At 08:59 AM 6/29/2007, Bruce Bostwick wrote:
Well, I'd believe a Ritchey-Chrétien is capable of that kind of resolution .. :D .. have had an RC on my fantasy wish list for years. (And will continue to have it on that list for many years to come, neither I nor anyone I know can afford one.) We all can dream, right?
Tell your friends I deeply envy their scope and they do great work with it! :)
It isn't because it is an RC ... Ron Dantowitz was doing similar work with a Schmidt-Cassegrain ... This is a larger aperture scope with a longer focal length, giving him better resolution ... He's been imaging the ISS for years now, but this is certainly a break-through image ...
They aren't using CCD cameras but rather video cameras ... even cheap web-cams can now provide incredible views of the planets, as already stated, because we take hundreds or thousands of images and now have software that keeps the good images and discards the bad ones. It then "stacks" the good ones to improve image density. There is an article in Sky and Telescope recently by Dr. Don Parker that talks about this.
Dave VE3GYQ/W8 Spencerville, OH