture and process at the Observatory. The southern polar cap along with some associated cloud is clearly visible. Cloud is also apparent towards the western and northern limbs. Albedo features of interest are:

•  Acidalia Planitia close to the hazy Northern Polar hood.
• Arabia the large red area of sand in the north eastern quadrant
• Pandorae Fretum the dark area running across the equator
• Sinus Meridiani and Sinus Sabaeus the dark finger above Pandorae Fretum
• Noachis the dark crescent just above the southern polar cap
• Hellas the slightly less dark semi circular area to the west of Noachis

Hopefully we will get a few more clear and steady nights here on the east coast, before Mars moves further away from Earth on its elliptical orbit around the Sun" -  Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Water on the Moon

 

Two different captures of the crater Clavius using our QHY5-11 colour planetary camera and the 127mm Meade Refractor with x3 Televue Barlow.- The video clips were captured using Sharpcap 3.2 and then stacked using Autostakkert3 and Registax6. The still images were denoised and sharpened using Topaz Denoise AI. Credits: Pip Stakkert and Kurt Thrust

" A recent NASA press release has identified reserves of water in the and around the large crater Clavius. Look as we might we could not identify any reservoirs"! - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

" Many thanks to our sponsor Anita Roberts for coming up with the money to finance the purchase of Topaz Denoise AI software" - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-sofia-discovers-water-on-sunlit-surface-of-moon/#:~:text=Scientists%20using%20NASA's%20telescope%20on,Moon%20for%20the%20first%20time.&text=Moon's%20southern%20hemisphere.-,This%20discovery%20indicates%20that%20water%20may%20be%20distributed%20across%20the,limited%20to%20cold%2C%20shadowed%20places.

Olympus Mons - one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System

 

Clouds over Olympus Mons Mars - 127mm Meade Apo Refractor, x3 Barlow and QHY5-11 colour planetary camera. Credit: Kurt Thrust

" As the weather continues to be poor in Lowestoft, I have amused myself by reprocessing some of the video clips captured earlier in the month by our student assistant Reggie Stax. We believe the circle of white clouds in the centre of the image formed over the extinct shield volcano Olympus Mons. Olympus Mons covers an area of 300,000 square kilometres which is roughly the area of Italy. It is 21 kilometres high or approximately 2.5 times the height of Everest" - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Mars on the 9th and 10th of October 2020

127mm Meade Apo- refractor, x3 Barlow lens and QHY5-11 planetary camera. 15% stack of a 3minute video clip. Credit: Reggie Stax our astro-student at the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

The night of the 9th and the early hours of the 10th October were clear and cold. The 'seeing' was not good as the jet stream was causing atmospheric turbulence over Lowestoft. When we watched the live feed from the telescope on the laptop screen we could see the image of Mars wobble. When Reggie analysed the data the following day, he noted that the red and green channels were surprisingly sharp but the blue channel was a turbulent blur. Reggie has made a good job of processing the data and we look to him producing even better images on calmer nights in the future. -  Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

The last of Summer

 

The summer constellation Cygnus, like Frodo, is disappearing in the west earlier each night, as autumn fades into winter. This image is a crop from a wider stack of frames taken earlier in the summer using the Canon 600d DSLR with an EF -S 18-55 lens at f=18mm all on the Star Adventurer equatorial mount. Credit: Kurt Thrust, Pip Stakkert. and Reginald Stax (astro-student at the JPO)

" Since the night of the 20th of September, the weather in Lowestoft has been exceptionally inclement! Between broken cloud and rain showers, we managed to glimpse the Harvest Moon close to the very bright and 'pink' planet Mars. . We are hoping that the weather will improve in order that we may capture some more images of Mars using the Observatory's large refractor. 

To keep the team busy Joel Cairo has been encouraging our sponsors Anita and George Roberts to provide the cash to purchase Topaz Denoise AI a software package capable of improving 'the signal to noise ratio' in the Observatory's images.  Pip and Reggie have been helping me to evaluate the software using a trial download. The above image was processed using Topaz Denoise AI (the AI stands for Artificial Intelligence - we can do with a bit of that around here). The stars Deneb, Sadr , Delta Cygni and Epsilon Cygni are well displayed. The North America Nebula NGC7000 is clearly visible. We also tried Denoise AI on a planetary image of Saturn. We are quite impressed with this software and hope the JPO budget can stretch to purchasing it!" - Kurt Thrust  current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory