John_D

Thanks, I haven't tried SharpCap because, according to Google at least, it doesn't run well with Wine on Linux. However all the posts about this seem to be a few years old so I'll have a look.

Thanks Geof.

This is an attempt at a longer animation of Jupiter and its moons. It's 30 frames, each produced from a 2 minute video and taken at 5 minute intervals. Ganymede then Europa pass in front of the planet followed by Io behind. Each frame is displayed for 200ms so it's 5 fps for 6 seconds. The seeing was not good that night and, as can be seen from the video, varied quite a bit during the 2 hours that it took to capture the whole thing. Each frame of the video was processed in the same way and I could have gone back and done a bit more work on the slightly fuzzy frames. However the ultimate aim is to get even more frames to make a smoother animation and then it becomes more important to develop a largely automated process. Creating the 30 frames took about 2 hours of manual editing which was quite long enough for me! Of course with a higher fps each frame will be displayed for a shorter time so processing becomes relatively less important. Video was captured using my 6" reflector, a 2x Barlow, an ASI120MC-S camera and ASIStudio running on a Linux laptop. Processing used PIPP, Autostackert3, Registax6 and GIMP. Next I want to try and automate as much of the process as possible. ASIStudio can certainly do captures at regular intervals and PIPP has a batch mode, not sure about the rest.

Ah the balaclava look, always fashionable 😁 I too sport something similar on the colder nights at the telescope and if I could only find a way of stopping my glasses fogging up my happiness would be complete.

Interesting thanks. Does the S50 have any options to automatically create Gigapan or 360 degree images?

Heated seat sound good - with the possible risk of nodding off if the seeing isn't too good 🥱

From the elder son, should keep me going until Boxing Day 😁

Thanks all, let's hope that Santa is reading this 😁

Are there any recommendations for an observing chair for a reflector telescope? I normally mix viewing and imaging and stand for the viewing and take a seat while the camera is doing its thing. But it would be nice to ba able to have a seat during an extended viewing session. ( +1 for the warm clothing, that makes a huge difference in my experience. I've been taking a flask of tea out as well recently which is very pleasant. Haven't tried the hip flask yet 😁 )

Ah, thank you. I'd seen the resolution drop down but not linked it with the "Move the position of ROI" symbol on the viewing area. I should have RTFM a little more carefully I've fiddled with various USB settings but unfortunately it's not managed to fix the frame rate problem

Thanks WinJupos was next on my list of things to investigate. It loads and seems to run OK under Wine on Linux.

Thanks Oddly enough I'd wondered if it was the temperature as well but I have managed to replicate some of the frame rate drops while testing indoors. However that doesn't preclude there being multiple problems! The author of AstroDMx ( Nicola ) has kindly investigated some of the issues that I was seeing but as they're intermittent and only seem to happen on my laptop then that's a software developer's worst nightmare. For now I'm chalking it up to an incompatibility somewhere in the myriad software libraries / hardware components in the laptop but I will keep testing to see if I can find a cause. One further thought is that an SSD may help with the lower temperatures if you haven't already got one. It would certainly help with the speed of my laptop, along with upgrading the RAM!

A quick follow up to my original post. After some technical issues ( see below for details ), the inevitable cloudy skies and the purchase of a budget 2x Barlow during the FLO Black Friday sale I came up with a short animation Ganymede disappearing behind Jupiter the other night: I was actually testing varying exposure times to see what difference it made - answer, not much when you're capturing raw. Then I realised that I could string them together into a basic animated GIF. I think that the seeing was quite poor, certainly the video that I took of the moon looked as if it was from the bottom of a swimming pool. Hopefully future images will be a little sharper. A couple of questions: I don't think that the red splodge at the bottom is the great red spot because the first image was taken at 23:20 on 19/12/23 which doesn't line up with any online transit predictions or the image on Stellarium. Any suggestions on what it might be are gratefully received. Is there a convention as to how these images should be presented, e.g. north pole at the top? Technical comments: I failed to work out what was causing the problem with the frame rate drops. Both AstroDMx and FireCapture exhibited this problem on the laptop but not on my desktop machine. However ZWO supply an app called ASIStudio which is a much simpler tool than the other two but, other than not having an ROI feature, it does all I want. More importantly the frame rate stays constant. The 8 frames in the GIF were all 120s long and captured at ~28 FPS which is fine for an ancient laptop and USB2. PIPP absolutely refused to debayer the raw video correctly. Whatever setting I used just resulted in a strange purple hue to the output. I "fixed" the problem by getting AutoStakkert! to do the debayering instead which worked fine. The only wrinkle was to tick the "Protect Bayer Pattern When Centering/Cropping" box on the "Input Options" tab in PIPP.

