August 2024 Meeting: Planetary Imaging
Presented by Ballard Bare
This will be a re-run of what was intended for the July meeting, which didn’t happen because of the July 4th holiday the next day. For the last of our Summer Season of meetings via Zoom, Ballard Bare will be showing us how to take and process gorgeous images of our planets. The technique is different than what is used for deep sky images (galaxies, nebulae, and the like), where long exposures are used for capturing their exceedingly faint light and detail, and low magnification is needed as most are large (some larger than the full Moon). Planets, by contrast, are bright, but tiny. Ballard will show how these different characteristics are used to advantage in creating the best images of our solar neighbors.
Ballard Bare is a retired Software Development engineer with a BS degree in Physics from UCSB and some computer science graduate courses from the University of Santa Clara. He has worked for HP, Netapp, Qlogic, and a couple of Startups, and has over 30 patents in Computer Protocols, Networking and Storage. Ballard has always been interested in astronomy and photography, and ground the optics for his first telescope at age 12. Now being retired, Ballard has had more time to indulge these interests.
Examples of Ballard’s work can be seen at: https://ballardbare.smugmug.com/Astronomical-Images
** Note **
For the “Summer Season” (July and August) the NC Astronomers will be meeting on-line via Zoom. Club members will receive the keys to the Zoom conference in their email via Groups.io.
NC Astronomers Meets on the 1st Wednesday each month at 7pm in the
Madelyn Helling Library Community Room
980 Helling Way
Nevada City, CA 95959
(September – May)
** NC Astronomers “YouTube” channel **
Many of the presentations are recorded and posted to the club’s YouTube channel. Please see https://www.youtube.com/@ncastronomers9981/videos