- I managed to capture another image of Planet X last night from sea level in Hawaii. The photo was taken about 8:00 PM and I used the HNsky Program and the coordinates given for April 7. I had to put my digital camera on it's highest quality setting to get an image (I could only fit four images on my memory card as apposed to ninety-three with the settings I used to get an image seven days ago). Planet X is now much larger in size, but with much lower light intensity. It appears that Planet X and it's moons are now engulfed in a cloud of dust. I imagine this is because Planet X is now slowing down.
- Chris
- Don't be surprised if a 20x zoom rivals Rent-A-Scope frames, for instance, when I use my 8*21 binoculars, the field of view that I see is the Hyades circle. So better binoculars could see finer details.
- Naji
Indeed, Chris has captured Planet X at a moment when it is braking, the momentum in the dust cloud pushing it forward around the corpus and sides.
- Chris does not say whether or not 7 zoom is all optical and no digital zoom. But Chris’s 1.2 megapixel mode saves 93 fotos and his 5 megapixel mode saves only 4 fotos on his flash-memory card. It might be that 1.2 mp fotos are stored as JPEGS and his 5 mp fotos are stored as TIFF files ( as that for French Photog ). Actually Chris' star chart with Planet X is not a 10 megabyte JPEG but a 1 megabyte JPEG of a 5 mp foto. It seems then that much confusion is possible if calibration of field of view is not done for the maximum zoom used for a particular resolution mode, unless the digital zoom option is disabled. Field of view calibration should convert vertical feet ( or meters ) height and distance for an object into degrees of field of view, which is the same for short distances as well as planet/star length distances.
zoom 7 7 20 17.5 vert field degs 5.4 5.4 1.89 2.16 vertical resolution 960 1920 1920 1920 arcsec per pixel 20.25 10.125 3.54 4.05 min pixel diam 4 86 23 86 Px Charted Dist 0.930 0.701 0.701 0.701 from sun (bil miles) Calc Px Corpus Diam 401,696 3,351,587 313,724 1,340,634 (in miles ) # times Px core size 12.67x 105.70x 9.89x 42.28x
- The above result shows the work of Chris at 7 x, the Frenchman at 20 x, and Chris at 7 x optical + 2.5 x digital zoom enabled for a 17.5 total zoom . In either case, it appears the Planet X Corpus is growing wildly as the Planet X slows and the dust tail overtakes Px and adds to its effective Corpus diameter.
- J