geoflewis

It's a cracking image Dave. As others have said, you're too harsh on yourself.

Excellent images Kostas, good to see that you’ve broken the back of the collimating issues. Whilst you’ll still need the ADC for Saturn, with Mars and Jupiter both up at ~60 deg elevation later this year, it’s questionable whether there’s any benefit using an ADC for them. I found that the loss from the additional ADC prism glass was greater than the gain from dispersion correction on Mars once it was above ~50 deg last time around. It will be a case of try it and see. Unfortunately, Mars is going to be a pretty small (<15”) this coming apparition - we never get the best views when it is high in the northern hemisphere. Those in the southern hemisphere are the ones that periodically get it both big and high. Geof

I was very pleased to find this waiting for me when I returned home after my replacement hip surgery done on Wednesday (14/02). Thank you.

Thanks for the 2nd place and congratulations to Kostas and Nigella for their respective 1st and 3rd places. There were many great images posted, so I’m really pleased to make the top 3.

Wow Kostas, you don't hang about...!! Sorry that I've only just seen this thread and what a great first light 👏

Fantastic images and video diary. How does that star glow filter work, I’ve never heard of that before?

Very nice Harvey.

That's lovely Kostas, very nicely done.. The saturation is just enough to bring out the colours without becoming garish.

Excellent images

A very nice Jupiter swansong for this apparition Kostas

Excellent image Harvey. It's good to see how much more of the left limb is passing into jovian nighttime shadow since opposition nearly 3 months ago.

Very nice image Harvey. I think it was a good night as I've seen a few decent images of that double pre occultation event. Unfortunately I didn't cjeck what was coming up and chose that day to swap my planetary rig for DSO camera and rebalanced the scope, so I missed imaging it. It's nice to see what you and others got though.

It's worth experimenting with the LD. I change mine sometimes, but usually between 0.65 amd 0.8, so Kostas suggestion of 0.7 seems good to me.

Nicely captured Ian, but there's an artefact on the left limb, which may have come from WinJupos, so I'm wondering what LD value you used for derotation, also whether you used manual derotation?

It's a pity that the seeing didn't play well for you, but it's still a nice capture of the event, with the moons heading towards occultation.

Looks good. I have no experience of strain-wave mounts, but not having any CWs does significantly reduce the payload. I would have thought that the C14 was far too heavy for the NEQ6 Pro. Looking forward to seeing your results.

The image on your laptop looks promising 🤞

I hope you get it 🤞

Excellent animation and still frames of the occultations.

Nicely done Kostas. It’s a pity that you weren’t able to locate Mercury, though from what others said, it looks like it might just about be possible at -0.5. As we discussed, I’m also done with planetary imaging until late Summer, when Mars and Saturn come around again, then it will be a busy season well into 2025, so fingers crossed for some good seeing. I stripped the planetary camera optical train, beefy finder scope, CW extension bar, etc., off my mount, replaced with my QSI583 DSO camera and rebalanced ready to capture some DSOs over the coming weeks, whilst I wait for my cancelled hip surgery to be rescheduled. I did a test run on the Crab Nebula last night, but lost the sky to mist/fog before capturing even 3x5min sub exposures, so hopefully I will be able to complete that in the coming nights/weeks.

I look forward to seeing what you can do with it 🤞

C14 is a great scope, but it is seriously heavy. I replied on the eqipment thread, but in summary I think you're pushing it with either of those mounts.

I used to have an NEQ6 Pro and never put anything bigger than a 4" APO (TSAP100Q) on it. The C14 itself weighs over 20Kg, so by the time you've added CWs and anything else such as a camera, then I think you will be far in excess of (maybe more than double) the recommended max payload. As other have said, I also wouldn't advice taking the C14 apart to do anything before you use it to see how it performs as is. I'm not familiar with the iOptron Hae43, but from checks on-line it looks to have a similar payload capacity to the NEQ6 Pro, so you're definitely pushing it try the C14 with either of those mounts.

Thanks Reggie, some sound advice there too

In my opinion that’s a remarkable result just using an iPhone camera and phone apps. I’ve occasionally used Snapseed for daytime photo processing, but I’m not familiar with VideoStack, or WaveletCam. Are they free, or paid for apps?