Kon

Craters at the northern side of the moon (15/05/24). Skywatcher 300P Flextube goto,  asi462mm, IR pass 685nm, 2.5x TV powermate.

7 hours ago, bosun21 said:

Another excellent capture of the ISS. It's not the capturing itself, but the actual tracking that puts me off attempting this. How many frames did you capture Kostas? and how do you intend to try and track it? Your image does give me a lot of incentive though, showing what is possible.

I forgot to answer the frames. 5000 out of 6000 had it but only 40 were of good quality to stack together. I start capturing when it's around 75-80 degrees up. The seeing wasn't great last night even in IR. I focused on the moon and it was boiling.

6 hours ago, bosun21 said:

Another excellent capture of the ISS. It's not the capturing itself, but the actual tracking that puts me off attempting this. How many frames did you capture Kostas? and how do you intend to try and track it? Your image does give me a lot of incentive though, showing what is possible.

Thanks Ian. If you have a well aligned RACI it is pretty 'easy'.

For the auto tracking, skywatcher has a satellite app if you look at their website. A friend has been helping me to setup. I'll report here if I can make it work.

3 hours ago, Clarkey said:

Great image once again. I agree with @Nik271, stationary targets are definitely my forte!

Auto tracking - now that will be impressive if you pull it off with the Dob. I assume you got your motor problem sorted?

Thanks. I am very excited to try the auto track.

Yes motor is working fine now, although I still got one as a spare since they are hard to get hold of.

3 hours ago, LukeTheNuke said:

Wowsers, that's officially amazeballs. Well done! 

PS I zoomed in on one of the white background pixels and did a bit of deconvolution (Lucy-Richardson) and came up with this:

Thanks. I completely missed this 🤣

4 hours ago, Nik271 said:

Very detailed, Kon, well done!  I saw it passing overhead at dusk last evening and for a moment was tempted to try to follow it manually with my Skymax 127 but I just knew I wont be able to keep up with it. The Moon is much easier 🙂 

Thanks Nik. I think you should give it a try. This week we have 2 passes every 1.5 hrs apart at night.

International Space Station at 87 degrees from last night. This is possibly my best capture of 2024 with the 12". This is still manually tracked but I am setting up for autotracking that I hope to test this weekend. 12" Flextube Goto, asi462mm, IR pass filter, 2.5x televue powermate.

9 minutes ago, Roy Foreman said:

Actually I wasn't thinking in terms of using IR with colour camera, but if one did then would it be the case that blue and green cells would not receive any light ?  IR does help, but I agree that under UK skies turbulence is still very much in evidence. 

Yes effectively the camera behaves like mono. I haven't seen a difference between my IR with the 462 mono or colour but again both have the same response in IR (I use the mono for UV imaging).

6 minutes ago, Roy Foreman said:

I agree. Also a colour camera may not give as fine a resolution as monochrome. Supposed to be clear here tonight so I might dust off my C8 and see what I get out of it

If you refer to IR imaging  that is not true as you only use a narrow wavelength. You should be able to pull more details in either colour or mono with rgb filters. IR might perform better under bad seeing as its wavelength is not affected as much from the weather (although my IR is ofter 'boiling' under UK skies).

16 minutes ago, michael.h.f.wilkinson said:

I have checked collimation and it cannot be far off if you get albedo spots on Ganymede. I didn't use IR on the above image (this was taken with my ASI182MC, and it has subtle colour). 

Looking at your image above, I think it is more the case of bad seeing (if you think collimation is good). You should be able to get a lot more out of your C8 under good conditions.

Very nice images and processing. You have pulled some nice details.

I see the stripes on the embedded image but at full resolution there is nothing.

I live in a fairly dark site and I could see the pinkish/red and some of the greens (some of them appeared more washed out green to grey). The sky had a reddish hue to it throughout the night and especially at the peak. The colours were verified by my wife who is always more critical on my excitement. I do not know if it helped that we were both dark adapted (I was out with my telescope and she was awaken by me to see the aurora). I have seen vivd green coloured auroras on a dark site in Iceland too.

8 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

That's great news Kostas and a nice capture of M57. Where did you manage to order a motor from? Just incase I ever need one in the future (touch wood).

I am so happy! 😊 😊 

I got it from this company. Very nice and helpful guys on email BUT they don't ship to UK. I got it delivered to a friend in Europe who is coming to UK for a visit and will be able to bring it to me.

https://tavcso.hu/

A very quick update on my issue. So my tracking is back working. I didn't do anything since the last update but playing around with software to test tracking iss, it did some very high speed slews when I did some test runs and it started working. It was something with the motor as it is now quiet and tracking very well. Either way, I have a spare motor coming in the post as they are hard to get by so it may be handy in the future.

This is a 30min on M57 without even doing a star alignment from this morning.

What a night last night and this morning. I got so many images but my favourite is the one with Ursa Major and the aurora.

Near Swindon now. It's amazing!

23 minutes ago, LukeTheNuke said:

Wow, that's fantastic. Manual tracking! Well done! I used to use drift just for low power on the sun with a 60 mm refractor. It's great to see someone using a dob and manually tracking! It makes me wonder about using a manual dob for lunar imaging.

I have done lunar manually but it is not as good with the goto. If you look at the planetary section, I have done loads of good captures manually and I think because I only need the planet rather than an expanded region.

Waiting to get my goto back to action soon.

The full resolution images are breathtaking. I love the inverted ones as it really highlights the details.

Excellent images and details.

1 hour ago, bosun21 said:

Oh no Kostas! Something else for me to try 😂. Fantastic images. Was this using Baader solar film?

Thanks Ian. Yes the Baader. My full one had some pinholes so for this capture I only used some film on the offset opening.

I need to work out how to make one for the 12". I think you can buy a roll but I am not sure I need that much.

1 hour ago, Steve Ward said:

Good to see you caught it ... 😀

I always bung my captures through PIPP before letting AS!3 loose on them , it'll stabilise the AVI by tracking a region of your choosing and crop the frames to a size of your choosing , as well as sorting the frames by quality and reordering them to make things a lot quicker i the stacking phase I find.

If I have multiple videos to play with I PIPP one while AS!3 stacks one and so on.

That's what I usually do for planetary, put it through pipp but I always struggle to get it a surface anchor to work at pipp, unless I do something odd😂.

27 minutes ago, LukeTheNuke said:

Lots of detail! A manual dob? Are you moving the scope at all during capture or letting the sun drift over the chip? How many frames are you getting to stack?

Thanks. For planetary imaging I use the drift method but for this particular capture I tried to move the dob or at least keep the sunspot in the middle of the sensor as I couldn't otherwise stabilise it in as!4.  For this image I had an 8,000 frame capture  and stacked the best 5%. The passing clouds were not playing ball to get more captures.