BGazing

5 minutes ago, geoflewis said:

I've always processed my images as linear in Registax6 - have no idea what dyadic does as I never even tried it.

Dyadic is much stronger, difference between the levels is, I believe, in geometric progression. I have finally found explanation in Villadrich's Planetary astronomy...

Not sure I like this as the dyadic/linear switch is no longer possible, or I do not see it. I find linear more useful in great seeing, while dyadic is better for when things are not that good.

Very cold, very windy, it bounced around a LOT in the ROI (and I had to enlarge it a bit correspondingly). Difficult to focus, but not too bad...

C8/ASI678 as usual, stacked only 4K frames

Updated, 01 Jan 2023 and the image is somewhat bigger even after resize because I had to shoot through a diagonal (Evolution has it shortcomings when shooting at high altitude). Seeing was mediocre, but still...

Great image, you captured it after I have captured mine on the same date, huge improvement in resolution but nice to see how the same features rotate across the surface.

Mars yesterday. We literally had 2 hrs of clearish sky, overcast for weeks and the forecast ahead is again bad weather, so quite possibly the last shot at Mars this opposition. Very cold, 0 degrees C, so SCT cooler had to work 20 mins before I started shooting and it was quite uncomfortable to shoot (opening balcony windows would bring out a gush of warm air and completely spoil the seeing). The only good stack I made was when I was locked out

105K frames (6 minutes), stacked 5000. C8, ADC, R6 and a tiny touch in PS. Tried not to oversharpen.

Little bright spot on the NW limb is Olympus Mons, I guess. There are two little bulges on NW (under the polar hood) and SW. Don't know what NW is over, SW is - I guess - Helespontes Mons? Nice bit of haze going on in the south...

On 02/12/2022 at 14:23, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Looking at adding a new planetary camera to my repertoire to allow my 290mm to be dedicated to guiding duties for my DSO imaging.

I'm looking for a OSC, and I'm aware there's been a whole host of new planetary cameras recently released, so, what's the general consensus on the top ones these days? 

Long story short, they are great. I've only started shooting in August and I am absolutely floored with how easy it is to produce something useful or even nice...and I am a complete novice. They are fast, have low readout noise and, as indicated, it is just a matter of pairing it with your f ratio. I have a 678 with my SCT, so no barlow.

Your Tak will be great on open clusters. M31, M42, M8 and M17 are also nice. Extended nebulae from dark sites with suitable filters...Rest of the fuzzies are more suitable to bigger aperture.

Excellent result! I like the color palette, too...

This is great, you should line them up at the end...

I use 3 mins with my color cam and same aperture, you can see the results on my flickr page. You are safe with 3 minutes for sure.

Great comparison. To me, 8 looks the best.

Since I also have C8, I can tell that your ROI was probably too big for you to increase FPS. Increasing it will let you deal better with the choppy seeing. It is really difficult with Jupiter, though, as it is bigger and you cannot realistically go past 200 FPS on C8, but it is still pretty good. Are you using ADC?

UPDATE 28 November - Windy and very cold but any clear night now is a bonus. 20 minutes SCT cooler and than a quick shoot. Stars were twinkling fast naked eye and in FC it was difficult to focus. Dropped exposure to 3.3ms, so 300FPS with ASI 678, stacked 15K out of 100K frames (easier to process than 4perc) and...voila. Northern hood seems to have shrinked even more, shrinking fairly fast, and in the top right corner I believe is Olympus Mons.

Great image! Nothing you can do about the weather, we have had overcast and rains for two and a half weeks.

Weather has been terrible (and I was super busy), so no astro for me for more than two weeks. Managed to grab a shot at Mars at around 45 deg height (just as it cleared the building and just before the clouds and mist rolled in). Seeing did not look terrible in the EP, but I managed to capture only one 6 min video before the thin clouds made it worthless. Captured with C8, ASI 678 at about 240FPS, 30 pct stacked (so a lot of frames). Stacking less did not yield better results.

Amazing stuff, really. That dark formation in the polar cap rotated away, I guess. 

This is great. That dark thingie in the polar cap is not an artefact (I was wondering when I shot Mars in my 8in), Peach's image shows it in more detail. 

19 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Processing is a pretty big part of a good image, but so is the data.

