Yesterday I got a brand new Nikon D5000 camera, with just the basic 18-55mm lens. So last night (August 20) I went outside to take some night shots, just to check out the cameras capabilities. I focussed largely on the Milky Way, with some promising results: http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=3669

Another test was a few shots of Jupiter. The shots were understandably not world-class, being just a camera with limited zoom capability. But I was able to vaguely resolve a disk, and definitely resolve two moons. And there was also a blue-green fuzzy do, which after consulting my ancient (more than 15 years old) "Sky Globe" program seemed to indicate that it was Neptune. Spotting Neptune on a scopeless camera impressed the hell out of me. But I later went back and looked at the rest of the photos of Jupiter, taken over a 20 or so minute span... and found that "Neptune" was moving. Far slower than a satellite, far faster - I'd imagine - than a comet. It's not a hot pixel, since it wanders around the image as well as the starfield. I've posted cropped, full size images of the important parts of the photos here:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=3678
The motion of the "dot" doesn't make any sense to me. Can anyone provide illumination?

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Bah. Nevermind. Those photos were taken without seeing the blue-green dot. Tonight I went out and took more photos of Jupiter... and saw the dot *again.* But this time, knowing to look for it and being willing to do some ultra-basic science, I simply moved the camera left and right... and the dot move in the opposite direction. It must be some sort of internal reflection of Jupiter inside the lenses.

Well, THAT's boring.

Oh come on! You KNOW you caught a UFO

Hi scott....

Nice capture of the Milky Way...so how long was the exposure etc...do you have / remember any such details?

Love that Orion lying down, relaxing...sword shining, waiting for the next duel...

thanks for sharing

ps: can't seem to open the attachments...oh this browser!
oh i geddit....the sequence of pictures on your blog...
as with Nick,
....gosh..... I seen a elephant fly...I never seen an UFO thanks for share...

edit:
scott, what's yout latitude?
just came back to gawp again at the magnificience of the Milky Way.

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clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

I also photographed this "green blob next to jupiter" last night. With a Canon 1000d and 75-300mm @300mm.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinlee2001/3843256021/
I also took a bunch of raw shots in sequence over a couple of minutes (trying to get a good jupiter shot), so made a little video.
www.kevin-lee.co.uk/jupiter_21_08_2009.avi

Thought it might have been a comet. Guess its a reflection, thanks for clearing it up.

Wow, Occam's Razor is at work here. I wish that it would be applied elsewhere in this forum.

The D5000 has the ability to take up to 30 second exposures, with up to ISO 3200. I believe the second one was taken at full 30 second/ISO3200; the first one was at a lower ISO, and I think 20 seconds. I will soon get a remote control for the camera, which will let me take exposures of arbitrary duration. A motorized equatorial mount would be handy, though.



Errrrmmm, 70 miles or so north of Salt Lake City, whatever latitude that is.

Sad but almost certainly true. Jupiter is vastly brighter than anything else in the frame, and the background is black... so I guess it's not that much of a stretch for the faintest reflection of Jupiter to show up fairly clearly.


So much for getting my name in the astronomical history books.

Thanks for the info ...

And you are about 112 degrees west of Greenwich meridian; approx. 41 degrees north of Equator

have a nice weekend

__________________
clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

Funny thing is, your first pic looks remarkably like NGC 1535, a planetary nebula in Eridanus.

Here is a picture I took,so you can see what I mean.

http://www.pbase.com/jniemann/image/...0/original.jpg

I think its just a co-incidence, though ...

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Snarg, and you snarg alone ...

What memories! My first discovery as an amateur astronomer was an 8th-magnitude "comet" near Vega. A wonderful thing that my old Dynascope had a rotating tube, allowing me to limit my potential humiliation over that one.

Bad luck about it not being Neptune. Not sure where it is now, but i consulted stellarium last month and took some pics with jupiter and neptune in the same shot. Funny thing is that neptune was in the same direction as your dot, though further out. I'll post them up if i remember after i finish sortying out my pc issues.

Figured it out... I had added a UV filter over the end of the lens, something that would seem minimally useful at night. Once removed, the blue-green dot magically disappears. So it must've been a reflection between the filter and the lens.

And another UFO is no longer unidentified. MUFON will be so disappointed.

Seriously, nice job of tracking it down.

Rick

Reminds me of the Schmidt Ghost which decides to haunt me every time I image.

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You can't really tell the difference between drunken rambling and sober blogging.

Siguy, Schmidt Ghost to Hollywood!

I once captured a Schmidt in a photograph, shooting from an aeroplane window...daylight zone.
It was an intriguing image. I showed it to a lady friend. She thought that that was the luckiest thing that ever happened. She said she loved me.
She kept the photograph. (I gave her the negative). She is very religious, you see. Bless her cottons.

__________________
clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

Hi there! Sorry to dig up a rather old post. I am trying to get into astrophotography, so I'm still new at this and don't know all the terms etc. I know a little about photography in general, but again sometimes technical terms really confuse me because I am self-taught.

Anywho, I want to buy a new camera and was doing research on the Nikon d5000 and your post came up. The main purpose of this camera will be to take pictures of my kids, and daytime photography. But, I also want to use it for astrophotography. I am an amateur astronomer, and I think the idea of capturing the wonders that I see in a picture is just wonderful. I tried my hand at it years ago, haha you'd all probably laugh at me. I took pictures of the moon literally by holding my point and shoot digital camera up to the eyepiece. I got some really cool pictures, but I'm ready to move up. Since you have experience with the d5000, I wanted to ask you if you've liked it so far, and does it work well with a scope? I really enjoyed your milky way pictures!

I also noticed you live near salt lake city! My husband was born near there, and we often go to visit family. I started to pack my telescopes this past year, but then I had second thoughts about checking them on the plane. Maybe if we drive one year, I will bring them!

Sorry, I figured since the question had been resolved, it would be okay to come in with my own questions for you

While you did not get Neptune, you have a good start.

After reading your writeup I was curious what could be done with a simple setup and Neptune, which is currently magnitude +7.9. So I took my Nikon D40 with a 50 mm f/1.8 Nikkor prime lens into my backyard, set it up on a fixed tripod. This setup has a field of view of 18 x 27 degrees. I centered the frame on Jupiter. Lens stopped down to f/2.8 iso400, eight shots at 5 seconds each. The whole affair took only about one minute. Images saved in JPG best quality. The image processing took a lot longer. Registered and stacked together in IRIS. The link shows a 6x6 degree portion of the image with the corresponding sky chart. Neptune is at the center of the circle in the skychart and easy to see next the the three bright 6the magnitude stars.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10562841@N00/4082196692/

The little chart is a slice through Neptune and shows the size of the +7.9 magnitude signal. From this chart ane can estimate that the signal-to-noise ratio at +7.9 is about 26, so +10.1 stars would be just visible with signal-to-noise of 3.

Hope this shows you what can be done.

hha

Errrr....

"This photo is private.

Oops! You don't have permission to view this photo."

Sorry. Forgot. Hopefully now fixed.

hha

Well, I've put more than 15,000 shots through in in the last 2 months, if that's an indicator...

Don't know, haven't tried. Just used the zoom lens.