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PAUL YATES
Oakworth, West Yorkshire, England
paulastro@blueyonder.co.uk

Paul uses a 14 inch Dobsonian and Meade's new Electronic Eyepiece with a 2x barlow recording to standard VHS to image moon and planets.  To capture to computer he uses a Snappy and processes images with Adobe Photo Shop.

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GRAZING OCCULTATION OF JUPITER
The occultation started around 1800UT at Oakworth, with all equipment
shrouded in plastic for what I thought was an impending storm.  There was
complete thick cloud and high winds when I started recording about 5 mts
before the event was due to start - I couldn't see even where the moon was!!
In case there was a break I thought I had to have it all up and running as
there would be no time to snatch any footage otherwise.  Amazingly the cloud
thinned just after it had started and though cloud was always present I
managed to get a total of 6m 34s footage before the cloud closed in
completely just before it finished.  My window lasted 11 minutes so from my
station at Oakworth the graze must have lasted longer than this as I missed
the start and finish.  I was lucky in that my home was calculated by Andrew
Elliot to be within around 50 feet of the centre line of the graze track.
Even luckier to have the window of opportunity in extremely poor
conditions - it started a squall within 10 mts of me packing away the
equimpment.

For these images I used the Meade Video eyepiece on an 80mm f5 Helios
refractor mounted on a Gem mount with slow motions, with a x2 Ultima barlow
for the larger scale images and a red filter for all of them.  The images
were recorded onto vhs, grabbed using Snappy and given a quick unsharp mask
with a bit of fiddling on the contrast and brightness.

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Mare  Crisium, 1 Jan 2002
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Petavius, 1 Jan 2002
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