geoflewis

24 minutes ago, Kon said:

Still closer than my family in Greece and my wife's in Japan. But I know what you mean.

Well that's a completely different proposition....!! Do you get see family at all, especially the last few years?

12 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

Absolutely brilliant news, Geof! Congratulations!

Thanks Jeremy,

She started her labour a few weeks ago, which was too early and proved to be a false alarm, so she returned home after 36 hours in hospital. She continue to have contractions for the next couple of weeks at home and eventually they had her back in and broke her waters to get things moving faster. All went well and both baby and mum were fine and back home after a 1 night stay.

21 minutes ago, Kon said:

Congratulations on the new arrival! Handsome little man (I am still referring to the baby) 🤣 and his brother. I am sure they will keep you busy and less and less imaging time. How was the star camp? Did you manage to have some clear skies at all?

Nice images. I see you are making a good use of all the software. How are you finding Astrosurface? Is it growing to you?

I have seen others doing these really short captures. I want to try it but the weather is not playing ball. Regarding stacking 1500 frames per capture, the 462mc will give you close to 250-300fps at a tight ROI or more at even tighter; why 'throw' away a big proportion? Or was it that the seeing was really bad to keep more?

Thanks Kostas,

Unfortunately we don't get to see our grandaughter and her family and indeed most of our other family members very often, as they live 150 or more miles away.

The star camp was good. We own a holiday home at Kelling Heath, so get there often throughout the year, not just for the star camps. A fellow Norwich Astro Society member persuaded me to take my little C5 with me on the EQ5 mount that I purchased from Neil earlier this year. After tweaking collimation the C5 worked really well, buzzing around the sky doing some visual observing. Initially I was just going for easy Messier / NGC lolipops, but my friend was working though some double stars, so I joined him doing that. I enjoyed it so much, that I'm planning on buying a double star atlas to continue with that from time to time.

I really like Astrosurface and find it much easier to control than Registax, despite my many years using Registax. I took your (Tom's) advice to apply an initial Registax wavelets to the TIFFs from AS3!, before derotation in WinJupos, then from there straight into Astrosurface, then Image Analyser, with a final levels tweak in Affinity Photo. I'm sure my workflow will continue to develop, but I'm confident that Astrosurface will continue to be a mainstay.

Regarding the 1500 frames per SER; I oscillate between using high frame rates that is possible with the camera and lower frame rates with better signal. I think we discussed this when we chatted over Zoom a few weeks ago. The seeing was quite stable last night, so I went for 8ms (125fps), which gives me nearly 7500 frames in per 1 minute SER, it also means the file sizes are smaller, so I don't run out of space on the imaging laptop so quickly. I ran AS3! at different stacks between 1000 and 5000 frames and concluded that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 frames gave me the best outcome (detail vs noise), hence I settled for 1500 frames, which is about 20%. By the time I've derotated a bunch of TIFFs, there's enough data there for good resolution.

40 minutes ago, MartianHill said:

Those are lively images.

The new little one looks really cute 🙂

Thanks, yes, very cute and his big brother is very 'lively'...

43 minutes ago, dweller25 said:

Nice images, but more importantly - congratulations on the new addition to the family 👍

Thanks David,

Yes, it's a growing family and make me feel my age, yet at the same time, feel very young at heart.

Just now, Space Cowboy said:

Looks like you've been busy Geof! Congratulations on your new great grandson! 

Very good images of Saturn and Jupiter even if conditions were not great you've produced some nicely balanced images.

Hopefully the weather will improve before too long.🥴

Thanks Stuart,

It's been a rubbish year for imaging; I sometimes wonder why we bother......

Very nice Stuart

That's brilliant Kostas

Excellent

Excellent capture

Well that's not too shabby Kostas.

That's superb Harvey.

I can't believe that it's been 5 weeks since I was last able to do any imaging, what is going on with our weather....!! Of course I should add that I was at Kelling Heath Star Camp for 1 week, then visiting family to see my new great grandson this past week end, so did miss some clear night skies. Anyway, last night started out very well with calm conditions, but unfortunatrely clouds and fog rolled in around 11pm, so I didn't get Jupiter at culmination when the GRS would have been visible. Anyway here is what I managed to get.

Images captured through the C14 with the ASI462MC camera, with ADC in train, but no additional amplification. Effective FR ~F13, so a tad undersampled, but opted not to drizzle.

Saturn is IR+RGB with the IR applied as luminance at 60% opacity. It comprised best 1000 frames from each of 11x1m RGB SERs and best 1000 frames from each of 8x1m IR SERs.

The Jupiter images are pure RGB with the colour camera. The earlier image comprises best 1500 frames from each of 13x1m SERs (total 19,500 frames), the later image is from only 4x1m SERs (6000 frames) as cloud and fog shut me down.

Processing was a mix of AS3!, Registax6, WinJupos, AstroSurface, Image Analyser and Affinity Photo.

Oh and here's my wife and I, with our new, 1 week old, great grandson and his big brother....😊

Thanks for looking.

Very nice Kostas.

