wouterdhoye

Lovely shots!

Well. It seems these are getting hard to get. They don’t even show up on optique unterlinden’s webshop anymore and that’s supposed to be the European agent foor Tak. Also on the website of the belgian dealer only the em11 is currently listed.

I’m not really on a tight budget. I believe especially with mounts if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Now for the rainbow mounts. I’m a bit reluctant to be an early adopter. Nor am I familiar with their long term reputation. The FLT132 is about 925mm focal length and weighs around 10kg could be more or a little less but one has to add accessories l a finder, etc. So it’s a pretty hefty scope for it’s aperture. Wouter.

Hi, As the subject of the post mentions i’m in the market for a new mount. It should become a replacement for my GP-DX and for my Losmandy G11. (Both non goto) and it should be complimentary to my Paramount MX. Scopes that should ride on it are my Omegon CC 154/1848 and my WO FLT132 (not together off course) Use will be strictly for lunar and planetary imaging and occasional visual observing I have no intentions on long exposure deep sky imaging (i live in bright Belgian skies) I’m willing to go for a premium mount in both fit, finish as performance. One important spec is that it should be able to take vixen dovetails, and not (or not only) Losmandy size. Currently I’m leaning towards an Vixen AXJ or SXP2. Being more than happy with the performance my GP-DX has given me for about 20 years (only the DD1 was replaced for a Boxdoerfer) so, what are your thoughts? Thanks, and clear skies. Wouter.

I agree with the above comments. A successful first effort. Your data for sure looks good. You can give it a few tries on the processing. I personally make no use of wavelet sharpening. For some reason i never got my head around it. I use a lucy richardson deconvolution on the stacked image. Further processing in photoshop includes a combination of unsharp masks, high pass filter sharpening, camera raw filter etc. What also might help in getting more pleasing images is converting to greyscale. This will reduce any color fringing caused by atmospheric dispersion. the use of drizzle 1.5x in autostakkert! is only of use if the seeing is really good and if the raw data is slightly undersampled. With data that is already oversampled it is of no use at all.

Lovely set of images. Thanks for sharing

Lovely images. I believe there is more potential though. Have you tried performing a Lucy-Richardson deconvolution sharpening on it. Can do wonders. Wouter.

Splendid image. Wonderful amount of detail, and masterfully processed!

For sure some very good images 👍

Hi, Another full disc mosaic of the near full moon. The altitude is getting lower and so is the seeing. Nonetheless even though there is a slight loss of detail resolved this is more than made up by the spectacualr albedo contrasts visible at this illumination. the full res image is still quite nice to look at.

we all have to start somewhere. 😀

I f you mean distortion by seeing, then yes, autostakkert will correct for distorion by using hundreds or even thousands of alignment points in an image. correcting the placement of these alignment points corrects for distortion or in fact displacement between individual frames. Wouter.

The point of stacking is in fact to reduce noise. software like autostakkert on top of that will also asses the quality and only use the best images for the stacksize you selected. Now, how many frames you need in a stack depends on the noise level in the single frames. The more noise in the frames the more you will need to reduce it. Now to reduce the noise by 50% you need 4 times as many frames. So the sequence is like 1 - 4 - 16 - 64 - 256,.... and so on. As it is so camera dependent All i can advise you to do is experiment and try different stack sizes in Autostakkert. With my ASI 174MM i tended to use 500 frame stack sizes to get noise to acceptable levels for high res work, and then during post processing still some noise reduction was necessary to keep the residual noise in check. With my new QHY 462, 200 frames stack requires only very very mild noise reduction and to some no noise reduction in post processing at all. So experiment, you have the data.. Clear skies, Wouter.

Well cropping will not get you any closer or give you extra magnification. You just need to mate your camera and aperture. And that taking into consideration the use of filters. e.g. the ASI 178 with 2.4micron pixels will reach critcal sampling at f/12. If you'd go to longer wavelengths like red of IR it even drops to f/9. So a less powerful barlow is the best solution to get you f/7 telescope closer to critical sampling focal ratio. if you used a luminance filter you also have to take into consideration softness due to atmospheric dispersion. you can actually use color filters with a color camera to cope with this. I used a green filter for below image taken with a 6" f/12 scope. pixel size is 2.9 micron, so in fact a little bit undersampled. Clear skies, Wouter.

very nice. Good capture, and good processing. Well done 👍

With the moon you really don't have to worry about rotation. unless you intend to image for many minutes. I never do derotation with 5000 frames shots at 100fps and 6000mm focal lenght. So not to worry about.

A delightful image!

Very nice, especially for a small aperture telescope. in my book certainly not overcooked.

hi, i think stacking will not have much sense with only 100 or so images. But with 100 images you will have a lot of images to picj the best one from. Wouter.

lovely images!

beautiful image! 👍

If it would be my choice i'd try with the 462C. Taking many shots with a dslr kan work, but the result will most likely not be as good as what one can achieve with an astro camera. But what keeps you from experimenting. If it doesn't work out the moon will always come back 😀

Hi, only a very mild noise reduction was used: and that was the only noise reduction applied to the entire image. Actually the amount of noise produced with this camera is so incredibly low. With my ASI 174 i had to use significantly stronger noise reduction, and often multiple times between processing steps. Now I have to admit that I do not like noise one bit. Luckily we all have different tastes or otherwise every picture would look the same 😀 Wouter.

Hi, under good conditions even modest scopes can get you remarkable results. below a 29 panel mosaic resulting in a 42Mpx image of our moon. 29 panels of 2000 frames each using a green filter on a 6" cassegrain @ f/12 equiped with a QHY 462C camera. for sure click to get the full image. https://astrob.in/full/9u4c2v/0/?real= Clear skies, Wouter.

Excellent work!