The 6th Workshop of the CMO Planetary
Observers
in FUKUI
3
January 1998
Left to
right: HIKI, MIMAMI, HIGA, QUARRA, AKUTSU, NAKAJIMA, MURAKAMI & NISHITA
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e had a small
but intimate and pleasant meeting mainly concerning the CCD technique of
planetary observations in
* On 1
January HIGA from Okinawa flied and arrived at
* On 2
January, they went to the EIHEIJI Zen Buddhist Temple built in
the 13 Century, and they as well as MINAMI welcomed MURAKAMI from
* On the morning of 3 January, AKUTSU reached 
and NAKAJIMA as well as
HIGA, MURAKAMI, NISHITA and MINAMI welcomed Gianni QUARRA (see #179
--- 25 Sept 1996 issue) who took a train from
Left to right: Mk, Ak, GQr: Photo by HIGA
* The talks were delivered
in the following way:
1. Tomio AKUTSU: CCD by Lynxx
2. Yasunobu
HIGA: CCD Imaging by XV1000
3. Masatsugu MINAMI:
1996/97 OAA Observations
4. Akinori
NISHITA: Coming 1998/99 Mars
5. Giovanni QUARRA: CCD
by
6. Masami MURAKAMI:
Internet in 1997
7. Toshi-aki
HIKI: Fresh Resolute in 1999
8. Tomio AKUTSU: Jupiter
Imaging
9. Giovanni QUARRA:
Practice by MiPS
* AKUTSU talked two hrs,
sometimes disturbed and followed a lot of exchanges of questions and answers:
His combination of a 32cm spec and the Lynxx brought
a lot of nice images of Jupiter and Saturn, but the B light troubles occurred
in the case of Mars. He uses a set of the Edmund filters, but the IR rejection
filter (SBIG) did not work well.
* After AKUTSU's talk we all went down to see HIKI who arrived at
13:35 at
* HIGA uses a rather
unique way to make CCD images: He first takes the Video moving images by use of
Sony's 3CCD Camera VX1000, and secondly picks out better still images 50 to 100
and sums them up on the Mac monitor. Then he image-processes
them by use of the Photoshop. In the case of Mars, the unsharp masking method looks no good. He rather likes a
"hard light" image. His three colour
decomposition is made through the inner prisms of the camera, and the B light
one rejects well the longer-wave leakage.
* MINAMI talked about a
few topics of the 1996/97 observations, but here we omit them because we are to
write them in NOTEs later; just we note that the
total number of the domestic observations proved over 6200 (while 5500 in the
preceding 1994/95 apparition).
* Then NISHITA showed a
graph of the apparent diameter of the coming Mars in 1998/99. It will reach 16 arcsecs near 24 April 1999 opposition, but the apparent
declination will be low deep down to -11°.
* QUARRA's
talk and his images on the monitor most attracted the audience: His work has
been well known among us because of beautiful images he and his colleagues took
during the 1998/97 apparition by a combination of the telescope of 30cm f/24 Cassegrain
and the camera ISIS CCD-800 14HS which contains Kodak-0400 sensor with 768 ×
512 pixels as well as a chip of a 14-bit A/D converter which divides the
digital signal into 214 = 16384 levels of brightness. Notable is that the
camera is equipped with 8 bandpass filters out of
which the blue one centred at 420nm was taken notice
by all attendants. This does not allow any serious leakage of the longer waves
and gives true B images. Its manufacturer is unknown however even to GQr. A UV 
filter centred
at 330nm is also equipped but is not always used because the exposure time is
longer. As tothe exposure rates see eg p2025 in CMO #186. Some discussion was given about
KAF-0400E which may improve the violet region.
Gianni talks: Photo by Hg
* The images, many in a
minute, are filed in Fits and are made to sum up into a composite image and
image processed by use of French-made MiPS software
(also now available in Japan).
* QUARRA showed us a lot
of images of Planets as well as his co
lleagues at Pic and others. It seems to be easy to obtain the Mercator map of Jupiter by MiPS. The highlight of the show on the monitor was
the image of the planet Saturn which rotated, and our eyes, as if from the
windows of a space- craft, could watch gradually the rear side of the 
planet while the scattered
stars were moving and another planet came into sight. What wonderful
workmanship! We all involuntarily clapped hands for the work: Gianni joined us
in our ovation also by applauding in praise of Andrea LEO to whom he owed much.
In the meantime it was getting dark outside.
* We moved then to the
Observatory, while the sky was not clear and the planet Saturn was dim at the
eyepiece: We took some pictures of ourselves around the pillar of the
refractor.
Left to right, front:
HIKI, NISHITA; back: MURAKAMI, NAKAJIMA,
AKUTSU, MINAMI, HIGA & Gianni
* Back to the conference
room, MURAKAMI talked about the Internet world in 1997 especially about the HST
home page and the MarsWatch. MINAMI additionally
commented.
* Then HIGA expressed how
impressive and useful the present conference was to him, and HIKI regretted his
observations at the latter half of the 1996/97 apparition and expressed his
resolute for the coming apparition.
* We again got out of the
Museum and went down to eat out. Returning the Museum again AKUTSU talked about
his observations of Jupiter and then Gianni showed us his practice in image
processing by the use of MiPS
starting from an original Mars image of NISHITA taken at the Fukui City
Observatory by a combination of the 20cm refractor and Mutoh CV-04 CCD Camera
in 1997.
Left to right: NISHITA, Gianni &
AKUTSU (Hg photo)
The original one (R image)
looked not so good but gradually by a series of restorations by the use of an
algorithm for about five times, the image became miraculously much improved.
Gianni says that he usually does 20 times. Syrtis Mj and
* It was quite late nearly
at midnight, and we moved to Mikuni while our conversation did not cease before
three o'clock. The next morning each guest left from
(Mn)
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