lukebl

Here's a quick capture from this evening showing Jupiter's moon Io and its shadow, along with the Great Red Spot (nowadays it's more like the shrinking beige spot!) appearing lower left.

250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 5x Televue Powermate, ZWO ASI120mc cam. c 5000 frames @ c.50 fps, 17ms exposures.

I'm not happy at all with the image.

For some reason, when processed in Autostakkert the image shows some horrible artifacts making it look like it's made with oil brush strokes.  I've managed to reduce it in Photoshop but at the cost of loss of definition. I used the same setup with previous apparitions of Jupiter and Mars and got excellent results, so I've no idea what's gone wrong. Any suggestions as to what's gone wrong would be welcome. I'm using the latest version of Autostakkert and capture with Firecapture..

This is an image before softening in Photoshop:

Here's a detail showing the artifacts:

On 26/01/2024 at 19:29, symmetal said:

By default Spiral search is assigned to Button 1. Has your joystick config file got corrupted? 'Load Defaults' may help.

Alan

Hi Alan. Thanks for the advice, but I’ve looked at the settings and loaded the defaults but still have the problem. I’m thinking that it might be an idea to completely uninstall and reinstall EQMOD, but haven’t tried it yet as it took ages to configure it in the first place!

My NEQ6 mount is controlled via EQMOD on my laptop.

It's recently developed an odd fault when the wired gamepad controller (used to manually go L, R Up or Down) is plugged in. After slewing to a chosen object, it immediately starts doing a spiral search and won't stop. It only does this when the controller is plugged in. I've tried a different controller, but get the same issues.

What on earth's going on?

Here's a singularly unimpressive video!

Actually, I like it. It's a capture I did last night of the occultation (lasting 4.1 seconds) of an 11.7 magnitude star (TYC 1183-00432-1) by the 123km-wide asteroid (602) Marianna. Marianna is 13.6 magnitude and you can just make it out during the occultation. The asteroids fascinate me, and I find the sight of a distant small object passing in front a vastly more distant star in real time literally awesome!  The star is the one just below the centre.

This was captured with a WATEC-910 video cam on my 250mm f/4.8, with a shutter speed of 0.08 seconds.

Hi.

I just wondered if there was any free sofware out there to annotate movie files (e.g. avis)?

I particularly wanted it to place an arrow on a footage of a field of stars to indicate the position of a star being occulted by an asteroid.

Musk's vanity project passed over here this evening.

I showed it to my son who was most impressed, but I can't help feeling there's something sinister about it all, bombarding the planet with the internet and filling the sky with more junk. In the olden days it was megalomaniac dictators who controlled the masses of nations. Now it's the fabulously wealthy who control all of us. If that isn't straying beyond the forum's guidelines.

Anyway, I capured these images of it with a Canon 700d and Samyang 8mm lens at f/3.5. I set it to take 6 second exposures every 3 seconds at ISO 1600, but the gaps between exposures is obviously longer. I guess that's because of the time taken to write to the disk.

This is a stacked set of 48 images, stacked in Startrails Version 2.3. See how the trails disappear into the earth's shadow when they approach Perseus. The bright thing is the moon!

Single frame:

Here's a video. One frame every half second. The neighbour's car illuminates the trees and house half way through!

Hi all,

I've been attempting to capture Jupiter with my 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 5x Barlow and ZWO ASI120mc cam.

This is around 4000 frames. Unfortunately, after stacking with Autostakkert the image has these strange markings and streaks. Any idea what's causing this and how to avoid it? It happens with all captures, including ones with considerably more frames.

Io and Europa were performing a nice little dance this evening as they almost simultaneously disappeared behind jupiter.

I braved the cold and captured this sequence of 21 x 45 second captures about every 3 minutes from 18:15.

250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 5x Televue barlow, ZWO ASI120mc cam. c. 4000 frames each capture. Captured with Firecapture, processed with Autostakkert, Registax and Photoshop. Europa is the upper one.

Not the best of images, but I managed to capture most of Io's shadow transit this afternoon. I captured 45 second exposures every 140 seconds from 15:55 (when the sun was still above the horizon and the sky was bright blue), til about 17:53.

39 captures of c. 6000 frames at 3ms, ZVO ASI120mc cam, 2x Barlow, 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian. Captured with Firecapture, processed in Autostakkert, Registax and Photoshop.

Hey folks, there’s a double shadow transit by Europa and Ganymede this evening. There’s only a short window when both shadows are on Jupiter, between about 19:20 and 19:50. This will be the view at about 19:30. 

Should be a nice viewing/imaging opportunity. Unfortunately I have a social engagement so will have to miss it.

