Nik271

Well, it does not matter what telescope you have, you need either a photography camera with interchangeable lens, or a dedicated astrocamera in order to attach it securely to the telescope. Think of the telescope as a giant camera lens. With your bridge camera you can only take pictures from the eyepiece. If you want to try astrophotography without too much extra exspense you can buy a cheap 'planetary camera' which goes directly into the eyepiece of the telescope and works with both of the models. This way you can take photos of the moon and the planets. For deep spaces stuff (nebulas, galaxies and such) you need a lot more gear and actually the mount becomes more important than the telescope (and often more expensive than the telescope too). Nikolay

For sharpest images with DSLR you are better off taking single frames rather than video: I note that 500D has a 15MP sensor and records up to full HD 1080p which is only 2MP. This means that the video is resampled and of much lower resolution than the camera is capable of. Additionally the codec applies compression to the video (probably IPB, interframe compression) which is very lossy. So using the video frames you don't get the full benefit of the sensor. You can try taking 100 single shots in raw format and stacking them to see if there is an improvement. Nikolay

Wow, I feel as if orbiting Mars with this image 🚀

Very nice sketch! I managed to grab a look at Mars around 4am today, just before the clouds rolled in, and your sketch is very close to what I saw. The dark central band band must be Terra Tyrrhena and Cimmeria. Probably the band near the south polar cap is Terra Sirenum but I'm not sure. The dark bit rising on the east limb looks like Syrtis Major, at 4am it was more prominent for me. Its amazing to see these details from so far away, to me it feels like being one of those 19-th century astronomers staring at Mars and trying to guess what the surface features are. Some of this mystery is gone now with all the probes out there. Clear skies! Nikolay

Thanks, this looks cleaner indeed! I didn't do the RGB align. I guess my image scale was too high, so next time I will try with 1.5x Barlow instead of 2x The forecast for Saturday morning looks promising, fingers crossed... Nikolay

Hi all, I'm new to planetary imaging and I been trying to get a decent image of Mars by reprocessing data from a brief spell of clear weather from a week ago (23 August). I recorded 3 mins of Mars with Skymax 180 at 5400mm and a Canon 250d in 4k crop mode. I know this is not ideal but without tracking on my EQ5 I found that a big sensor is easier to keep the planet in view for longer and manually follow it with the slo-mo controls. I collected approx 5000 frames of which I stacked the best 5% using Pipp and AS3! This is my best image of Mars so far but I feel it can be better (both the data and the processing). My concrete question for this image is this: I seem to get better results sharpening with GIMP rather than with the Registax wavelets. I'm attaching the stacked tif file and the two (sharpened + contrast boosted) jpeg files after Gimp and Registax. Marsunedited.tif This is with Gimp: and with Registax: The wavelets in Registax seem to produce a visible 'halo' around the edge of the planet and more 'grain' in the image. I'm puzzled since people always recommend Registax for sharpening. There could be several explanations: 1. My data is too poor for the wavelets to do their magic (pushing FL to 5400mm was perhaps too much for the camera sensor and the seeing conditions). 2. I don't know how to use the wavelets properly. 3. Mars is special as it has very low contrast and needs delicate sharpening. I suspect it is perhaps both 1 and 2 but maybe people with more experience can comment if Mars needs more subtle editing especially when sharpening. Thank you for your attention! Nikolay

Dear Alex, I have this scope. The motor tracks the object in view with the movement of the stars but it won't help you to find it initially. For this you need a 'go-to' mount (which are much more expensive). Its not a bad beginner scope, there are some well documented issues with it (wobbly mounting, spherical instead of parabolic mirror) but for the money it gives you 130mm aperture which is a lot to see many dim objects. I saw the Dumbbell nebula, Orion nebula and Andromeda galaxy with it. As for planets you will definitely be able to see the moons of Jupiter and its red spot and the main equatorial belts, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus with the 10mm eyepiece. At this magnification 65x the images will be small though. The optics are not of sufficient quality for much higher magnification. I hope this helps, Nikolay

I just thought of another solution: observe Mars when the sky is getting brighter: just before sunrise or after sunset. These days Mars is highest above horizon around 5am in the morning and here in the UK sun rises 45 mins later so 5am is perfect for me. If you have tracking your mount may follow Mars even during the day. I have seen Venus during the day and then it did not seem bight at all.

