CraigT82

This mornings session was on Saturn, though seeing conditions were poorer than they were on the morning of the 16th it was still worth getting out there. This one is 3x90secs videos in colour with the 462c, with 6x90secs in IR685 with the 290m, added as a luminance to the colour image. 300p, QHY462c/GPCAM3 290m, APM2.7x barlow, ZWO ADC. (I don't think I've captured the Encke gap, I think it's a sharpening artifact)

Very nice, lots of detail

Beautiful! Does it focus using a sliding tube? I had an old Irving focuser that had a sliding brass tube section and it was surprisingly smooth and accurate.

My heritage 130p is surprisingly good on planetary, with Baader BCOs and the lightwieght 2.25x barlow lens (the one meant for the Hyperion zoom). I conducted a shootout between it and a 127mm mak and a Tal 100RS I had at the same time, all mounted on a Skytee. To my surprise I preferred the views through the H130p to the other two.

Thanks Neil. C&C always very much appreciated. I know what you mean about the colour balance, even looking at Juno and Hubble images online there is plenty of variation the the colouring, I guess even the people processing them will have some bias too. How do you tell the tue colour of Jupiter... I guess you could try to match the eyepiece view but even then different optics will produce differing hues. Short of stowing away on the next spacecraft hesding that way and paying it a visit in person we will always be just guessing! I have done a quick phone process with more blue to get the whites whiter than white (a 'Daz' version?!). This one is 6x90sec videos. Winjupos is a gamechanger and definitely worth it to crank up the number of frames in the stack and get those nice smooth looking images. Using the OSC makes things much quicker too, I only spent 15 mins in winjupos for this, would have been nearer an hour for an RGB capture.

Very nice Neil, is this a mosaic or single shot? Are you controlling the camera with Sharpcap?

Managed to get first light with the 300p on Jupiter (16/07/21). Very pleasing result with the planet at about 30 degrees elevation. Was quite a lot of near ground seeing issues after the hot day too, so should be able to do better with better conditions. Plans are afoot for the following: 1) fabricate new secondary holder from 50mm diameter delrin rod and glue secondary using three blobs of RTV technique (rather than square of thick double sided tape currently employed) 2) Build a Foucault knife edge tester and have a look at the primary. More out of curiosity than anything else. 3) Fabricate a new primary mirror cell from 8mm plate and angle 6082 aluminium with 6 point floating rear support and 6 point edge support. Have purchased a drill press, bench grinder and other metalworking bits and bobs for this. Plenty to keep me busy for the foreseeable.

Thanks Neil, yes the initial processing I did on the laptop with the rubbish screen. Have redone it using my monitor and now have a final result, what do you think? I tweaked the colour and levels and tackled the bright edge of the limb and added a little gaussian blur around the edges of the planet.

Yes getting yourself a monitor is a great idea. I have a lenovo thinkpad which has am awful screen. I hook it up to a cheap 23" monitor i nabbed from work and the difference between images process using the monitor and those using the laptop screen is huge.

Fantastic shots... the Jupiter is a stunner for only one capture, very well done

It's not the easiest to be honest but it does have more features than registax. The wavelets function has only two sliders: low frequency and high frequency, so simpler than RS in that sense. There is also an LR deconvolution feature and to get the best of that you upload an image of a star to allow it to calculate the PSF and do the deconvolution (similar to pixinsight), but I haven't really bothered with that feature yet. it also does sell the other stuff: levels exposure, contrast, rgb align, white balance, resizing etc etc.. I've been using it for about a year now and I haven't gone back to RS since for planetary. For lunar I still find the multiple frequency levels of wavelet adjustment in RS handy.

So 8 of the 14 captures were junk. The best 6 I ran through Winjupos and got a nicely improved image. Very pleased with this big ole bucket.

