David, Thanks for the very kind words and I'm glad the website was useful. I update it as often as I can so if you visit it occasionally there will hopefully be at least some new material. Seeing here in New England hasn't been very good lately and I've been doing more deep sky than lunar work for the past few weeks. But, I'm excited about starting a new lunar project if the seeing improves. If you are interested, check out the link I've provided in the left menu for the free on-line journal Selenology Today. I think you will like it and it might get you interested in some specific area of lunar work.
Wonderful photos and an amazing website, Rick. You are obviously very knowledgeable and an asset to astronomy. I am a research physiologist who really wanted to be a professional astronomer... a familiar tune I think... but thankfully the glories and wonders of astronomy are free to all. You have rekindled my interest in lunar observing, thank you. Kind regards David
Thanks... lunar imaging is a challenge from New England. I'm still learning... my latest thought is to capture a lot more frames than I have in the past. Folks have told me that capturing 10K to 20K frames is best and in the past I've only worked with 2K frames. If this is good advice then my images might improve
Rick, I found your site through Cloudy Nights and wanted to tell you that your lunar photos are amazing. They make me feel like I'm looking through the eyepiece. Thanks.
I sent you a message but it doesn't show here - just a line indicating it went out 17 hours ago. If you would like to see a photo of a wafer of the holographic grating material mounted almost in contact with the CCD chip, e-mail me at my yahoo address. JRW
Your system sounds somewhat similar to using a Patton Hawksley 100 line/mm diffraction grating (or a 200 line/mm Rainbow optics grating) that can screw onto the T-adapter of most CCD and web cameras. Such gratings are often used for low resolution stellar spectra. I have thought of using such a grating for monitoring lunar meteorite impacts. However, these impacts are usually fainter than about 7th magnitude and this is too dim. So, I content myself with imaging the dark side with a three hole aperature mask (Hartmann mask) and producing a slightly out of focus image. This helps to determine if the meteorite flash is real or is just a cosmic ray flash.
I'm a retired chemistry professor, and I live in Cotter Arkansas. I have a 10 inch Newtonian and some lesser instruments, and I'm interested in lunar meteoroid impacts. I've adapted a surplus Minolta lens system as a telecompressor for a miniature monocrome CCD video camera, added occulting masks for observing most of the lunar darkside during crescent phases and placed a tiny holographic diffraction grating very near the CCD chip. The 10 inch is f/5.6, and my compression system will not handle that; so I stop it to 6 inch aperture when the telecompression system is in place. This arrangement produces spectra on either side of star-like sources, and because of the very low dispersion involved, actual optical optical sources (as opposed to electronic noise) are "marked as such" down to about magnitude +4. I don't get the best resolution with the CCD video/telecompressor combination, but it's the same result as going with your three images slightly out of focus, which I thought was a good idea. I haven't recorded anything yet, but maybe with persistence...
A lot of cloudy weather has been keeping me from doing a lot of searching with this instrument! It seems to stay mostly cloudy between new moon and first quarter! My thinking is to go with no compression after half phase, use the full aperture of the instrument and monitor closer to the dark limb than the terminator, where a larger surface area is seen foreshortened. I have a small color video camera for doing that, and it, too, has a diffraction grating very close to the video chip. In this case the detection limit and and image quality are better because I'm operating at a sharp focus. I record data to DVD+R disks, with time signals on the audio channel.
I'm still at the beginning of the road myself. Lunar geology is a world of its own... but I hope and believe that there is plenty of room for participation by amateur astronomers. So often we hear that amateurs can contribute little to lunar work except maybe in TLP or lunar meteor impact studies... but domes research, hi res imaging, and spectral studies are all additional areas in which we can hope to contribute...
Not yet unfortunately... but Arnie will soon have hi res lunar/planetary imging on line unless I miss my guess. But a lot of my stuff is done using Clementine UVVIS NIR images which are available on line and students can easily access that data and work with it as shown on my website.
Using my own scope requires either using my homemade low res spectrograph or using narrow bandpass filters and a couple of cameras (to get from 450 nm to 1500 nm). I don't think this will ever be available robotically...
I'm interested to know what you are teaching if you have a link or have the time to explain in more detail...