You have really good data here, even more can be teased out in terms of detail if color management is a bit tweaked:

(this is last image tweaked for correct gamma setting for sRGB, contrast / brightness and things like that).

 

Thank you, what did you actually do?

3 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Very nice images! Yeah could try to deal with the ghosted limb by using an elliptical selection tool (just inside the disk), invert and feather it and then apply a slight Gaussian blur. That’s what i do when I get that artefact and it works well. 

Thank you for the comment and the suggestion. Honestly, PS was for me quite an obstacle, I might devote more time to it eventually. I only started imaging planets in August. There's some tutorial about removing rind floating around, will try to get a hang of it. Frankly, here it is bearable, it is much more pronounced on Mars.

Well, this took some time to process. I shook of covid just enough to drag myself to the balcony and capture these - another night of high pressure good seeing. You know it is good when you see details on a relatively still FC screen.

C8, ASI 678, ADC. Single images are out of stacks of 3 mins where I stacked between 65 and 75 percent of frames. Video is about 85 minutes of Jupiter rotation.

Here's the same thing, processed with 1.5 drizzling just for the fun of it and somewhat more aggressive processing. 

1 hour ago, imakebeer said:

Sure, right now there's a chasm between my gear and yours - I'm realistic about that, but seeing what's possible makes me more positive about upgrading.

 

Yeah, this was something someone on CN pointed out to me. Interesting points about RBG in R6, I'll have to revisit my Mars images - I won't get the detail but I wonder if the colour tones are in there.

Also interesting to note you're using more than 20x the number of frames as me. My 450D is only doing about 25FPS! My Nikon is a bit better in this regard but maybe not so suited overall to the task.

Interesting point about dedicated astro cams - I only frequented CN briefly but one chap there did point out to me some tests he'd done and found that although his 700D did far fewer FPS there was far less noise than the astro cam so he could get away with far fewer frames.

I only started very very recently, in July. A friend convinced me to try his guiding cam in my Lunt...and here I am. Doing planets since August, I reckon. You actually buy cam once you settle on particular gear. For planets, I'd say going SCT is an easy choice and then a 2-micron camera like ASI 678 is the easiest solution and does not require any barlow. It is difficult to get decent image scale on planets unless you get at least a C6. C8 is better and C11 even better if you have the mount and typical seeing to support it.

I was actually surprised how easy it is. Solar too. Most of it is about seeing and then you can get a hang of a few processing tricks. Mastering it is still beyond my skills, but when you get nice seeing session you really need not be a wizard. Consider this Jupiter I shot recently (am yet to complete a rotating video, too many shots to process). It's just that seeing was good. When it is bad, I cannot fix it, no way.

3 hours ago, imakebeer said:

Nice pic, certainly puts my own first effort (also on the 9th Nov) to shame! As mentioned above, it looks very natural. I'm encouraged though to see what's possible with the right gear and skills 👍

Interesting point about the RGB balance, something to look into - did you process this pic in Autostakkert and Registax?

Thank you, but please do keep perspective. I checked your effort and it is commendable for a 70mm refractor  and a DSLR. I know that it made huge difference when I started using C8 after initial test run with a 100mm refractor (doublet). Unless it is a triplet colors will be out of whack. R6 does well with auto RGB on Jupiter, less so on Saturn and Mars was (when I hit auto) very bluish. Combining visual with photo is great because one then approximates color that is seen visually, instead of going for something that is just not there.

Also, seeing is key. First time I was out with C8 just to test camera, it was a complete MUSH. I could see that playing with wavelets hints at literally a mass of data underneath. Once the seeing cooperated you can do wonders with a relatively affodable C8. I'd say that for planetary 200mm is very convincing. I use Evolution mount. Still amazed at how modern cameras and software crush any problems with tracking and seeing.

FYI the above image was 17 percent stack of 6 minute video running at 240FPS, so over 70000 thousand frames. I can only imagine what it would have done in some decent seeing.

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

That’s lovely, a very natural looking Mars.

Thank you. R6 auto RGB balance does not work well on it, at least not with ASI 678, i adjusted to colors that I normally see in the EP. A rather big polar cap, to my surprise.

09 nov 2022, iffy seeing, windy, Mars was jumping around. Still managed to grab a couple of 6-mins videos, here's a 17perc stack of one of them. C8, ASI 678, ADC.