We had our challenges this spring. The first month was CoVid'd into Zoom'ing. But we generally had clear skies, but yet a balky 12" telescope. Still, everyone got either some images, or Nikon images (Amanda), or borrowed raw material from a previous semester. Not tragic - it happens! We still got enough points of data on our variable stars projects to make combined class light curves, and compare them to the best available data and have our traditional friendly competition for who estimated the best magnitudes for these stars. Always fun to do this, while we munch.

Images from our big Thetis Occultation on May 2.

I set up the 8SE scope and gear from out of the back of my RAV4 behind the 700 building. Students worked on their image project until 9:25pm, when they walked out back to join me and I showed them how the faint star was occulted by the asteroid for several seconds. Kirk Bender also got data, and perhaps Karl as well (data unreduced - he's quarantined for now). It was a difficult set of data to reduce - the column noise in my camera, perhaps some vibration due to students walking during the event around the scope, and the shortness (only 2.5s) and small drop (1 mag or so), made it require using the column noise median filter before it could be pulled from the video properly. Thanks to IOTA's Tony George for help on that!
     

Pictures from our Final Exam party night

Thanks Ryan, for the pizza, and Cory for the quiche!

Hard at work crunching numbers to produce the phase plots for our Cepheid variable star observations

Ryan assembling her work sheets

Amanda had the best data for Beta Lyrae

And Lucia had the best data for Eta Aquilae

Ryan won for Delta Cephei...

JP squeeked through with the best data for Zeta Geminorum

And Cory had the best data for T Monocerotis. Congrats!

 

Gallery of images for our Astrophoto project

 

Cory Panttaja
M63: Sunflower Galaxy
Hunting Dogs constellation
8th of March 2022

Picture is of the Sunflower Galaxy, a spiral galaxy of magnitude 8.6, a size in the sky of 12.6 arc
minutes, and in the Hunting Dogs constellation. Initial picture taken on the 8th of March 2022 at
the Cabrillo College observatory, 36 degree’s north, 121 degrees west, with a Sbig ST2000 xcm
camera through a mead LX200 Dome scope. 3 pictures were taken with a 5 minute exposure
time for each, the sky was clear with a crescent moon, and the subject was 41 degrees above
the horizon. Images were taken with CCDOPS5 connected to the telescope. Flat fielded, dark
subtracted, and single-shot color processed in CCDOPS5 using sRGB+gama transfer function,
and flat and dark fields taken about a month later. The three photos were then stacked using
Registax 5 and no image adjustments.
The photo was then taken into photoshop and adjusted further:
Cropping
Color curve adjustment, decreasing violet
RGB curve, make darks darker
Decrease star size
Local color contrast enhancement
Space noise reduction
Sharpen
Increase star color
Space noise reduction
Noise reduction median
Local color contrast enhancement
Spot healing brush on discolored spots
Final resizing
I sent it to Bay Photo to get it printed.

(Jason's image - from earlier semester by Isaac raw image).No labels yet.

Juan Pablo Chavez
Astro 8A
Spring 2022

For the Whirlpool Galaxy (m51): I took 3 5-minute exposure pictures, 1 3-minute picture, and 1 two minute picture, all through the 12” ST2000xcm camera at the Cabrillo Observatory. For every picture I dark frame corrected using a 4 min 25 degree dark field using the adaptive setting since every picture was different lengths. I then colorized them using single shot color processing and then opened all 6 photos in registax 5 and stacked them together. The stack photo was then opened in photoshop where I first used light pollution removal enhanced flatten action. I followed by changing the lower curves to darken the black space around the stars, next adding a deep blue photo filter and editing the hue and saturation to help add more color to it. I blurred and used smart sharpen on the picture to reduce some of the noise in the picture. The last thing I did before cropping and resizing the image was editing the levels to darken the sky a bit more. The cropping and resizing was to center the galaxy a bit more and to make the picture the required sizes and next emailing to Rick.