Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

This is one of those areas of sky that will consume as much telescope time as time/money allow. A clear, moonless Australian sky enabled me to up the luminance frames to 30 minutes and also take a single 15 minute exposure through a hydrogen alpha filter.

Combining the luminance frames using SD Mask and a simple Digital Development stretch results in much lower noise than the original image post while keeping the star brightness under control. This was then aligned with the Ha image in Maxim DL, saved as a jpeg file and combined with the Ha image in Gimp.

The next step will be to add in the 15 minute exposures for each colour.

Eris was first discovered in January 2005 during further analysis of images originally taken at the Mount Palomar observatory in 2003. Initially called the Tenth Planet, it was reclassified, along with Pluto as a Dwarf Planet in 2006.

More massive than Pluto, it is currently at a distance of 96 AU (3 times the distance to Pluto) but it’s highly elliptical 557 year orbit will bring it as close as 37 AU. Along with some of the comets it is one of the most remote objects in the Solar system.

This two frame animation shows two pictures taken 24 hours apart. Eris appears to move about 21″ in this time (about 0.88″/hour).