CraigT82

Very nice, that lovely turquoise colour of the south polar region coming through in the old image

I only image from home and so always have it plugged in to an extension lead, but am considering buying a Powapacs Atom 78Ah Power Pack which would power everything in the field for a good few hours and would allow me to seek out spots with better local seeing.

Thought I'd revive this thread with my 'Covid Collection'. All images captured Between 1st April and 6th August this year with Fullerscope and Altair 224c or 290m plus APM 2.7x barlow (at various powers). Now I have goto functionality on my EQ6 I will have a pop at the ice giants in the next couple of months and add them to this.

Drifting in dec means your polar alignment is off, have you got a polar scope on the mount?

Thanks Jeremy, Signature changed!

Postie brought the final piece of kit that I needed -EQ6 pro mother board- to perform open heart surgery on my ~18yr old EQ6. Bought motors and the m/b from an eq6 pro along with a lynx astro eqdir cable and 5a power supply. Also bought the rail kit upgrade for the polar alt adjustment from dark frame (works beautifully but still hugely overpriced). Now I can let firecapture do the hard work of keeping the planet centred on the chip! It had a strip down and relube a couple of weeks ago and with these upgrades this old beast has a new lease of life. Looking forwards to maybe getting another 18 years out of it. It's a bit weird seeing it slew around at x800 when all I had was x16 max previously! Next on the list at some point in the future will be belt drive kit and a bit of tuning - already got the delrin shims in various thicknesses for that. 20200812_201444.mp4

The secondary mirror and its holder simply screw onto the end of that bar, keep turning it clockwise and it'll tighten up. If it gets tight but then it isn't facing the right way you can loosen the bar at the upper scope end and turn it so the mirror faces the primary properly

Very nice work for only 2 mins per channel 👍

very nice shadow transit, shame about the ADC running out of adjustment!

Very nicely done Peter, hints of the Encke gap coming through

Being mostly blind in one eye I don't use bins, but I do have one half of a broken pair of Barr and Stroud 10x50s that I use as a monocular. Came across an eBay ad for the two halfs which had been broken down the middle and I snapped (pun intended) up the half with the focuser for £8 posted, no idea if he managed to sell the other half! Surprisingly it was in pretty good collimatiom on arrival. Never found out how he snapped them 🤷‍♂️

True, but if the air temp was below the dew point it would have been foggy, which is a whole other challenge! The dew on the scope proved that the tube had indeed cooled below the air temp and was thus the blanket was ineffective

Welcome to the Forum! The 150p is a capable and versatile scope and will be much much better than the Mercury 70... not only is it significantly larger in terms of the objective, but it's all mirrors and so you wont get any chromatic aberration that you do with the little frac. With the 150p you will be able to see the cloud belts of Jupiter and the Great Red Spot, you will see the cassini division easily and equatorial belts on Saturn, and you will see the dark 'seas' on Mars along with it's polar ice caps. The 6" aperture will start to reveal real detail in DSOs, especially if you can get it out under good dark skies. The 2.5mm eyepice will give you x300 magnification which is a lot, and you'll probably only get to use it on the moon when seeing is good. But like you say worth having for when the skies are steady

Well the space blanket didn't work particularly well, as evidenced by dew on the scope. It did seem like there was less dew on the scope than on the mount etc. so maybe it worked to a small extent, but not enough. Will try the silver backed bubble wrap next (radiator foil?) How have you got on with the film?

Very nice Mike! Next time you get good seeing why not try a green filter to get more resolution, or even blue if seeing is excellent... you'll be amazed at the extra fine details you get with the shorter wavelengths

I took some time this morning to reprocess this Mars image, as I wasn't entirely happy with the soft/bright limb of the original (and it was a bit hurried as they always are - just wanted to see it done!) This time around I: 1. Tested various alignment point numbers and sizes - decided that 8 largeish points spread evenly around the visible disc worked best. This had probably the most effect of improving the limb 2. Further sharpened, using unsharp mask in PS after the wavelets, each stacked tiff before loading into winjupos for measurement. This allowed more confidence and accuracy in placing the alignment frame for each image. Normally I just apply the wavelets then go to winjupos. 3. Was less aggresive with the final sharpening and contrast boosting, aiming for a bit more of a natural feel. I feel that these differences have yielded an improved image with a better limb and more natural detail, particularly around the S polar cap.

That's a really nice effort, well done! For checking the mars globe I use Sky Safari app on my phone, or Stelarium on laptop, Winjupos ephemerides tool is ok too.

Hmm maybe it's that the RGB images aren't the same: Each channel image looks different in terms of the shape/distortion of the planet, this would obviously cause misalignment of the channels. What kind of exposures were you taking? What did you do in pipp and AS3?

Can you post the individual master R, G and B?

Have just seen pop up for sale on ebay and 8" fullerscope newt (in bits) plus a very nice looking mk4 mount which has motors on both axes, all for £500. Would make a serious planetary imaging rig for relatively little outlay. Disclaimer: The sale has nothing to do with me!

So having spent a few hours studying what seems like a hundred different Mars maps and atlases, I think I've identified the main features in my Mars image. Some could be not quite correctly placed/identified or just plain wrong!

Superb Mike! You're really squeezing everything out of that frac 👍

From sky safari... looks like you got the GRS!

very nice lots of detail on show. Polar strom clear to see

Nice work Peter, conditions are rough but its definitely still worth getting out there