Great photos. How did you set up the camera?

I am. 100% cloud here tonight and drizzle so no chance of a repeat ☹️

It was 10.30 pm before it cleared enough here. I saw 6 bright ones in about 45 min, all roughly in the direction of Orion. No pictures or video as I didn't think that it was worth setting up any cameras. ( I'd forgotten how relaxing it is to just sit and look at the night sky 😁 )

The Swiss sneer at your rail replacement bus and raise you to - https://www.railwaygazette.com/passenger/rail-replacement-helicopter-service-takes-off/65349.article 😁

This is so true. Having spent my professional life designing electronic/software devices of various types and sizes it's very difficult to get them to work reliably 100% of the time. And it's an order of magnitude more difficult when you try to integrate several of them together. Looking at some of the YouTuber telescope setups I'm amazed any of them work at all 😁

Very nice transition from day to night. In the past I've tried a sunset time lapse with a manual camera which eventually worked ok but involved an awful lot of lot of faffing about in post-processing. Getting the camera to do it seems a much better idea 😁

Very nice. Something like this is on my to-do list as well 😁 Are there any specific techniques you use for matching the exposures between each panel?

Thanks. Yes AstroDMx allows you to set an ROI. At the moment, mainly I think because I'm using USB2, I'm getting roughly half the maximum specified frame rate from the camera: 1280 x 960 - 30 fps vs 60 fps max 800 x 600 - 48 fps vs 85 fps max This will be fine as long as I can work out what's causing the occasional drop in frame rates. At the moment it could be anything from extraneous processes to bottlenecks writing to disk. Things like turning off the real time Debayering doesn't seem to make any difference.

Nice. But be careful of the sawdust if you need to cut or sand it because it can cause severe irritation. I've given up using African hardwoods on my wood turning lathe because I was never quit sure what allergic reaction I was going to get next 😁

This is an attempt at Jupiter ( and Io ) with my TAL 6" reflector taken on 14/11. The initial plan was to use my Nikon D3100 DSLR to take the video but the D3100 has very little manual control over exposure in video mode and, in earlier tests, the planet was just too over-exposed whatever I did. There is an exposure compensation control but this achieves the result by modifying the lens aperture which of course isn't going to work when the camera is attached to a telescope! So I splashed out on a ZWO ASI 120MC camera which is what was used here. Ideally I'd like some more magnification and I think that a 2.5x Barlow would be the optimum size for this setup. However when I bought the telescope I got a TAL 4x Barlow with it so I'll experiment with that first. One problem that I had was that I captured the video using AstroDMx on an old laptop ( running Lubuntu 22.04 ) with only 4Gbyte of RAM and no USB 3 port. I was generally getting about 30 fps but, on occasion, it would drop down to about 8 fps for no apparent reason. I suspect that things like auto-update checks were getting in the way. I need to see what services I can turn off and maybe increase the priority of AstroDMx as well. Failing that I'll have to lever open the wallet again and get more RAM and an SSD. The processing used PIPP / Autostakkert / Registax all running under Wine on my desktop Ubuntu 22.04 PC. It was a 3 min video of ~5000 frames, the best 1500 selected by PIPP and the best 25% stacked in Autostakkert. I have no idea whether those numbers are sensible or not! I also did some final cropping and tweaks using GIMP. Now waiting for the clouds to clear so that I can try the Barlow ...

That's what I do. An ex-work colleague who was a very good amateur photographer suggested to me that anything over 300 DPI was pointless. However that was a few years ago now and I'm happy to believe that printing technology has moved on 😁. He also routinely printed images at 100 DPI and got good results.

Lovely images, the closeups are great but I'm a sucker for a full disk image. One of my longer term goals is to take a full disk picture that I can print and hang on the wall. ( I've also woken at about 4 a m. the last two mornings but it's either been cloudy or raining so I've gone back to bed. Perhaps I need more committment 😁 )