Mandy D

When the clouds eventually parted around 11 p.m. last night I decided to have a peek at Saturn, but with a 135 mm f/2 lens this time, figuring I could get a brighter image for spotting the moons and with no tracking. At an exposure time of 1 second I was getting reasonably round moons, with Titan showing very bright to the upper right of Saturn and a couple of fainter moons nearer the planet. I could get Titan all the way down to ISO-400 with a 1 second exposure. At very high ISO the foreground was clearly lit by a street lamp poking over the roof top and the sky appeared bright pale blue with white clouds surrounding Saturn, but the moons were still visible. Of course the clouds eventually had to obscure everything so I packed up and went to bed.

I had to ask why you'd got a screwdriver jammed into the wooden base. Then I saw the second one and it finally dawned on me. Madness, bordering on genius or something like that. 😅 I've been looking for a turntable like that for an industrial application, so you may have just solved my problem. The friction also helps.

I thought I was looking at the large hadron collider at CERN when I saw that wiring! 🤣

It's a standard Syemour Solar glass filter. Just under-exposure, I guess. I can make it as yellow as you have it straight from the camera, but then I lose all the sun spots and detail. As @Steve Ward says, you can recover detail in under-exposure, but over-exposure: it's lost for good.

Yes, I understand this from regular photography, which is why I questioned the "uber-bright" image Laurieast just posted. I watch my exposure very carefully to avoid washing out. Who'd have thought the Sun has beaches, huh? 😃 Thanks for the explanations.

Nice stuff. Maybe one day I'll get there with your kind help!

If that is my image, what did you do to it to get that result? Am I under-exposing my solar images? I never find that I pick up the sunsposts properly when I get the disc bright yellow like that. Thank you. 😊

Nope! I am not using the AZ-HEQ5 at the mo. I am walking everywhere right now and that is a bit of a monster to carry along with the D800 and a 300mm prime lens and teleconverter. Yes, EQ mode would deal nicely with field-rotation for me, if only I could ...

Yes, this is exactly what I have realised. A part of the problem this morning is that I was shooting from work and had forgotten to bring my remote for the camera, so was using the five second timer in the camera to avoid shake, so long time to capture 120 frames.

Yes that last one was stacked. Probably 30%, so about 40 frames. Here is another version where I've removed the offending frames (see my reply to Steve) and taken 30% of the best frames selected by PIPP for final stacking, so about 10. The camera is currently on auto-focus, due to my eye problem and the laptop being at home along with the fact I still do not have Backyard Nikon. I am currently trying to get to grips with Digicam Control, but it does not look like it can focus the camera.

Yes, you are quite right about frames out of alignment. There were two runs of photography taken this morning with a half hour gap between them and the solar disc had obviously rotated noticeably between the two sessions. On some attempts with PIPP, I was remembering to ignore those frames and others I completely forgot. I have now moved the offending images elsewhere.

Thank you! Yes, this, too, has worked. Progress!

Thanks! I'm struggling to focus at the mo and have to let auto-focus do it's best as my telescope eye is currently out of action. I've just re-run my PIPP process and then imported and stacked the 10 best images and got the final result below. If I import 100% and stack the best 30% it still does the same as before. I think it's a PIPP problem, like you say. I had set PIPP to crop and centre, but now I've got it set to Object/Planetary.

@Laurieast I can't get Autostakkert to properly stack my solar images from this morning. I've uploaded the best image from the camera and a stack sample for reference. It doesn't seem to be aligning the solar disc properly, yet there is noticeable improvement in the sharpness of the sunspots. I have around a hundred frames acquired and have tried stacks of 30% and 10 images. I've tried with alignment point sizes from 24 to 200 but nothing seems to work. The camera files were auto-cropped in PIPP. Any ideas what is going wrong? I've been on this for a couple of hours now and getting nowhere.

It will be good for Moon and planets. Should give nice crisp views of lunar surface. Planets will be sharp, but small. For those you will want a short focal length eyepiece and barlow. Consider buying some decent eyepieces, as the ones included are not the greatest. Stars will just be points of light in any telescope.

It's an excellent telescope. Do you know what you are going to use it for?

Strictly correct, but this assumes the eyepiece is 90 degrees round the tube from the top. Many (most?) are rotated 45 degrees from this position for more comfortable viewing, thus introducing a 45 deg rotation from inverted. You need to be aware of this when using a Newt for visible observation and to rotate a camera by the same angle for photography, etc.

Oh dear! This cannot possibly bode well for the success of the mission! I hope he doesn't get up to his usual mischief! Good luck, NASA.

Space missions are extremely expensive: cost premium for tants would not even register. I was using tants in the 70s.

I can't imagine they would have used aluminium electrolytics. Surely they would not survive well in low temperatures and hard vacuum. Tants may fare better, but I'm still not sure. It's all d.c. anyway, I guess, given it runs from a thermo-electric generator so less need for big caps. Today, I might consider ceramic caps or polyester film.

I kept getting glimpses of the Moon and Jupiter before midnight and it looked like it might clear a bit later, but I was fed up of getting bitten by bitey insects! That Lunar atlas is awesome. I've just downloaded it. Thank you! More for me to learn, now! 😊

Thank you. I've had a quick read and will keep it on my reference list. I don't know when my next clear sky will be for further imaging!

Yes, it is very intuitive and seems to work quite well. There is one problem with it though, it keeps the camera awake and hence drains the battery rapidly. So, either use a mains PSU for the camera or turn the camera off when not actively using it. Fortunately, I have dual batteries in the D800 and spotted it before the first battery was completely drained.

Clear(ish) skies here right now, but getting bitten by midges, so I guess I'm going to be applying Anthisan to my legs for the next ten days! Was going after Jupiter tonight, but not so sure now. 🤣

Sadly, no, the 600D does not have a virtual horizon. I'm sure there is a way to derotate images, but I'm not the one to ask. Sorry!