Venus Atmosphere with Altair Astro NUV 395nm Filter | Aug 1rst 2021

[MalVeauX]

Hi all,

 

My weather in Florida is wet and stormy, but I coudln't resist at least trying to see the planets the night of 8/1 and into 8/2 for Saturn's opposition. I started the evening with Venus while it was still daylight. It was only 20 degrees elevation and seeing was poor. I used a newtonian with F6 primary mirror to get best odds of performance in near UV (instead of corrector plate of my C8 Edge which is bad in near UV). I'm using the Altair Astro 395nm near UV filter for this. It indeed does a good job of showing off the atmospheric clouds on Venus. I combined this with 742nm IR data as well to create a false colored image. I will include my capture values and histogram values from FireCapture.

 

Equipment:

 

200mm F6 newtonian

2x telenegative barlow (F12)

ASI290MM (IMX290, 2.9um pixels) camera

Altair Astro NUV 395nm Filter (UV)

Astronomik Pro Planet 742nm Filter (IR)

 

Final results (at 2x increased display size, it was tiny):

 

 

Here's the info from FireCapture:

 

FireCapture v2.7 02 BETA Settings
------------------------------------
Camera=ZWO ASI290MM
Filter=UV
Date=020821
Start=002834.566
Mid=002934.568
End=003034.570
Duration=120.004s
Frames captured=11995
File type=SER
Binning=1x1
Bit depth=8bit
ROI=560x500
FPS (avg.)=99
Shutter=10.00ms
Gain=456 (76%)
Histogramm=85%
Noise(avg.deviation)=n/a
Sensor temperature=101.5°F

 

Here's a single frame:

 

 

Here's 2k frames stacked:

 

 

Here's the 2k frames sharpened:

 

 

And these were my conditions, again, 20 degree elevation (awful!).

 

 

Then it rained.... until midnight.

 

 

Very best,

 

[TerryMcK]

A mighty fine capture

[MarkAR]

First time I've seen some colour in Venus, well done.