I tried and failed, as the cloud was just too thick for me to see what I was focussing on. There were very brief glimses of what promised to be stable seeing, but after about 90 mins of failure I gave up...

6 minutes ago, Bugdozer said:

That's impressive! Better than I have managed so far. I shall give it a go!

I've sent you a PM with additional info

1 minute ago, Bugdozer said:

I have a Nikon D90. The oldest DSLR that can do video there is! So not the ideal tool for planetary photography. However, I am working on the basis of "this is the equipment I have, what can I get out of it?" rather than "this is the photo I want to take, what equipment should I buy?" So yes I know it's not optimal, at the moment I have used an eyepiece projection adapter to image Jupiter with reasonable success via video stacking, and I was wondering how using a Barlow instead might compare. Probably the best thing to do is just to try it.

This image of Jupiter was captured with my Nikon D90 and a x3 Barlow.

23 minutes ago, Bugdozer said:

And would this technique work if one was to use a DSLR in place of the camera you used?

Yes, but please note that a DSLR camera is not a very good option for planetary imaging. I have used one with moderate succes, but you need to shoot video (or download steam of individual frames for stacking). DSLR video is often compressed movie format which can lose a lot of detail.

Which DSLR camera do you have?

3 hours ago, Bugdozer said:

Sorry, probably an idiot question here, but I am still getting to grips with imaging methods. 

When you say you took your image with a 2x Barlow (and the kid used a 3x Barlow), do you mean the setup was basically just putting the Barlow into the scope like you normally would, and then attaching the camera instead of an eyepiece? So like prime focus photography, but with a Barlow in between the scope and camera? 

Yes, the barlow is used to increase the effective focal length of the scope, by placing it betwen the scope and camera.

On 01/10/2023 at 20:22, Mark2022 said:

I  refuse to "buy" that until I see the reality of it. I don't dispute it does have an effect but I don't "buy into" that much of an effect. I will be more than happy when I am proven wrong in my thinking. 

Hi Mark,

I don't know if the following comparison will help convince you, but here goes.

It is from a slide that I include in a presentation that I gave to Fanham Astro Society a few years ago, when I lived in Surrey and more recently to Orpington Astro Society when I was requested to speak there by @carastro

The heading that I gave this slide was 'Seeing is everything', which of course it is not, but it is a huge contributory factor to obtaining or failing to obtain high resolution images.

As you can see these 3 images, which are the result of derotation in WinJupos cover just over 2 hours elapsed time. When I started the session Jupiter's red spot was heading off the limb and whilst the seeing wasn't good by any standards, it deteriorated over the next couple of hours, to the point that the images being captured were just mush. I didn't add the elevation for each image, but my recollection is that Jupiter was gaining altitude during this session, so if anything conditions for capture should have improved (I've checked ephemerides and my recollection is correct with Jupiter at 43° elevation for the first image and had risen to 56° by the time of the last image). Nothing else changed, same scope, camera, barlow and ADC - it was just the seeing that deteriorated and there is nothing you can do about it (other than relocate). NB I know that there's less data in the 3rd image, but 7 mins is long enough for HR images, it was just that I finally gave up trying due to the poor seeing.

The other very important factor as @CraigT82 stated is good collimation, which absolutely is something that you can fix, but not when the seeing is bad as you can't get a stable enough star image to accurately assess the image.

Good luck.

That's fantastic Kostas and very well deserved.... 👏👏👏 Excellent article on ZWO website too

1 minute ago, Kon said:

In my eyes a lot more details and more natural looking. AS is a nice program but as we discussed sometimes Registax has the edge especially on mono data, or at least on my hands I can pull more details. It doesn't mean we should dismiss it but experiment with both (that's more a comment for newcomers reading this thread).

Thanks Kostas,

Yes, I’ll continue to experiment with both Registax and Astrosurface. I do think the Astrosurface interface is very nice. I particularly like that that I can zoom right in more easily than with Registax, to monitor the effect of adjustments on the entire image.

Also your help through PMs the past couple of days has been invaluable and very much appreciated.

12 minutes ago, Space Cowboy said:

Looking good Geoff. For a first go with AS that's excellent. 

Thanks Stuart

With no new data to process due to continuous cloudy skies and encouraged by Kostas @Kon in particular, but also Stuart @Space Cowboy I have performed a complete reprocess of my best 15 Sept Jupiter data WITHOUT using Registax, but instead trying out Astrosurface for the 1st time then a play with some of the tools in Image Analyzer.

I've reposted the original version alongside as the 2nd for easier comparison. I applied less colour saturation / vibrance in the revised version, which I prefer. I'm really pleased how it came out, given that I'm completely new to these new software tool, but please let me know what you think.

46 minutes ago, Space Cowboy said:

PM me Geoff if you want to have a go with IA. I did promise to talk you through it

PM sent, thanks Stu.

9 hours ago, Maurizio83 said:

Here you can find the two images for comparison ( 9 images derotated vs the best single )

Both ae excellent images, but I think that derotation has yielded a little more detail.