Kon

6 minutes ago, Space Cowboy said:

Good start despite the seeing Kostas! I can understand you wanting to get an early shot with the big dob as the extra aperture will make the biggest difference on Saturn.

Thanks Stuart. I am loving the 12" and I have some serious plans for it this season 🤣. It's good to get things sorted eg ADC, fine tune collimation and also get the hand on setting it up at crazy hours. 

Will you start imaging soon?

Nice image and the animation really brings it to life.

21 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

Lovely series of images Kostas. I have been out observing these past few nights and on two of these I was up until dawn broke more or less. I was considering getting my imaging gear out for Saturn but the seeing at such a low altitude was terrible. I don't think even the use of my ADC would have been of much benefit. Seeing the rings at such an angle in the eyepiece has me yearning to image it properly.

Thanks Ian. It's the reason I had a go at it, seeing all the images from my friends. Yes the ADC helped. Seeing seemed ok apart from the clouds and fog when I imaged it. Worth giving it a go if you are up already. I can't commit to much imaging at crazy hours at the moment due to work. Weekend is looking promising.

28 minutes ago, Tony Acorn said:

Enjoy the holiday Kon,

I was thinking of using my ASi585MC on the 80mm ED f/6.25 refractor with the ASi120MM attached to a 50mm f/4 guide scope to guide that - it all sits on a Star Adventurer on a Manfrotto 055 tripod and is certainly "carryable".
I could use the 254 Dob with my Nikon camera to take videos even though it is a big bundle to move around to get a clear sight of the occultation. I hadn't thought about that so cheers for that suggestion too. A bonus for me is that, if successful, it might help sell that 'scope later.

If I were you I would go for the dob with the 585 as you will get better resolution. This is my moon/mars occultation of 8 Dec 2022 with my 8" and asi462mc (the seeing was awful but still a good event to capture). First image with barlow and second without.

2 hours ago, Tony Acorn said:

Those are lovely images Kon - well done! Did you take a series of images and stack them to create a composite or are they individual shots?

I'm just starting on imaging and. although I have a flex-tube 254mm Dob (somewhat cumbersome) and a 150mm reflector (nice but a bit heavy and not that mobile with its HEQ-5 Pro GoTo mount), my latest toy is an 80mm refractor with guide scope and a 585MC un-cooled camera that I hope to be knowledgeable enough to capture the August occultation of this planet by The Moon.

Tony

Thanks Tony. Yes all images are from videos and in most cases image derotation (with the exception of 2024 as the seeing wasn't great). You should be able to get some excellent images with the 254. Looking forward to your Saturn/Moon occultation. I will miss it as I will be on holidays abroad without a telescope. 

2 hours ago, josefk said:

Fantastic @Kon - thanks for posting.

I've finished three recent sessions in May/June looking at Saturn in the post dawn sky along with it's narrow rings and found it a fascinating aesthetic change. I see it just slightly brighter than your 2024 image but otherwise just as you have captured it - bands and shading and striking ring shadow.

I've noticed there have been some tantalising close arrangements of it's moons to try and spot - enabled by our view of the rings at this angle - but so far i haven't had that success.

👍

Thanks. I agree that at the eyepiece the 2024 rings looked a bit brighter but as the seeing wasn't great, the sharpness and further processing hasn't helped. I want to revisit again.

The transits would be good to capture but with work in the morning it is hard to commit to any of them. I will see if anything is going on this weekend.

I had a play with my Saturn captures over the last 3 years (2022-2024). I have only been in the hobby since late 2021 so I only have a 3 year record but the apparent tilt is nicely demonstrated. Looking forward to 2025 when the rings 'disappear'. Skywatcher 200P (2022+2023, manual) and 300P Goto (2024). Asi462mc, 2.5x televue powermate and UV/IR cut filter.

Stunning images and animations.

41 minutes ago, IDM said:

Thats’s a superb image, particularly given the conditions you describe. 