Thanks sunshine 🌞

FINALLY managed to get out with the 300p that I've had for months and not been able to use. Shot 15x 90s vids of jupiter. Have only processed one single video so far which produced the image below. I'm going to run all the best ones through winjupos and see if I can improve on this one. SW300p, QHY462c, ZWO ADC, APM 2.7x barlow operating at 2.87x (f/14.3). AS3 > Astrosurface > Affinity photo with a final colour tweak in PS express on my phone as I processed it on my laptop which has a pants screen and I can never get exposure or colour right on it. Will do proper process on monitor. Single 90 sec video Derotation of 6x 90sec videos

Have you lined up the main scope and the finder scope? It is best to do this in the daytime on a distant landmark.

I have had this issue with more than one scope. What I do in this case is: 1) Set the secondary mirror boss central in the tube by adjusting the 4 spider vane screws around the edge of the OTA. Use a ruler or similar to measure the distance from the central screw to the tube wall along each of the 4 vanes and adjust so all 4 measurements are equal. 2) adjust the three secondary mirror tilt screws so that the secondary mirror holder is not tilted, I.e. there is the same amount of thread showing on each of the three screws between the secondary boss and the secondary holder (the bit that the mirror is stuck to). After doing these two steps the secondary mirror should be near as dammit bang in the centre of the tube and you now want to aim the focuser at it. 3) look through the focuser with concenter in it and see if the secondary is centered or not in the up/ down direction (I.e. traversing the short axis of the OTA). 4) if it is out in the up down direction, rectify by tilting the focuser by whatever means necessary. In the past I've used washers between the focuser and tube to force a tilt. 5) if it is out of centre in the other direction (along the long axis of the ota) then adjust this by loosening or tightening the central screw in the secondary boss to move the mirror back or forth. Once the focuser and secondary are lined up, continue with the collimation as normal. Hopefully that should get you there. The secondary collimation isn't that important really, just affecting the field illumination mainly. The primary collimation is the important one and will affect the sharpness of the views.

Excellent work 👍

Orion optics can provide both cheapish rolled rings and expensive CNC alloy rings. I use a pair of the rolled rings on my 220mm Fullerscope and they work great. Will need radius blocks to use with a flat dovetail as there is no flat on the rings. IIRC I paid about £55 for the pair, custom sized for my 250mm OTA

Very nice work 👍👍👍 Some nice surface detail on the moons too, I'd be super chuffed with that set of images!

Is that line definitely not there on the pre-sharpened image? You often get lines like that when using AS3 to stack and comes from the placement of the alignment boxes, using different sized boxes usually fixes it.

Coming along nicely. What are you going to mount the whiffle trees to? Was just looking at your drawings and couldn't quite tell. I was thinking they would be mounted to two points of the triangle but you have the triangle in the other orientation with one point facing down.

I don't think the OPs scope is a Mak, it's an f/7 newt like this one... Being f/7 it shouldn't be too fussy about collimation as the 'sweet spot' is 7.6mm in diameter, so pretty close will be good enough. Without a centre spot the best way to collimate is on a defocused star. If the central hole of the star appears squashed over to one side then hold a finger up to the front tof the scope so you can see the shadow of it in the defocused star, then move the finger around the OTA until the shadow of it is aligned with the squashed side of the donut. Then adjust the collimation screw that is nearest the position of your finger on the OTA to move the cental hole of the shadow back towards the centre. I would disregard the laser collimator for now and just use a sight tube or collimation cap to get the secondary in the correct position beneath the focuser with all primary mirror clips equally seen in the reflection, then use the defocused star method to fine tune the primary collimation.

Very nice Neil, darkness is really helping things, didn't realise there would be that much difference. Looks like a bit of colour in Saturn was it LRGB or is it just my eyes?

I owned this scope previously and reluctantly sold it to Ade, wonderful little pocket rocket... glad to see it living it's best life with a new owner 😀

Yeah I think shooting over the sea should be better in theory. The best atmospheric conditions tend to arise due to laminar airflow, which is what you tend to get as air moves over the flat sea before it becomes turbulent as it hits land and is forced over hills etc. The thermally radiative properties of the body water is relatively uniform too so that can reduce the negative effects from rising thermals that you get when shooting over land. The windy.com app is great for looking at atmospheric forecasts, you can check what the jetstream is doing but also see what the lower prevailing winds are doing too.