For my first bit of imaging for ages I though I'd try an animation of Io and its shadow transit last night (1st December). Unfortunately, freezing fog and high cloud rendered the images useless after the first five. However, I thought I'd do an animation anyway.

250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 2x TAL barlow, ZWO ASI20MC-S cam. 5 images of c.7800 frames captured every 200 seconds.

It was clouded over here for the whole event. But once the clouds cleared it was amazing how easy it was to see Venus in bright sunlight with the naked eye. This was a snapshot at around 11:20.

It looked promising at 6 here in Norfolk, but clouded over just after 7.

Here's the view at about 7 just before the clouds rolled in.

3 hours ago, maw lod qan said:

...At almost 68 now, time is not guaranteed. 

Same here, and the next one visible in the UK isn't for another 67 years! The last one here was in 1999. I saw that one too, but in France not on home territory.

In know it's a bit early, but who's planning to go for the total eclipse on April 8th next year?

I meticulously planned the August 2017 trip to be in the spot which I reckoned would have the best weather, deepest Wyoming, and sure enough the weather was near perfect apart from some high cloud. And the landowner did warn me to beware of rattlesnakes!

This time, budgetary pressures mean I've got to go for the cheapest option which is to fly to Montreal and thence to Magog near the centre line. Unfortunately, this area is also potentially the most cloudy along the whole route! But fingers crossed. And I've never been to Canada.

Here's a couple of images I captured of the 2017 event in Wyoming.

The star to the lower left is Regulus.

Me and my sons during the eclipse. You can see the shadow as it traverses the sky.

I had a quick go at capturing Venus this afternoon in colour to capture something of what it looks like in the eyepiece.

It really is a beautiful sight in the eyepiece right now against the blue sky and only 2.8% illuminated, and only 14 degrees from the sun. The atmosphere was doing a wicked shimmy, so the image isn't particularly crisp.

ZWO ASI120MC-S color cam, 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian. c 2000 frames @ 0.5ms. Processed in Registax and Photoshop.

Here's an animation of a few of the frames. Focussing was tricky.

Some star trails from the same session.

This is a timelapse of the night sky from the night of 15/16th August 2023.

Two days after the maximum of the Perseid meteor shower, I'd hoped to capture a few meteors, but nary a one was captured. Nice clouds, though. 7 hours compressed into 1 minute and 14 seconds.

Canon 700d. Samyang 8mm. 20 second exposures.

1 hour ago, Craney said:

Very nice capture.

Is that Mars photo-bombing the bottom left  ??

Thanks! I also thought it was Mars at first, but it’s actually delta Cancri. Mars is a bit further east.

Venus was passing near the Beehive Cluster this evening. This is 10 x 1 second exposures in the evening twilight, manually stacked in Photoshop.

Canon 700d. ISO 1600. Sigma 150-500mm lens @ 300mm, f/6.3. Unguided

Nice captures. What sort of Barlow/Powermate did you use?

I'd forgotten that the rings would be closing up so soon.

Here's a quick capture of Mars as it passed through M44, The Beehive (let's admit it, the most boring star cluster!), on the evening of 2nd June 2023.

Hardly my best image, but it was just a quick set of 7 half-second exposures in bright twilight at ISO 1600 with my Canon 700d and Sigma 150-500mm zoom at 500mm. Manually stacked in Photoshop.

Great capture!

I’m baffled as to how you can get such short exposures. With my U-filter and my ASI290 cam, I can usually only manage 20-30ms. Certainly not 3ms!

9 hours ago, Ibbo! said:

Vey nice and interesting experiment.

I have had an awful time trying to get focus with my UV on venus this time , any tips?

I struggle with focus too. I just focus in and out till it looks about right. Nothing scientific!

8 minutes ago, Space Cowboy said:

Nice capture! Seeing has been very good this week and Venus getting larger too, so it's all good 👍

True, it’s getting larger, but as it becomes more of a crescent there’s much less to see! Very frustrating.

Here's a capture of Venus this evening using the Baader U-Filter, with the results from some previous sessions at the same scale for comparison.

Captured with a 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, 5x Powermate, ZWO ASI290MM Mini cam, Baader U-Filter and Baader IR-Pass Filter.

Up until now I have been aiming to capture as many images at as short an exposure as possible, generally around 25-30,000 frames at about 15ms. This evening I tried fewer (just 5000 frames) and longer (30ms)exposures, and rather counterintuitively the results seem as good as or better than my earlier attempts.

Processed in Autostakkert, Registax and Photoshop. RGB thus: R(IR), G(50%U/IR), B(U).

Apparently Venus's clouds rotate around the planet every 4.2 days, and it would be intersteing to see if any features are persisent and reappear at subsequent rotations.