Well, it is a small object which is very bright so it has large surface brightness'. I experience the same effect with Venus and bright stars, notably Siruis, but for these I don't care too much because we don't look for surface features. There are several way to overcome the blinding brightness of Mars: 1. Use even higher magnification! Something like 150-200 should be doable in your scope if the seeing is OK. 2.Filters: a red filter will dim Mars considerably and allow more of the surface features to be distinguished. 3. Check your star diagonal. The cheap one scatter a lot of light and make observing bright objects more difficult. 4. Or use sunglasses I hope this helps. Nikolay

I'm not sure but I suspect that this small cap is for putting a filter to look at the sun. But yes it can also be used for any bright object, especially on the Moon. It may be too narrow to get good resolution to see very small detail, but the overall image should be much sharper. Nikolay

The mirror suffers from spherical aberration which means that it does not focus all the light from its surface to a single point and the focus is spread out. If you look at a star say at x100 you will find it never becomes pin-point with diffraction rings/spikes but it is a small 'blob'. There is an easy way around it: Reduce the aperture! You could for example make mask from cardboard, of say 80-90mm diameter and attach it to the front. It does not even have to be centered or perfectly circular, and actually it's a good idea to make it offset to try to avoid some part of the secondary mirror obstruction. The focal ratio of the telescope changes from F5 to F7/F8 and the spherical aberration for visual use is then much less noticeable. The downside is of course that the mirror is not collecting as much light, but you only use big magnification for planets, the moon or some double stars which are fairly bright and don't need all this extra light. Actually for the moon you may prefer the stopped down view since it can be unpleasantly bright to look at at full aperture. Another downside of stopping down the aperture is loss of resolution but even a 80mm scope has plenty of resolution to show you detail even at x150 on the planets. Clear skies! Nikolay

Dear Nick, Astromaster 130 EQ was my first telescope. The mount is easy to set up and lightweight but not very stable. As Brian said keeping the legs short will improve stability. I also recommend suspending a bag with some weight below the tripod. Something like 3-4 kilos should make it stabilise quicker. Another factor to consider is the magnification. Astromaster 130 has a spherical mirror and if you increase magnification above x70 the picture will get mushy and the shaking will be much more obvious. Having said that I had great views through that scope, especially of deep sky objects like M27 Dumbbell and M42 Orion nebula. Eventually I wanted something for planets and I got a Skymax 127 which is lighter and sits better on the original Astromaster mount. But for wide angle starry views nothing beats a short focal length, fast Newtonian like the Astromaster. Enjoy it! Nikolay

Dear azrabella, Your scope is F8 so it should be fairly tolerant of even cheapo eyepieces. On the face of it you could probably go down even to 4mm for x300 but on a Dob this can make it hard to track the target. Also at magnification more then your aperture in mm, you start to see the diffraction rings very prominently especially in obstructed scopes. A cheap eyepiece I regularly use is the 6mm Svbony with 68 degree Fov (with the red stripe not the yellow). It suffers from kidney beaning on bright targets especially the Moon but has good eye relief and I found that on double stars it works well with my old Skymax 127. I bought mine from ebay new for about £20 and at this price I'm very happy with it. So far I've not been able to resolve anything below 2'' with my old Skymax 127 though. I tried Zeta Herculis, no luck at all. Nikolay

Sorry, that was silly of me. I corrected it. This was my first post By the way I found this very useful link in a post from paulastro on Monday. The web page by Ade Ashford displays exactly what features should be visible on Mars at any given time between now and December 2020. Previously I used Stellarium but I found that the photos there don't resemble what I can actually see... Nikolay

Dear Merlin100, I also find details on Mars tricky to see. To illustrate, here is an unedited picture which is pretty close to what I saw this morning (5am) with a Skymax 180 at x270. It took me some time to convince myself that there is a large dark region in the south hemisphere. Marsnoedit.tif I also found that a red filter improves the contrast a bit, with the filter the view resembles the second picture edited (obtained after sharpening and contrast boost). Mars.tif Clear skies, Nikolay