BGazing

Very nice scope. Not sure that the laser compliments it. It could be collimated, though... My back would not handle that mirror box, for sure.

Still have a C11, borrowed from my mate, Rowan AZ100 and 678MC with ADC. Thank you.

I've been geting the view of the 'boring' side consistently, but managed to catch a GRS transit finally. Seeing was iffy, this was eked out of 6 min video derotation, exp 7m, stacked the best 19 percent.

It was again C11. I will dig out and reprocess my best C8 data at some point. I find video derotation, once you get a hang of it, a bit less tricky than image derotation - for Jupiter (emphasis added). But I would not go past 6 minutes for color camera, too much rotation. There's a good instruction about this in the FAQ portion of the relevant CN subforum.

Thank you. I am never sure about tiff derotation if there are no moons to anchor to. Video derotation is time consuming, but it is done by the computer, once you set the parameters. OTOH, Saturn is relatively easy to do image derotation because of the rings.

Sorry guys (and girls), no GRS or moons or transits this time. Turned out better than I expected, seeing was iffy and transparency also not that great, had to up exposure to compensate. This is 6 minutes of video derotation, 15K frames stacked.

I have forgotten you are doing this on a manual dob...you have done a fantastic job, indeed. I guess Paracorr would help if you are capturing it while it is drifting accross the field?

Indeed a very nice capture, I played around with it a bit, result attached. I'd say 5ms is really short in good seeing. 7.5ms would get a much better S/N for you. Also, although readout noise is not that important, when stacking many frames it makes sense to up the gain over HGC threshold, check it out. Also, try metaguide for collimation. Your images have that little bit of softness mine had before collimation tweak.

Thank you. As for conditions, well...we have planets 6 or so degrees higher and I'd say that I've never seen clouds run accross the sky as quickly as they do over England. But some of the best planetary images have indeed been shot from the UK...gentle rolling hills and laminary flow can work magic. I shoot from the city and from a tiny balcony in the city center. Paradoxically, sometimes it is really a fairly good spot - city pollution (we have plenty) dampens heat exchange, and balcony is lifted above ground turbulences. Second image was done from our dark site at approx 1000m above sea level. Sadly, if pollution is at its worst you know the seeing will be great. Coatings may suffer, but YOLO 😄

This is very very nice, you may try a touch more of vibrance and/or saturation, if that suits your taste. Settings look good to me, but IMHO perhaps resizing to 150 percent is too much unless we are talking about excellent seeing, even then might be too much on Jupiter. I usually do not resize over 130 percent of the original, even on C8, seems to me that it is a diminishing return.

Thank you, everyone. This was indeed derotation of video, and to my surprise it turned out good. Perhaps it was because Ganymede is slow. I thought this derotation (click for time and date) had better seeing, but for some reason details in the disc look the same, Ganymede...well, not sure there.

Seeing looked rough and I was tweaking focus between captures endlessly...so was kinda surprised to see this result. Video derotation 6 minutes, 12K best frames (about 25 percent of the total). C11 again, still have not returned it. Comments and suggestions welcome, on processing especially, always looking to improve.

Probably my first buy when getting into the hobby, 127Mak. Not that it was bad, but I could have skipped that and should have started either with a 100mm refractor or a C8. Both of which I have purchased later. 5 inch mak is neither here nor there, and it was very hard finding a decent diagonal for it. Sold it the moment I bought C8.

Bought my 678 last September with the FLO, flat cable, zero problems.

Wow, this without ADC and tracking is truly superb. Move on to tracking and ADC...ASAP.