A 3 days study on Uranus and her moons
Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:38 am
Okay, "study" is maybe a bit strong but it feels a bit like that
Decided to do something on Uranus since I did capture it and it's moons a few days back.
So, I made captures at 06:00 hr local time / 04:00 hr UTC on 16, 17 and 18 September of Uranus and her moons Ariel, Umbriel, Titania en Oberon and made this.
The first image is an animated GIF showing the movement of the moons. It also show how fast the movements are. The closest moon Ariel, did almost a full circle in 3 days, so approximately 3.5 days for 1 rotation. That's pretty fast since Uranus has a periphery on it's equator of around 159354 km / 99017 miles :
The second image shows the orbits of the 4 moons around Uranus. At first I though there was something off with my captures because the results kept on giving elliptical shapes. But it turns out this is correct: I did find that the planes in which the moons are moving, are at this moment a bit sideways towards Earth. So a circular shape will be shown as an ellips .... which is shown now with that image.
The third image is an overview of the piece of sky Uranus is in now. I made an overlay of the 3 days where the stars are place on each other. This shows the movement of Uranus and the 4 moons rather well. For the geeks (aren't we all? ) I named 3 stars as reference points.
All this was VERY cool to do. Somehow I (and I think a lot of people with me) forget that there is more then Mars, the Moon, all the spectacular nebulae, Andromeda and so on. Those are of course interesting and beautiful and great to capture (I am processing M33 at the moment) but there is SO much more out there, even for modest telescopes like my 8" SCT. So I noticed that if something like this can be done or a very faint ARP object, I personally prefer that above an Andromeda
Details on equipment used, settings, and so on, on viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3165
Decided to do something on Uranus since I did capture it and it's moons a few days back.
So, I made captures at 06:00 hr local time / 04:00 hr UTC on 16, 17 and 18 September of Uranus and her moons Ariel, Umbriel, Titania en Oberon and made this.
The first image is an animated GIF showing the movement of the moons. It also show how fast the movements are. The closest moon Ariel, did almost a full circle in 3 days, so approximately 3.5 days for 1 rotation. That's pretty fast since Uranus has a periphery on it's equator of around 159354 km / 99017 miles :
The second image shows the orbits of the 4 moons around Uranus. At first I though there was something off with my captures because the results kept on giving elliptical shapes. But it turns out this is correct: I did find that the planes in which the moons are moving, are at this moment a bit sideways towards Earth. So a circular shape will be shown as an ellips .... which is shown now with that image.
The third image is an overview of the piece of sky Uranus is in now. I made an overlay of the 3 days where the stars are place on each other. This shows the movement of Uranus and the 4 moons rather well. For the geeks (aren't we all? ) I named 3 stars as reference points.
All this was VERY cool to do. Somehow I (and I think a lot of people with me) forget that there is more then Mars, the Moon, all the spectacular nebulae, Andromeda and so on. Those are of course interesting and beautiful and great to capture (I am processing M33 at the moment) but there is SO much more out there, even for modest telescopes like my 8" SCT. So I noticed that if something like this can be done or a very faint ARP object, I personally prefer that above an Andromeda
Details on equipment used, settings, and so on, on viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3165