geoflewis

Thanks Jeremy, I just took a look at the Sky Notes - I had no idea..... 😊. I'll have a dig through some of the others and watch them on my 65" Sony OLED TV...., so much better than on my laptop. I really should try to get along to one of the meetings, but it's a long way from Norfolk and will be an all day affair, if not overnight.....

Thanks Jeremy, I didn't even know that the BAA had a YT channel 🙄, so I've just subscribed.....👍

Really, that's great , thanks for letting me know. Which images were they, Mars or Jupiter? Do these Sky Notes get published on BAA site anywhere?

Thanks Kostas, I did wonder about capturing longer SERs, as recommended by Neil, but as I mentioned above, I find them tricky to process and my experience of running them through PIPP for quality grading is patchy, with resultant very big files that get even bigger after de-rotating in Jupos, so I think I'm now settled on this methodology. It's a pity that the seeing wasn't good enough for you, maybe tonight 🤞.

Thanks John

Nicely done Reggie. I love the full Moon, with tiny Mars beside it.

Excellent

Excellent animation....

Both are excellent. I particularly like your Mars, maybe Jupiter is a tad over sharpened, as it looks a little crunchy..

Very nice Peter

Well done Peter, I enjoyed the video and the stills are very well processed.

Thanks Simon, I appreciate the feedback. It's very tempting to push harder when there's detail coming through, but after reviewing a couple of attempts, I dialed right back to this and still wondered if it was a tad too much.

That's really good Craig. I also like the colour, which is very similar to what I see folks like Damian Peach, Martin Lewis and others posting. I think I've messed up the histogram sliders with new my colour camera, as my images are comong out a bit too red/pink. I've had a discussion with Martin Lewis about it and done a bit of background reading, so now I think I was wrong to try to set the balance on Mars and probably should have left the sliders alone. Hey ho.....

Nice re-process Stuart.

A couple of days past opposition, but still effectively 100% phase, I looked outside after the disappointment of the football and the sky was largely clear, so I had another try at Mars. I think this is possibly the best seeing I've had this year (certainly better than that referee...!!). The fog had mostly lifted from what had been less that 100m visility late afternoon, but there was still a slight haze over the Moon. I think these continetal highs with stable cold air really work for planetary imaging. I stuck with 3 min captures at 3ms, each separately stacked, with the resulting images de-rotated in WinJupos. I know that @neil phillips suggests that going longer and then de-rotating the SER will yield finer results, but I'm finding that the file sizes after de-rotating SERS are huge and processing them is more problematic (I don't know why that is as I have a fast gaming laptop with lots of RAM). Anyway, here is the result being 30k frames total intergration, (best 10k from 60k for each SER). I'm particularly pleased to see the peak of Olympus Mons just showing through. I did try pushing the sharpening harder, which showed Olympus Mons peak better, but the darker regions started to look blocky and arteficial. I continued imaging for another 30 mins, but the fog started to thicken again and seeing deteriorated, so whilst probably still better than some other sessions, this is the best one from the night.

I went for best %, so yes, in theory more frames in the stack, though of course I dropped the capture duration from 6 mins to 3 mins due to cloud, so probably similar over all. The final image has ~53,000 frames.

These are superb Kostas, really excellent. I'm glad the experiment at faster capture worked for you. I had my doubts about it, but @neil phillips kept telling me, so eventually I tried it and he was right . I didn't go out last night, due to extra time and penalties, then it was cloudy here. Not sure I'll try tonight either, but we'll shall see.....🤔

Thanks both, I think it's one of my best this year, so I'm very pleased to get that at opposition when 100% phase.

Thanks Neil

No, I did consider it, but opted for NAS at Seething, though I've driven by the observatory at Gt Ellingham many times. Are you a member there?

A bit of improvement, but pretty marginal, just a tad more sharpening that I could get from the single stack. Here's the best single stack not resized, so with the WinJupos 3 stack (which comes out a bit bigger due to the ROI settings I have there), for comparison, before I took it into Affinity Photo for final tweaks....

Not one I was thinking of, I was born in Fakenham, near Sculthorpe and West Raynham, but also not very far from me now, I'm now living the other side of Attleborough.... My neighbour goes the Watton aution most weeks....

Thanks Stuart, one of these days we'll have the combination of good seeing and no clouds - well maybe....🙄

Thanks Kostas, yes I'm really pleased with this one. I think I may stay at both 3ms and 3min SERs in future, I think that combination is giving cleaner stacks and it doesn't take me long to run a few stacks through Jupos. I'd like a few more images with the Valles Marineris region more central, which will be the case earlier in the evening over the coming nights, though of course tomorrow night is a football night, whether it is clear or not.....🤔

Thanks, though unfortunately still not the detail on either Mars or the Moon that I wanted to get, but I had no time to fine tune the focus due to clouds right up to the time that the occultation started. I also set up my DSLR+200mm zoom on a tripod, but I couldn't be in two places at once, so the DSLR was a miss. I should have set the DSLR rig up on my SA tracking mount and set it running a series of exposures, but my head was too foggy for that, so I concentrated on the main observatory rig.