Thanks. We never seem to get a break here 🤣😭.

49 minutes ago, chiltonstar said:

Superb!

 

Chris

Thanks Chris.

41 minutes ago, Albir phil said:

Great images I like the bands on the first image 👍👍

Thanks. I was hoping to derotate a few images to get more of the banding but this was the only decent one.

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

That's excellent to get such an early season Saturn Kostas, well done. I can't bring myself to stay up that late, or get up that early yet.....🙄

Thanks. I do not plan on getting up early again either; it is not worth it at 20 degrees elevation. I was just getting a bit jealous of seeing pics from others online 😜

I managed my first image of Saturn with the rings almost edge on this morning. Seeing was awful even in IR. Good for the record and I suppose planetary season is upon us. This is my first Saturn with the 12" and goto and it made life a lot easier as I could use an ADC at the low elevation. Skywatcher 300P Flextube Goto, asi462mc, 2.5xTV powermate, ZWO ADC, UV/IR cut filter. I also captured an IR image with the asi462mm and an IR pass filter.

Very nice record of the development and the composite has nicely captured it.

9 hours ago, Space Cowboy said:

Just reminding myself that I did planetary imaging once 🤪 Thank goodness Venus was last year and not this 😮 Can't help thinking this prelonged unsettled weather bodes well for Jupiter in the autumn. Surely we are due  settled weather at some stage!

For a moment I thought you had a new capture 🤪. True, the infamous June 2023. I might give it a try this week. Mercury is close by too.

12 minutes ago, Tony Acorn said:

Thanks Kon, I'll investigate your leads buty I hate the idea of giving a Windows OS access to my Macs.

Tony

Crossover does not install windows as it is only an emulator and you do not need to partition any of your hard drive. I never owned a PC and I have to use one for my satellite tracking software and it is driving me nuts.

I am a Mac user and I use crossover to run all the planetary software without any problems (pipp, as!4, astrosurface, etc etc). Siril is also good for DSO work.

The earthshine has come out nicely and you can clearly recognise many features.

First one is better than the others but still very noisy. The seeing was probably not the best as it seems to be soft.

I hope you don't mind, but your workflow is way  too complicated. If you have a soft capture no tool is going to make it look sharp. Keep imaging and hope for the good seeing one night.

The topaz is making a mess and it's more obvious on the 2 and 3 image. ALPO discourages AI tools.

Have a play with Astrosurface and imageanalyzer.  Many of us have moved to it. I haven't had much success with wavesharp.

Finally, worth getting longer captures per channel so you have more data. In the long term, you may want to consider an OSC camera as you can capture several colour videos and derotate them.

7 hours ago, Ags said:

You mean FPS? Surely you can’t get more than 100 FPS with 10 ms frames?

Yes my bad, sorry. Ooops!....100fps. I was thinking of something else when I typed the value.

38 minutes ago, Ags said:

I thought the pros might do something radically different. I do 10ms as my laptop can't hit high frame rates for some reason...

Even at 10ms I still get 150-200ms with tight ROI.

48 minutes ago, fireballxl5 said:

Interesting.  Do you have link please?

You will need to go to the planetary imaging section and look back in 2022 posts. Sorry no link.

1 minute ago, Ags said:

They discarded 92% of frames from the first run and 96% from the second. And the frames are quite long - 10ms and 5ms in the second run. I thought they would be far shorter!

Most of us do around 10ms for Jupiter as it gives better noise to signal ratio. Going too fast sometimes is not that beneficial. I used to go for fast FPS but Geoff and Neil had done some nice experimentation here to change my thinking.

Very curious what it can pull out for Ganymede.

4 minutes ago, Ags said:

Here are the capture details: quite short sequences actually:

I note they use a water-cooled CMOS that can go up to 1000 FPS if they restrict the ROI.

I had a look at the paper and very small amount of stacked frames. I would love to see the raw images.