CraigT82

Nice work, seeing wasn’t great here too early on, May have improved later but I’d packed up by 11.30pm.

Good idea to reduce image size always makes it worth while when the seeing is poor. Better than looking at a big blurry image! 

Looking good Pete, seeing here on the 2nd was abysmal, was better last night though. It is just nice to be out isnt it.

I saw you replying to that C14 ad did anything come of that?!

Nice shots Neil amazing what can be done with that size of scope and no barlow. Good Mars too looks like maybe a very large dust storm over Argyre Planitia,  1 o’clock in your pic 

Nice shots,  the IR Saturn looks great. 

Very nice Geof, you were up later than me I was fast asleep but the time the GRS hit the meridian  

Nice image, think it might have been APs too close to the limb? 

With a DSLR, yes… use 2” accessories if you can.

 
1.25” accessories will likely lead to vignetting, also the physical connection tends to be more secure with the 2” size. 

After a hasty testing session of new kit the other night got out for a little while last night with the intent of actually producing an image, first one in over a year. 

Need to check my primary I think it got knocked about during house move and isn't sat right in the cell, stellar test image had definite astigmatism. Also couldn't get the bloomin ADC to completely correct the dispersion either no matter how I adjusted it.

• KIT: SW 300p on AZ-EQ6 (in AltAz mode). ASI485mc.   ZWO ADC.    Baader Q barlow 2.25x (working at 3.4x).    Astronomik L2 filter
• CAPTURE & PROCESS: 10x90sec captures in FC.   Best 25% stacked in AS3.   Image derotation.   Sharpening in Astrosurface. Finishing in Gimp.
• DETAILS: Image scale 0.12"pp/5200mmF/17.   Planet at 36 deg.   Derotated to 22:16 UTC.  Seeing varied 2/5 to 3/5 at times (strong but consistent jetstream) transparency varied 4/10 to 8/10 (some scudding high cloud). Captured from Taunton, UK

Thanks for looking & Clear Skies!

Old blue tube SW 300p on and nice new AZEQ6. Can’t believe how well this thing tracks in AZ mode, look how tight the RoI is around Jupiter!

The 462 is more sensitive than the 120, though if you take the pixel size difference into account probably not that much of a gap. Maybe transparency was poor for that capture? 
 

Do the sorting/registration/stacking in AS3 rather than Pixinsight… might help a bit? Would still take a while though with the full sensor size of the 585.

Thanks Neil I shall give that a whirl and see what happens 

It’s interesting I wonder if it’s something to do with the image measurement for the video derotation, do you take your image from the centre of the long video Neil or somewhere else? I tried stacking the central 1000 frames and measuring that to run the video derotation but maybe that’s not the best way. 

Ah I wouldn’t have know if it did I was only out there for 20 mins, got a bunch of new kit so just wanted to check everything worked ok really, then off to bed. 2 yr old likes to start his days at the crack of dawn!  

22 hours ago, geoflewis said:

I had my 2nd session with my new ASI462 camera on the C14 last night. The seeing was better than last week, but still very in/out, with focus changing minute by minute, making it difficult to determine best focus. Io and it's shadow were in transit, so I opted for a series of 2 minute SER videos, which I de-rotated in WinJupos before grading in AS3!, with further derotation and stacking of the TIFFs in WinJupos. Sharpening was done using wavelets in Registax6.

The stacked image had a large blur where Io and it's shadow were in transit, so I pasted them back into the stacked and sharpened image from a single SER that represented the correct timestamp of the de-rotated image. Final colour saturation and levels adjustments were applied in Affinity Photo.

As others have reported, Io itself is somewhat lost due to poor contrast aginst Jupiter's bright cloud surface.

Thanks for looking, comments and feedback welcome.

 

Really nice image Geof by the way! 

I did a video derotation on a 6 minute capture on that night too and the moon itself was streaked just as it would be using the image derotation tool, but the shadow wasn’t yet on the disk so can’t speak for that but I’d imagine it would be streaked too. I thought the same as Geof in that the moons are moving at a different rate to the jupiters rotation. 
 

The data I got was total rubbish and have junked it . Plus side was it was my first use of the new AZ-EQ6 which I bought months ago but not had time to use yet. Had it in AZ mode and it worked like a charm.

It’s a sharpening process, I’ve found it works quite well

That’s looks nice and natural to me tbh. It’s just one of those things where to get good fine detail with a smooth natural look you really need good seeing. Just gotta keep getting out there and you’ll catch one of those greats nights sooner or later.
 

I always avoid any kind of AI denoising or sharpening , images tend to get a certain look to them when they’ve been used and can usually spot it, saying that though you’re looks nice and you must have been really gentle with it I guess.  AI sharpening can also introduce false detail as into an image too which can make it look good on first inspection but when you look closely you can tell (there was a big hoohaa on Astrobin about it a couple of years ago). I just don’t think the AI stuff copes that well with tiny scale planetary images as opposed to big megapixel dslr shots. 

I really like the Wiener deconvolution in Astrosurface so maybe have a go with that and see if it helps.

I’m assuming it might have been sorted in the seven years since. 

I use this one, has a cigar socket and use it to power my AZ-EQ6.

RoyPow Portable Charger 30W PD USB-C Power Bank with 12V Cigarette Lighter Outlet, External Battery Pack for Laptop MacBook Air iPad iPhone Dash Cam Camping Travelling 【2022 New Upgraded】 https://amzn.eu/d/etWUYWh

Have also used a couple of Talentcell packs in the past and they are also decent. 
 

What is your total current draw? Would need to do some maths to see what you need for 10 hours. 
 

Never tried to get any of these power cells onto a plane though.

For an unguided DSLR image that’s really decent, especially as it’s not an easy target. Really nice stars all the way to the corners and that’s half the battle. 

If you use an Allen key and tighten up this screw just a little it will stop the focuser drawtube from sliding down under weight.

It is a balancing act to get the tightness of that screw just right so that it holds the weight but doesn’t make the focus knobs too stiff. Tiny adjustments are what you want.

11 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Do you know what type of aberrations does ADC introduce?

I don’t fully understand it myself but more info here

https://skyinspector.co.uk/adcs-part2/

Don’t forget that when using an ADC, the ADC introduces an aberration that gets worse with faster F ratios (hence why you should always use the barlow in front of the ADC)

I wonder at what point the ADC aberration will outweigh the benefit of critical sampling. Might be worth some investigation. 

How are you viewing your SER files? I use SER player (downloaded from PIPP website). That will read the bayer pattern in the SER header and temporarily debayer the video file before playing which will give you a clue if the wrong bayer pattern is written into the SER header (That Bayer pattern will be written into the SER header by FC whether or not it is debayering the video). You can actually read the SER file header in SER player too.

I think the best thing to try now is to take your undebayered Jupiter video capture and run it though PIPP or AS3 to debayer it with the debayer pattern GBRG, and if that doesn’t work try the other patterns to see which is the correct one, then compare that with what is written into the file header (using SER player).