A long time ago now seemingly in a galaxy far far away the birth of digital imaging technology took place. That was in the early 2000’s. If you were like me you first experimented with contemporary webcams that were typically used with your computer where now they come built in to laptops etc. The one pictured above called a Phillips Toucam Pro was popular around 2005-6 or so and the video technology at the time was applied to imaging planets. It was perfect for them because they are bright and not a lot of exposure time was needed. The cameras were inexpensive and your equipment did not have to be very sophisticated to capture a 1 minute video file of a planet.
Most of us started with Saturn , Jupiter and Mars. I remember the first time I imaged Jupiter and saw the Great Red Spot and circling dark gaseous bands across the disk! It was so mesmerizing that you could actually do this with a simple backyard set up that you could not leave it! I would stay out there for hours at a time waiting for the seeing to clear even a few seconds where the features on the planet’s disc would suddenly become sharp enough for you to start a recording. Technology evolved rapidly though and some folks who were doing this upgraded their equipment for better mounts and cameras and started using color filters instead of single shot color cameras. It seemed for a long time this was the way of the future for planetary imaging. That made things difficult for amateurs like myself who “moved on” to deep space imaging to continue also with planetary imaging . The “deep space” camera set-ups are very involved and it’s a full time project managing them as you have seen here on this site. However, high resolution planetary imaging has also become a subspecialty in and of itself. You need fast computers with a ton of memory to handle the enormous sized video files 2GB each at minimum. Using color filters instead of a single shot color image means you have to take a sequence of 3 or 4 videos to create a single image (the same is done for deep space images except we are taking single exposures per filter, not videos, so the file sizes are much smaller). Then you have to account for the planet’s rotation. If the Earth were the size of a nickel, Jupiter is as big as a basketball! In just 10 of our Earth hours, Jupiter makes a complete rotation. That means if you expose a video of Jupiter longer than 2 minutes, the features you initially captured have already moved from their original spot! There are ways to “derotate” your image with software now but the procedure is very labor intensive. I have revisited planetary imaging a couple of times, most recently during the Mars opposition of 2018 when it was much lower in the sky but the images were not very good and I decided then the planets were just going to be too much of a hassle to get involved with……until now!
Casually looking at images from around the world on a popular astro-imager’s hosting site a couple of months ago I came across what I thought were the crispest most detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn I had ever seen and just taken by amateurs, not by the well-known planetary imaging “Gurus”. Looking at the capture details I noticed they were taken with one-shot color cameras! I looked into this some more. Yes it seems like the latest generation of color sensors are much more capable than their predecessors and very affordable. “One shot color” meant no additional filters, much less memory demands and no additional derotational software to fuss with. So I’m thinking in my head this could be a huge game-changer if it were really the case. What to do? I just had to try this out somewhere. I already had my remote set-up tied up with equipment and my backyard set-up has a spectrograph on it and I wasn’t going to take that down. Then it came to me. Aha! There was one observatory I had access to that was doing nothing now but collecting spiders . That was the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces Leasburg State Park Observatory.
Located in Radium Springs NM, just a short 15-20 min drive from my house, the observatory was a joint project between the Park and the astronomy club. It was completed about a year before I moved out here. We use it only once a month for our public outreach program. Beyond that nothing is happening there. Lucky for me I am the chairperson of the observatory! We have been trying for years to expand the activities there but so far not much interest. I am hoping that will change and this new technology could be the springboard for that!
Stay tuned for part 2 next time I will discuss my trip out to Leasburg and the birth of the new planetary imaging set-up!