Mars, a poor jupiter & Saturn.

[tich]

I managed some time out at the dark site over the bank holiday which I thought was surprising to say the least so I did some planetary imaging on friday night.

All images were taken using a 250P, 4X imagemate & QHY5L-II camera that were stacked in Registax & tweaked in Photoshop.

First target was Mars so after some initial niggles sorting out my set up I started to record some video footage. The end result didn't turn out to bad considering the seeing & it's been my best Mars so far but still not great.





My Second target was Jupiter as it was still quite high up in the sky, higher than Mars anyway so I rattled off some more vidoes & oh dear;



Saturn wasn't much better either although in its defence it was still pretty low at the time so I wasn't expecting it to be great.





This is just a short video I cobbled together of the two nights;

[Grotemobile]

I think you have done very well.

Your tracking is very good.That

seems to be the trick.Just getting

it on to the laptop using the 4X imagemate

must have been a battle.It does

make a difference using a dark site.

Just carting  the gear, & getting

it all working.That is what puts a

lot of us off.Well done. 

Steve.

[oldpink]

very nice shots
I've given up on Saturn as its way too low for me now, tried yesterday but it wasn't much above 10 degrees' and I couldn't get any detail

[si@nite]

Nice mars images,i don't think that's a poor image of Saturn at all, especially at such low elevation, but I do think Jupiters past getting any fine detail now!

[Barv]

Nice images Tich. Saturn and Mars are nothing to be ashamed of given their relatively low altitudes!

Regards

Harvey

[JamesF]

Lots of people seem not to get on with the ImageMate, so I think you've done pretty well there.

James

[tich]

I've only had a couple of good results using the imagemate James I've had better images using a cheap 3X achro barlow. I've also noticed if I've had a long session imaging planets lets say I start using the 3X then up to the imagemate the planet itself is a lot darker so I have to boost the gain up somewhat. I'm only guessing that the glass used is much thicker that's causing it.

[JamesF]

I've only had a couple of good results using the imagemate James I've had better images using a cheap 3X achro barlow. I've also noticed if I've had a long session imaging planets lets say I start using the 3X then up to the imagemate the planet itself is a lot darker so I have to boost the gain up somewhat. I'm only guessing that the glass used is much thicker that's causing it.

The other thing to consider is that even though you're only going from 3x to 4x power, you're almost halving the light arriving at any given photosite by doing so.

James

[Pete Presland]

the Saturn and Mars images are very good! Saturn is even showing a hint of polar vortex so well done for that. not sure about the Jupiter, maybe a focussing issue?

[tich]

I don't think it was the focus as i'm sure it would have been the same with the other 2 planets, another thing I can think what caused the bad Jupiter is as it was to the west even though I was at the dark site there is a town on the horizon & maybe heat rising up was an issue?

Ok so I'm beginning to pull at some straws here lol.

[simmo39]

Nice images, need to get Saturn too.