With weeks of anticipation, and even a little planning aforethought,
I loaded up my equipment and headed off to Venus and into an onslaught
of lightning, thunder, and rain. Sometimes, I think we astronomers are
a bit crazy with all our eternal optimism. I arrived at Kye's Star Farm
well before sunset, but alas, it was still raining and there was no
sunset in sight. Over the next two hours, three more half crazed
astronomers arrived with their vehicles loaded full of both telescopes
and photography equipment. It is hard to imagine how we can all just
sit around in the rain and cheerfully fantasize about the fine viewing
conditions we will have later in the night.
Against all odds, it cleared up about 10PM, and by 10:30, everyone was
set up and busily viewing the jewels of the night. A couple of straggler
clouds drifted by just before midnight, but they were of no real
consequence. The Moon was up by now, with Mars close in tow. Somehow,
it seemed there was too great a gap between them to be bridged in only
four hours. As the Moon rose higher into the sky, the other dim fuzzies
we had been viewing slowly faded into oblivion. Soon, all eyes (and
scopes) were trained on the Red Planet.
After removing all the manual viewing devices from my scope, I carefully
outfitted it with a Sony Hi8 video camera and re-balanced the scope for
imaging. This was my first attempt at live video, so I took my time
setting up while slowly learning what did and what did not work for me.
As it turned out, the best results were attained with all the automatic
features of the camera disabled, the focus set to infinity, and the zoom
set to maximum telephoto. This gave me a good high magnification image
with no vignetting. I set the shutter speed to 1/30 of a second and
adjusted the iris to about f/2.8.
I must say that I was truly amazed with the both the color and the
clarity of the image. Both polar ice caps were visible on the planet, as
well as a significant number of darker surface features. Unfortunately,
four hours later when the occultation occurred, all the good stuff had
rotated off to the side and we were presented only with Mars' most
boring and featureless face.
I started recording at 4:20 AM, which was about 10 minutes before the
start of the occultation. Mars was centered in the field of view, and
the short wave radio was tuned to WWV so we could record an accurate
timing signal along with the video.
An animated gif sequence
has been extracted from the video as a time lapse motion picture. This
is a first run clip with no enhancements. I will be assembling a much
more detailed sequence sometime in the next couple of weeks. The event
lasted about twelve minutes, and I captured images at 30 frames per
second. The next step is to average four adjacent frames every 15
seconds to make a real cool animation. I have to get psyched up first
though, because there will be about 200 individual images that I will
have to select, combine, and enhance.
Fred Lehman, July 17, 2003.
|