A 3 days study on Uranus and her moons

[Menno555]

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

uranus_moons_ani.gif (305.16 KiB) Viewed 1969 times

uranus_moons-orbits_sm.jpg (38.92 KiB) Viewed 1969 times

Uranus_3_days_sm.jpg (122.5 KiB) Viewed 1969 times

[turfpit]

Very good Menno.


Dave

[admin]

Hi,

that's very neat!

Robin

[Menno555]

Thanks Robin and Dave!

[timh]

That's brilliant Menno - and still without guiding. You are making me want to invest in an F10 telescope and a powermate. Expensive temptations.

thanks
Tim

[Menno555]

Thanks Tim!
But in this case the no guiding is really not such a big point. The exposure times were relative short and that can be achieved with every decent mount I think

Menno

[timh]

Yes of course - thanks Menno. I realised after posting that you likely would simply have recorded as short AVI or SER files? The dance of the moons was fascinating. I lack a setup with a long enough effective focal length to get to the nice big image scale that you have achieved. Could put a barlow on the dob but it already has so much stuff on it that balance and focus will probably be difficult. An 8 " F10 that is not too heavy for my HEQ5PRO looks quite an attractive proposition at the moment. Tim

[Menno555]

Oh, but non of this full scale. It's all enlarged, cropped and processed in Photoshop. The image here is full scale for me: on the left with 2.5x Powermate (f/25), the right just f/10. I used the 2.5x one for 16 september and 17 + 18 september were done with f/10.
The captures I used for the "moons project" were just with a bit longer exposure but at first with no intention what so ever to capture the moons. Only with processing and a *lot* of stretching, I did see those 4
But your FOV is around the same of mine if I look at your M33 capture and you gather more light. It will not be as sharp but I think that you could capture this too, especially with a good Barlow.
And yes, it was saved as SER. AutoStakkert handles that way better then FITS.

uranus_100.jpg (3.98 KiB) Viewed 1852 times

[oopfan]

Great work as usual, Menno, but you got one thing wrong. According to Wikipedia:

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Its name is a reference to the Greek god of the sky, Uranus, who, according to Greek mythology, was the grandfather of Zeus (Jupiter) and father of Cronus (Saturn).

So you got the gender wrong. Uranus is a him not a her!

Besides that, outstanding job
Brian

[Menno555]

Thanks Brian!!
But ... were both wrong it seems. Did some searching now and it seems that although the god Uranus is male, the planet Uranus is called neuter in general. So the right title would have been "A 3 days study on Uranus and its moons."

But ... it also depends in which country you are. In Germany all planets are female. And Dutch being a Germanic language made it no error for me to call her she

Menno